A Guide To Health & Regeneration and how they work

[Repost of my old guide - not checked its relevance vs I25 but assuming it's still solid]

This is not so much a guide as a help feature for those who don't understand regeneration.

I understand Recharge. I understand Endurance recovery. But I could never get my head around Regeneration. Stamina, for example, is a good benchmark for Recovery. For thos of you that remember pre-innate Fitness, you knew how much of a difference Stamina made when you took it at 20. But I never really "felt" the difference Health made.

Mainly I think that's because "tough" toons are tough. You expect them to be able to withstand damage and they can have a lot of mitigation as well (even Regen toons). Squishy toons are generally squishy. When they pull a group of mobs, that health bar can go down (mitigation aside) quite fast. Apart from on a /Regen toon, the speed your health comes back is only noticeable when you self-heal, or when you rest.

When you're building a toon, those regeneration bonuses look quite hefty. But how much of a difference do they actually make?

Thanks here to those that replied to my Regen questions thread [old boards] and also to Plasmic's Regeneration Guide [old boards] which set me off down this road. In some ways, this may seem a repost of Plasmic's thread, but I couldn't get my head round some of the things he said and had to work through it at my own pace.

For the tl;dr crowd, download my spreadsheet and play.

For the rest of you...

Regeneration works by healing a portion of your health every x seconds. At its base level (numbers from City of Data) it's 25% of your health every minute. In-game this results in 5% of your Health every 12 seconds.

And this is where it gets confusing. The "real numbers" quote hp/sec regeneration rates, but all this does is give you an idea of your regen rate, because what actually happens, is that (at base) you get NO health back for eleven seconds, then a huge tick of health on the 12th second.

Example

- With no regen bonuses, and a single 50 Healing IO in Health (assuming a level 50 scrapper) your HP/sec rate is about 8.6. What actually happens is you get a tick every 7.8 seconds which heals 67HP

- That same character with 165% regen bonus and a 13% HP bonus from sets/slotted health has a hp/sec rate of 16.7. In reality they get a tick every 4.5 seconds for 75.6HP

Also...

Increasing your Regeneration will reduce the time between ticks.

Increasing your HP will increase the amount of health you get back with each tick.

So what does it mean to enhance Health? Is it worth plopping a Regen Tissue in Health, or a single Health IO? Those powers that increase your HP. Are they worth slotting with Healing IOs to increase the max HP of your toon?

I built a spreadsheet. Dropbox Excel Download Link.

It works in conjunction with Mids/Pines and you can play with it in several ways.

To Use it...

Change the AT in cell B4 to whatever your AT is. This will populate your base HP, capped HP and regen caps into the sheet. No data for Sentinels at the moment. It's easy to add though.

You can then fill out columns f & k with your various bonuses - be they set bonuses from IO sets, or powers that increase HP.

If you want to do it quickly, just take the summaries from Mids and plop them in.

-You can change the "Number of" to 0 to remove them from the calculations. This quickly allows you to see the real effect of removing/adding something

-The "Before" numbers assume a single 50 Healing IO in Health and nothing more, so don't forget to add Health back in.

-You can also just add percentages to the column to watch the regen rates change if you had a goal (for example) of 1 tick every second. You then know how much regen you need to build for in order to get that rate.

B16/17 and B22/23 then show you the output in terms of how often you get a regen tick, and how much HP is healed with each tick. I've also included what the game should say is your HP/sec rates for comparison. The spreadsheet also takes into account you hitting HP or Regen caps.

If you chart this, it's not particularly scintillating, and is very basic maths, but you can see how the need for more regeneration is exponential to the time between ticks. This chart is irrespective of AT, as it only affects the time between ticks rather than the the amount you heal (which will differ depending on AT)

and zoomed in a bit...

Hopefully this will help understanding of Regeneration!

Lastly, I apologise for the .xls format of the spreadsheet to those without Excel. I did try converting it to Google Docs but it broke my cell validation list. If someone else wants to convert it - feel free! The calculations aren't that hard. I'd be happy to repost a link in this guide (and give you credit!)

Thanks for the guide, this was info I've been wanting to track down. I was hoping to see the formulas exactly, but I imagine when I open your spreadsheet, I'll get them from there.

Yep. I can't remember how it works any more and just rely on the sheet, but it's very simple excel work.