WeatherLord

That's fair and a good point. It's a reasonable approach and is certainly preferable to just removing IH outright. Still, I love what was done with Dark Armor's Dark Regeneration and Obscure Sustenance, which was also made to be mutually exclusive. They both fill a Healing role but accomplish the task in very different ways. Obscure got some nice buffs to make it more competitive, and I really like how this gives the player more options based on their playstyle and build goals. Both powers are great, it's a brilliant addition. I'd just like to see that with IH and RR as well. I don't want to offend anyone who likes IH currently, but honestly it feels more like a trap power now, where picking it instead of RR is just the wrong choice. Giving it some buffs would be nice.

I was thinking more about the pros/cons between Instant Healing and Reactive Regeneration and think IH could use some love, especially if the goal is to make it viable compared to RR. To be clear I love RR, but I'd like IH to be competitive too. First off, no -regen resistance in IH really hurts, when RR can easily cap it Additionally, because IH is a long cooldown click, death is incredibly punishing since you're also losing the Hasten recharge buff, which let’s be real IH desperately needs all the recharge it can get. RR being a toggle means death is not that big a deal IH also suffers tremendously from slows, while RR doesn't care Those differences alone make RR way more desirable, but even if we just compare the regen values to uptime between the two, IH just falls behind even more. At minimum, RR gives you 400% (enhanced) regen with 100% uptime, and in practice this goes up to around 550-600% average when in combat. Note this performance costs the player almost nothing, just turn on the toggle and go IH gives about 1000% (enhanced) regen, and with max local Recharge slotting goes from 650 second CD to ~325 seconds, which is only about 28% uptime Best case, a high recharge investment build can bring that to around 175, so about 50% uptime However, in addition to the high recharge needed to make IH usable, you also need to build for some amount of slow resistance, otherwise a minion's cold sneeze halts your momentum In summary, IH requires significantly more investment and IMO still falls short of what RR can do. In my Beta mission playtesting, RR was superior every time, even with a build that tried to leverage towards IH's strengths. IH could really use some additional debuff resistance while active at minimum, and ideally have it's recharge reduced a bit or given something to make it more viable.

Copied my T4'd Ninja Blade/Regen/Weapon Mastery Stalker to Beta and respec'd into Reactive Regeneration. My build already included all 9 Regen powers though I did shuffle a few slots around slightly. The overall build didn't need to change much though. This character is very heavy on theme, but I tried to squeeze as much efficiency into the character as possible (Perma Hasten, 42% Smash/Lethal Resists and 20ish other Resists, 90% Slow Resists, only 12% Def to all but Divine Avalanche easily softcaps Melee, good amount of Procs in single target attack chain) My Beta Experience: I played several missions ranging from +1/x3 to +4/x8 to experiment with the differences. I normally play Solo around +2 or +3 and keep the player count low, as Stalkers are naturally better at DPSing hard single targets vs groups. Ninja Blade specifically has pretty bad AoE sadly Playing at lower difficulties was mostly fine, Reactive Regen really helps keeps your health topped up. Regen has always felt like it rides a razor's edge between "unkillable" and "just plain dead". Sometimes a group of enemies could beat on me for eternity and my HP bar never moves. However, if you get too lax about it throughout the mission, your HP can plummet incredibly quickly and then you're dead. To really stress-test the build, the final mission I played was the Marauder one from Maria Jenkins at +4/x8 which is not normally a mission / difficulty level that I could do on Live. That mission has IDF and since they do -regen, I wanted to see how it would go. Jumping into a group to fight them head on works great for exactly 15 seconds, then MoG wears off and you're dead. So, I used lots of pull tactics. This is where the new Reactive Regen really shined, as I could definitely tell it was helping to both keep me healed up plus prevented a good amount of -regen debuffs from coming through. As long as I was very careful, took it slow, leveraged cooldowns properly, pulling the group around corners, it went OK. I died a few times, though I accepted Death as a natural (but temporary) part of the Regeneration Powerset a long time ago. The mission is still a slog, and clearly I'm not expecting Stalker Regeneration to breeze through this at +4/x8. Ultimately, it was a nice stress-test to get a feel for the Set's ceiling. The -regen resistances and the higher average regen thanks to RR is huge! When it came time to fight the AV, I had to Rez twice using Second Wind, but I was able to solo the AV without Lore pets or any Temp Powers, though I did use Barrier and Assault Hybrid. As a point of reference, I can solo him just fine on my Live build as well. It's a balance between going heavy DPS while cycling the big protection clicks (Instant Healing, Barrier, MoG) while heavily relying on Divine Avalanche while the big protection clicks are on cooldown. While IH does have superior Regen while it's up, having RR on constantly was definitely preferable. My Thoughts / Opinions: The changes are definitely an improvement. I particularly like Reactive Regen, a permanent ~400% Regen (enhanced) at minimum is really nice! I'm also a big fan of the added debuff resistances. Second Wind giving a heal is neat, and I'm fine with the instant rez pop-up on defeat. Glad to see a small amount of +recovery added to Fast Healing, since Stalkers always missed getting that benefit compared to the other archetypes. I didn't really notice the +Damage in MoG, but it's alright (would much rather have +recharge!). While I don't see myself using Instant Healing anymore, shouldn't it also get some -regen resistances? RR can cap -regen resist, but Instant Healing continues to just get neutered. As other posters have mentioned, the lower HP cap really hurts Stalkers (and by extension Sentinels) a lot here. While going from "fine" to "dead" is kinda part of Regeneration's DNA, it's always felt more extreme on a Stalker, as enemies can burn through their 2k HP much faster. Since increasing the HP cap is unrealistic, it would be really nice to have some kind of +Absorb, though at this stage that's probably a pipe dream. I can live without it. Please do consider giving +Recharge somewhere though. Especially if you want the Reconstruction + Ailment Resistance bigger heals combo to be an integral part of the set. With Reconstruction being a 60 second cooldown, it needs all the recharge it can get. Since regen has very little Damage Resistance / Defense, it eats through HP much quicker, which continues to be my experience on Live and when testing. In fact, for the longest time I never even had Reconstruction in my build. I always felt like I'd use it, then 5 seconds later I'm at half HP again, so I experimented with other defensive cooldown powers like Unleash Potential and Shadow Meld. Reconstruction just feels like it has a bit of an identity crisis at times. Either your regen is enough to keep you alive forever, or your about to be overwhelmed and need to do something about it. In those cases, popping Reconstruction will buy you a few more seconds at most, so either you need to have it ready again quickly or you need to have a Plan B. Regardless, I'm happy the set is finally getting some love, thank you Devs! I love the active playstyle of Regeneration and needing to manage incoming damage, but I always find myself reaching to use Reconstruction and MoG only to see them often still recharging on cooldown. If the set could get some +Recharge somewhere, it'd really help with leveraging those active cooldowns (and benefit the players that decide to stick with IH). Reconstruction comboing with Ailment is neat and clearly better than Live, but as a heal in the premier Healing Armor Set, I just wish it did more.

I was the Dominator Puzzlepox on the Synapse, and I agree, it was a lot of fun! When a team capped at 17 has good coordination and manages to steamroll lvl 21s, it's always a great time. Whlie we didn't have too many defeats on the Synapse, some of my favorite memories from Live were those missions with the in-map Prisons. It would really create some intense situations, like if half the team wipes and some are trying to work together to break out while the others are trying to fight their way over to make a rescue. I wish more missions nowadays had them, though not everyone likes it. After all, its classic comic book storytelling for a team to get beaten down, only to have them overcome the odds and make a comeback. When those scenarios happen organically with CoH, it's the best!

I understand the above are formula standardizations / bug fixes for Spines, but these three powers were already kinda underperforming within the set IMO. The lower End Cost for Impale and slightly faster Recharge for Stalker Spine Burst made them more appealing to actually use on a Spines Stalker. For Impale and Spine Burst, the damage done compared to the animation cast time is really low. Impale Activation Time is 2.43 seconds while Spine Burst is a massive 3.00 seconds. If the End Cost and Recharge are going to be standardized, OK fine, but could the cast times at least be lowered a bit please? As a comparison: Blaster Plant Manipulation Thorn Burst is only 2.00 Activation Time (compared to 3.00 Spine Burst) for similar damage Dominator Thorns Impale is only 1.43 Activation Time (compared to 2.43 Spines Impale) for similar damage. The Thorns version does have more End Cost/Recharge but also gets more Range and def debuff As another comparison specific to Stalkers only, Electric Melee was already considered one of the best Stalker sets, and the Thunder Strike consistency change (which was definitely needed, thank you Devs!) has buffed an already top set to be even better. There's also a lot of inconsistencies between the Spines/Thorns powers as well, and the Melee versions have the short end of the stick. To be clear, I'm not asking for huge buffs to the Spines set, but if the powers are going to be tweaked to fit the standard formulas, I think the context of the powerset also needs to be considered. I admit my bias as Spines is one of my favorite melee sets, I'd just like to see a little love to avoid it being unintentional nerfs for an already middling set (especially to Stalkers). Lowering the cast time of Impale and Spine Burst a bit would help a lot.