Invuln Vs Willpower: Fire/Elements.

I have a bit of an issue with the term "exotic". There are some enemy groups you can safely face with little else but S/L (at the moment) but there are plenty of foes that can mix things up heavily. Every day we seem to get a few more groups doing it.

If you level up villain side, you will also see a lot more fire and cold than blue side.

I did it with my S/L soft capped (with one foe) Invuln. Tsoo and Knives of Arthemis can kill me, but it takes a LOT. I had to lower difficulty every time I faced Banished Pantheon, CoT and Talons.

I popped inspirations like crazy during that last mission of the final arc.


And the reason Invuln is considered extremely good against Smash/Lethal is precisely the existence of Tough. I skipped it for a long time, but I was underperforming compared to other players. Finally felt forced to respec into it when I returned to the game.

We will see how it goes but my prediction:

In very bursty fights, WP will die faster IF Invuln has Dull Pain ready to click.
If dull pain is recharging, Willpower will do better.

Will see how that goes!


The video was to demonstrate how weak the Invuln is on the element/energies side. I can’t tank Banished pantheon for myself with my Invuln. And yes that’s a big chunk of what triggered me to revisit this opinion.

Mind you: I used to be on the other side of this argument. I used to say it was acceptable as it is, mainly because SL was literally everywhere. This was before GR launched. Now I have played through GR 1-20 content and Dark Astoria and I'm seeing this is, with every issue, less of a reality. And I didn’t come out and say this just now because I had my rear handed to me last week. I started crunching numbers for a few months now, and brainstorming tests that may let me see if my own numbers are flawed.


I personally think inspirations should not be part of any serious balance discussion. They are too random and you just may never have them at hand when you need them.


What utilities would you say Invuln has? It has some resistances to some debuffs but that’s not utility. Things like Burn or Quick Recovery are not only useful if you happen to face a specific enemy type.

I think inspirations are important, but not in the way other people do. I don't ask "what can this character do with X inspirations", I ask "how often will this character need to use inspirations". That question is best answered with a set's sustainability score though.

Indeed, but I do not need to construct scenarios such as that to demonstrate the point. Starsman specifically mentions tanking, which favors mitigating incoming damage over 10-20 seconds, not 4 minutes. Invuln certainly is not a stellar performer in that scenario unless the damage is heavily weighted towards Sm/Le (which, of course, it normally is), although if Dull Pain is available, they do much better. But WP is just as susceptible in that shorter scenario and they are more susceptible to Sm/Le.

Ironically, my WP tanker's weakest link is Psi. "But, but, I am good at Psi, right?" But still way better than Invuln, naturally.

Well, it's got a much better Taunt aura.

True, but that's not really a comment on what I said so much as it is another point entirely. What I said is that WP has more leeway to supplement its defenses with Luck inspirations. I didn't explain that statement because I felt like the reasoning is obvious: WP has less need of both greens and blues.

And once we start talking about builds that use pools and IOs, we're effectively talking about two sets that start at the soft cap, which means that Invuln gets more mileage from its debuff resistance, but it also means that WP can throw Lucks at the problem and remain functionally immortal.

The basic bottom line here is that Invuln is likely to be roughly as strong or maybe even a smidge stronger in terms of pure survivability, but it spends a lot more time and effort filling in various weaknesses that WP doesn't have to bother with. As you allow for more resources to be spent on each build, the WP can focus on survivability whereas the Invuln has to worry about endurance management too.

Again, the above-quote paragraph may be true, but even if it is true it has very little to do with regeneration, in principle. I can't take it as given that WP necessarily performs worse in 20-second intervals against non-S/L damage simply because ... regeneration. Over 20 seconds, regeneration isn't irrelevant. I don't intend to accuse you in particular of anything here, but it's worth pointing out (for anyone else who may be reading) that there's an oversimplification implicit in your reasoning (as you've posed it).

The immortality line has its limits in practical application. That is true. It's also true that you can easily adapt the immortality-line calculation to fit smaller windows of time. It also may very well be true that Invuln has a sizable advantage against burst damage, but simply citing a cliche ("longer fights favor regeneration") isn't sufficient to prove the point.

I object to the implicit logic of the exchange more than I object to your conclusion. The reason I used an absurd example in my last post isn't that I was trying to represent your position as absurd; I used an absurd example simply to establish that the axiom you cited isn't an axiom.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

I use the term as a holdover from launch, when the general convention was (or seemed to be) that anything not S/L was 'exotic'. It's a catch-all for E/N/F/C/P/T, but I agree it's not a very precise term.

As for how exotic Fire/Cold are, that's a different question. I maintain that pure Fire/Cold attacks are rare enough to be irrelevant from a build-strategy standpoint. That doesn't mean that Fire/Cold damage is irrelevant, especially if you spend a lot of time in Praetoria or the Rogue Islands.

With respect to your test, none of the above is important, because you were using base Invulnerability without pools/IOs. That is, you had exactly the same amount of F/C DEF as you had S/L.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Sorry dont mean you, in particular. Even the devs seem to use the term.

He is right, in a 20 second window, Invuln will stay standing if the challenge is designed precisely to kill Willpower Scrappers in 20 seconds. What kills a Willpower Scrapper in 20 seconds may take 36 seconds to kill an Invuln, thats without using Dull Pain (and if you talk about spawn to spawn tanking, given dull pain cant be perma without insane recharge, you cant expect it to always be available to do the job.)

Without healing support, though, spawn to spawn is the same as a very very long fight unless you are taking naps in between fights.

But sure, I do grant you: Invuln can take an alpha better than a WP scrapper. I would call the game broken if this was not true.

The immortality line also is about immortality. What I did in this test was break that line.

Not only this, but there is little value for a solo tanker to take an alpha if he will have to stop and recover his health in between fights because he was unable to sustain that damage intake.

I do not think it was obvious that is what you meant, but I can see the reasoning. I do not know if I agree that WP is more flush with inspires, but I see what you are saying now. I'll think on it.

It gets really esoteric here, so we likely shouldn't discuss it too heavily. One could easily say that stacking an orange or two on top of Invulns modestly higher resistances is valuable and since we are also talking about pool powers we fall into Starsman's point where Invuln gets more from Tough (and Hasten too).

This is something I have mentioned before, but I feel bears repeating. I needed Ageless on my WP tanker primarily because I kept getting end drops in Lambda. My Invuln scrapper never had that problem (and I am thinking of all the times I was tanking on the scrapper, not the times where someone else was eating the debuffs for me). Oh, the tanker was definitely more study, especially against the psi, but WPs end advantage is not as clear cut, because combining recovery debuff and end drain, the WP got flattened even with QR, whereas my Invuln did not. Maybe I just got lucky on the Invuln, but the difference was enough to be noticeable to me.

I could be mistaken. Surrounded by foes a WP will regen a good amount of HPs in 20 seconds. I am not being simplistic because I think it helps my case though, I am being simplistic because of limited time. Whatever both sets mitigate in the first 10 seconds stays, but after that many enemies could be dead. Sure, this means Invincibility is giving less defense, but it might not need as much now and now would be the perfect time to heal back the damage, but of course WPs regen is lower because it doesn't work on corpses.

OTOH, sometimes it takes a few to collapse the spawn, and both sets take a beating during that time. Now that you are surrounded, WP is rapidly healing while Invuln has merely steadied out. It is a pretty complicated set of circumstances and I have only barely begun to scratch the surface.

No one can tank anything for themselves. If you are solo you are just fighting. But putting aside the odd terminology, I am having difficulty understanding your premise. Are you saying it is wrong that some enemy types make you lower your difficulty while others do not?

Not disputing your conclusion or his, just questioning the underlying logic he appeared to be using. With regard to your conclusion, though, are we still talking about an Invuln Tank versus a WP Scrapper? If so, then that's not a definitive statement on the relative strength of the two power sets.

The point isn't that Invuln is necessarily worse than WP at short-term survivability (even against non-SL opponents); you can always construct a scenario for which Invuln will be better, numerically, than WP. The point is that the burst-damage-survivability difference may not be big enough to matter in practice, because it isn't axiomatically true that sets featuring regeneration are crappy in short-term scenarios.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Thats the topic of the thread. The Willpower in that video, that out-survived Invuln, was a scrapper.

You are right to a limited extent. The main reason many (that have looked right at the numbers) state a Regen Tanker would suck is that for Tankers, it is expected that a set can take high bursts of damage, beyond what the base HP allows.

Burst survivability is part of the tanking schema, but it's not everything. Sustainability is also an important piece.

Are we talking about Invuln's end-drain resistance here? Or are you saying that your Invuln also has higher DEF, and therefore gets hit with fewer debuffs? I'm not trying to patronize you; I really don't understand exactly what your point is.

The end-drain resistance is nice, but it's not anywhere near high enough to account for the situation you describe. Also, Lambda heavily features Seers with Drain Psyche*, which opposes AoE and Psionic DEF (neither of which are strengths of Invuln), so I doubt very much that any DEF advantage your Invuln character may or may not have over your WP characters will help you much to avoid the copious endurance drain in that trial.

In any case, even if we stipulate that your Invuln character is mechanically superior against endurance drains in Lambda (as opposed to simply luckier) than your WP character(s), endurance drain resistance does not help you to make your build endurance-sustainable. Quick Recovery gives you some small amount of insulation against endurance/recovery debuffs, and it gives you more than a Stamina-equivalent recovery bonus to use as you wish.

There really is no comparison. I don't question that your experience in Lambda is as you describe it, but at best what you describe is a niche scenario that's only tenuously relevant to the point at hand.

Again, a combination of lower DEF + higher regeneration isn't intrinsically inferior to a combination of higher DEF + lower regeneration.

And do forgive me; i wasn't criticizing you, I was just clarifying what I saw as simplistic reasoning not because I think you need the education, but because someone else reading might come away with the wrong idea.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Although what he says is not too "relevant" balance wise, it actually pours some light into a more interesting point: IOs.

You can get a lot of defense from IOs, not so much regeneration. By the set having so much Def buffing room, you can build a Willpower Tanker beast that soft-caps S/L, runs Tough and ends up rivaling the survivability of Granite tankers.

I am saying the gap between S/L heavy content and non S/L content is extreme. I tend to solo +2x8 against Knives and Tsoo in Dark Astoria, but anything "magic" (that is usually very lite in S/L) forces me to swap. How low I have to swap may be a test I should do, but after a while I just decided it's not worth the trouble of maximizing AoE so i just go x1 and rush those missions.

The last mission in DA (if you done it) is sort of fixed at x8 almost all the way through. I need to eat candy a lot and go to the hospital a few times during that one (cant even tank for my NPC allies without insps.)

I feel like we're talking past each other here. Yes, I know that's the topic of the thread. I understand why it's interesting to compare the Scrapper with the Tanker for the purpose of the original test. But as soon as you shift to a scenario in which the WP Scrapper loses, the fact that you're comparing two uneven Archetypes becomes problematic.

Or if you prefer, that wrinkle renders your numbers irrelevant to the conversation to which you responded. No one in his right mind would question that an Invuln Tanker is better at surviving burst damage than a WP Scrapper. I surely never questioned it. What I don't accept as self-evident is the proposition that an Invuln Tanker is meaningfully superior at surviving (non-SL) burst damage than a WP Tanker, just because one relies more on regeneration than the other.

And although I didn't explicitly spell it out before, that question includes the idea that an Invuln build will be more vulnerable to bursts in any situation that features considerable psi damage. It's not obvious to me that Invuln is necessarily the more stable set overall, in any practically significant way.

Regeneration as a set has very little stacking mitigation to go along with the eponymous regeneration. We're discussing WP, which does have stacking mitigation; WP also has a higher sustainable regen rate, given a fully saturated Rise to the Challenge.

All I'm saying is that you can't simply look at two sets, see one that has high regen (along with whatever else), and one that has low regen (along with whatever else), and declare that the latter is axiomatically better at surviving burst damage. The "whatever else" in parenthesis is crucially important. The exact window of time you choose is also crucially important.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Regen and Resistance aren't directly comparable. Regen is a fixed value -- X amount of HP/sec is equivalent in broad terms to X amount of damage, assuming you have no other mitigation. Resistance is a proportional value (as you know).

So which is "better" depends on how much DPS you're taking. If it's below a certain threshold, the regen will be better. If it's above a certain threshold, the resistance will be better.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

I am assuming that it is the drain and recovery debuff resistance. My WP tanker's Defense values are generally better than my Invuln scrapper's, so I assume it is not that they are missing me more.

I am not sure the resistance is as insignificant as you think. While Seers and diviners are rough, those rocket guys are brutal too. Again, I am pretty sure it is not defense, since the tanker is better off defensively (although the Invuln has better defense debuff resistance, but I don't think that is coming into play here).

Well, there are a lot of end drain and recovery debuffs we face. So while I agree that it doesn't help me as much against Council as QR would, it might help the blue bar against Carnies as much as QR helps WP. Maybe I am way off. While my Fire/WP scrapper is in the 40s, I don't have enough scrapper to scrapper experience to draw from. So maybe my WP tanker has more end trouble because he does less damage, although I almost never solo, so that seems unlikely.

It doesn't seem that niche to me, but I fight a lot of stuff with end drains and recovery debuffs. Leveling up, QR is certainly better, not quite as much end draining in the lower levels and while I am calling the drain resistance solid, you generally will skip ResNrg until later. I think QR is also better at the high end, but I think the advantage narrows significantly.

It has been awhile since I played into the 40s on a scrapper or tanker without a Miracle (although I have just done it to the 30s on a Staff/Invuln, but the Staff can cheat). Without IOs, QR is obviously significantly better.

Both Invuln and WP have tier 9s which can aid the end bar as well, in the short term and with the obvious need to pay it back (and Invuln pays back much more).

True; and it is true that running missions is similar to a long fight in the fact that we stress our blue and green bars pretty much constantly in CoH. There are differences though. In a mission, you can rest between spawns. While we certainly do not want to be resting too much, there is an amount that is acceptable to most players.

And teamed, there is also the case where an Invuln's slower moving health bar is easier to react to for those pesky human reaction times (barring those high Psi scenarios, of course).

No offense taken and I am glad for the clarification. I actually can't believe I am arguing this. I have often longed to have my old survivability back. I would very much love to see the F/C/E/N/T resists higher. I only want to make sure we are not unfairly touting the strengths of Willpower while hand-waving away the value of Invuln.

It is often said that with IOs most builds are better off now than back before ED. Invuln is not one of those, IME. I was mostly stronger in Issue 4 than I am now I think. Maybe I misremember.

Averaged over time, not compressed into the window. Otherwise I would have to bifurcate my spreadsheet into "Invuln with DP heal" and "Invuln without DP heal" and its already insane.

In fact I'm considering writing a program to literally recreate the spreadsheet every time I change something, just because it would be easier than actually editing the spreadsheet itself.

K just wanted to double check. My first attempt (the one that Castle copied when he implemented Willpower) compressed healing in time but never showed Invuln (or ice, or stone, or regen) outside dull pain.

Sooo.... well... that at 45 seconds made willpower actually look sane... That may fill in a few blanks there.

Edit:
The goal of my version then was not to pick a specific timer, though, but to draw a graph based on time (1s, 2s, etc) to display the zig-zaggy nature of click heals.

Resist Energies gives you 25% Endurance/Recovery drain/debuff resistance. Quick Recovery gives you 30% in recovery, unslotted.

Base recovery is 1.67 End/sec (without +End-boosting IO bonuses or accolades). Stamina gives you +25%. So ignoring IO bonuses for a moment, an Invuln Scrapper with standard SO slotting in Stamina will have a gross recovery of 1.67 + (1.67 * (0.25 * 1.95)) = 2.48 EPS.

A WP Tanker with standard SO slotting in both Stamina and QR will have a gross recovery of 2.48 + (1.67 * (0.3 * 1.95)) = 3.45 EPS.

In order for the Invuln Scrapper's recovery-debuff resistance to outpace the extra ~0.97 EPS from QR, you'd have to face a debuff worth 0.97 / 0.25 = 3.88 EPS (or, since debuffs are expressed as proportional values, -232% of recovery debuff).

In other words, both characters' recovery would be floored at the levels of recovery debuff required for Invuln's resistance to be better than Quick Recovery. Now I grant you that the comparison shifts as your other recovery bonuses rise. But chances are, you're not going to reach much higher than 3.88 EPS on your Scrapper through IO/Accolade bonuses alone. You can reach higher effective levels of net recovery if you use Conserve Power (and/or Physical Perfection) from the Energy/Body Mastery pool, but then again, if you take Conserve Power you're paying an opportunity cost that WP doesn't.

(Body/Energy Mastery offer sub-optimal attacks, so it's a goal of my Tanker/Scrapper builds to try to avoid those pools if I can.)

You can also obviously boost your net recovery through Incarnate powers (alpha, destiny), but my point is only that WP has to spend fewer resources on endurance management, not that Invuln can't be made endurance sustainable.

The only explanation I have for your experiences in Lambda is that you got lucky with your Invuln Scrapper. For whatever reason, you were hit with fewer endurance-relevant drains/debuffs on the Scrapper than you were on the WP Tanker.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

But that is only taking recovery debuffs into account. Assuming your numbers make sense (and it seems they do), without factoring in recovery debuffs at all you would need to face about 40 pts of end drain in 10 seconds in order to meet that goal. That doesn't seem out of line with what you can face quite frequently even vs. Freaks, much less Malta, Carnies, IDF, and a few others.

Based on your quick analysis, I think not. You have made me appreciate the value of that drain and recovery debuff resistance even more and also made me realize that putting ResNrg off until later in a build may not be as automatic as I always thought it was.