Regeneration - The red-headed stepchild

I guess I got it all mixed up with those discussions, sorry.

I dont agree with you (i do on some, definitely this one) but see your points, but I'm mainly quoting this for the awesome analogy.

I like that idea.

However, I would add the Absorb to Moment of Glory. (I reconsidered)

I would add a moderate to high amount of enhanceable +Absorb to MoG that lasts for 120 seconds or until it's gone, whichever comes first.

You still get the 15 seconds of godhood, and some additional survivability after that, but not so much that it would be broken. If it were set to be non-stackable, the most an extremely high recharge build could do is refresh it.

Make the +Absorb, say, 30% of your character's base HP, so the base amount of +Absorb would be 401.58. If it were fully enhanceable you could get it up to around 782. Dull Pain would have no affect on this Absorb.

It almost sounds overpowered, until you consider how quickly your average /Regen will take 782 points of damage. In a tough fight, you get 15 seconds of MoG, plus another 15-20 seconds of Absorb before it's gone.

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.

I had a Magi run a couple of weeks ago where my DM/Regen died three times in the first few minutes of a Magi. Once I was typing while standing in the middle of a huge group of IDF bosses I'd pissed off with Soul Drain, once was just a "normal" burst damage death, and the final was my own fault for being the first person to run up to both Shadow Hunter and Nega-Pendragon with no MoG, no Dull Pain and no (fresh) Barrier up.

Notably, dying that much that rapidly drew comment from people I play with often - they recognized it as unusual for that character. I didn't die the rest of the TF, and honestly usually don't, despite fairly aggressive play. For the rest of the TF after the IDF mosh pit, I actually find Regen's huge self-healing potential pretty useful against the tricks the Magi trial throws at player characters.

iTrials are full of damage that's either exotic (psi, energy and toxic) or outright unresistable. (Most of the damage Tyrant deals flat out ignores damage resistance.) If your mitigation has a significant resistance component, you either need to be playing one of the powersets that is good at avoiding the attacks (which, in Incarnate settings, almost certainly means you have a defense-based secondary), your resistance to exotic damage needs to be quite good (say, Electric armor), or you need to be able to heal back fast. Regen doesn't much care what you attack it with (though most high-end Regens probably have Tough, making them a little happier to take L/S damage), meaning untyped or unresistable damage is something they are good at, as long as it's not delivered in bursts too large or frequent to survive outright.

As an example, my BS/Invul Scrapper is pretty good at avoiding most attacks, but he sucks fairly badly at avoiding exotic damage types delivered at Incarnate toHit unless he has lots of foes around (and he sucks at avoiding Psi attacks at all times). So if he takes on too much of that kind of attack at once, his only recourse is to hope he has Dull Pain or Rebirth handy, or to duck away and use Aid Self. He's got better resists to everything but Psi than my Regen does, but he can't recover from the hits as fast. (And if he has to resort to Aid Self, he sure can't heal and get back in the action as quickly.)

Because of this, I believe my Regens tend to deal with the Tyrant fight better than my resist and defense-based characters. Yes, the Regens can get smeared by successive massive attacks (especially if people aren't staying on top of the Lights of the Well), but in general, I think they recover from things like being stuck in the flow lightning better than my other melees. (The next closest at being good at that would probably by my Fiery Aura Brute.)

I'm curious about something. Do folks who have IO'd Regens who feel like those Regens are squishy in iContent have builds with damage-typed defense? This usually means they have high L/S defense, but not so much the other damage types, or to positions other than melee. I have stuck to positional defense builds, with melee defense in the upper 30 percentage points and ranged defense in the upper 20s. It occurs to me to wonder if the prevalence of ranged exotic attacks literally impacts Regens more when they have a L/S focus.

For example, about half the attacks from IDF Heavy Commanders (the guys with the huge missile packs) are tagged as AOE, Fire and Energy or Ranged, Fire and Energy. A build with high L/S defense will usually also have moderate Melee defense, but unless it's built with decent Energy/Negative defense (which is unusual for Regens, in my experience), they will have very little mitigation against such attacks. The same is true of most ranged Seer Psi attacks, as the Psi Blast powers have ranged position vectors, but only TK Blast would be affected by L/S defense.

I wish that too, believe me. I too think the ship has sailed, but I'd still love it to stop back in port. It's not just an issue for Regen, either. Willpower could stand that, too.

My "solution" at high levels has been to use Ageless Core on my L50 Regen Stalker. (The Scrappers tend to go with Barrier, though I have Rebirth, too.) Notably, I don't often feel that bad off for lacking Barrier's big +def, as Ageless helps get my MoG and Shadow Meld back faster. And, of course, it helps fuel the blue-bar-depleting practice of using fast AS as part of a standard attack chain.

That possibility just kind of blew my mind.

Wasn't that also a Katana/Regen build. Basically, take the set with Parry and you can do that for most sets?

Yes and yes, though I believe it was John Printemps that did something very similar with Claws/Regen. The most survivable builds, at least on paper, did NOT have soft-capped defense, but instead fell into the mid 30s somewhere. I can't remember what John's build had, but I assume it was something along those lines. Claws would be missing out on sky-high melee and lethal defense, but I'd give it the edge on active mitigation (Shockwave plus movement), plus you tend to be incarnate soft capped on demand with Moment of Glory and Shadow Meld. It might well be as survivable in practice in the right hands, just not on paper, and not without a little extra work.

But yes, add Broad Sword, Katana or Titan Weapons to ANY set, and you can get something pretty solid. Some benefit more than others of course. My Katana/Dark had better on-paper survivability than the Katana/Regens we were proposing. But that assumed you could reliably hit Dark Regeneration right before dying, every time, and that's not going to happen. Regeneration has its own dangerous dance to perform, of course.

So pretty similar, and I consider my Katana/Dark to be near the top end for Scrapper survivability. Strengths and weaknesses vary, of course, making comparison a bit difficult. A survival-spec'd Dark Melee/Invulnerability would run circles around me against smashing/lethal enemies, for instance, or I would assume a Super Reflexes against heavy defense debuffers like +4x8 Incarnate Banished Pantheon.

Regen.

Lets look at just Reconstruction and Dull Pain. Reconstruction alone slotted with SOs has the effective health recovery of about 21.2 h/s. And while Dull Pain is up, regen's regeneration is about 51 h/s. That's 72 h/s while DP is up, which it will be 2/3rds of the time with SOs, about 80% of the time with Hasten. DP also has a heal: about 5.8 h/s, or 7.0 h/s with Hasten (still with SOs).

While DP is up, which is between 66% and 80% of the time, Regeneration has an effective health recovery equal to Willpower when RTTC is saturated (at least based on your calculations above which I haven't double checked). Without Instant Healing. Willpower is unlikely to have 10 things in RTTC range 66% to 80% of the time.

Willpower's main strength is enhanceable and stackable resistances and defenses: with high end invention builds it can develop very strong layered defenses. But with just SOs, Willpower does not really out-regen Regen.

Id love to see the Claws/Regen. I've been working on a Regen build with specific goal requirement, and have yet to make it! :/ It may not be possible, but Id love to see other builds.

Do you have a link?

Here's the thread.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=260718

It looks like John's most recent version of the Claws/Regen was posted on 5-20-2011. Defense is much lower than I was thinking, but then, we were abusing +3 Enzymes to pull off our defense numbers, so they were surely somewhat higher then than they now appear. It looks like he calculated a survivability score about 60% that of the best Katana/Regens. So yeah, not as good as I'd remembered, at least on paper. Sorry for my bad memory.

It's over a year old, so you won't be able to use the builds directly, but there may be some information there that's still relevant and useful.

Edit: A quote of mine I like, "The Regeneration secondary seems made for these waves of damage. During those forever times when everything is going OK, you aren't even touching your heals. Then when one of those massive waves of damage hits, you're sitting on a huge list of powers that will all help keep you in the game and ride it out. On a Regen, you just about never find yourself just clicking when things recharge, over and over, getting the highest average level of mitigation and damage recovery. You're matching your mitigation and damage recovery up to the spikes and waves. Played well, that makes Regen much stronger than measures of average performance over time suggest."