Enamel_32

Regarding Frostwork: So the power loses what makes it unique and becomes slightly weaker (no increase in regeneration), so that characters at or near the Max HP cap can benefit from it? Outside of using incarnate powers, how often does this actually come up? Is it possible to "overflow" any would-be wasted +Max HP into +Absorb or otherwise make it more broadly useful while remaining weird/unique?

This is where my head went immediately, and while it's complicated it might just be the most consistent way to handle defense/damage and I think it opens some interesting doors. The currently proposed change is simply taking the "lenient" defense calculation and inverting it to be "punitive" by favoring the more exotic damage types. Though in all fairness, it's being reported that this isn't too large of a change overall. I think it's still worth exploring that as an alternative. What strikes me most about this is that the defense calculation apparently cannot be changed in a vacuum. Instead, we see that various NPC attacks have to be tuned to fit this new calculation, altering ratios of the damage types and even swapping out damage types to retroactively make sense with the new model. We're not even applying this to player attacks at this stage, though it sounds like that's might be planned for a later date. It all seems just a bit off to me, a lot of work for what's billed as a small change. There's a lot of speculation here. I'd love to hear an official take on WHY this change is being made, the thought process behind it, and what it enables going forward. What's the goal for this? Is it because we want to reign in high S/L defense builds that IOs have enabled? Are some defense sets a little too strong? Are ALL defense sets too strong, and we want to make support sets like Empathy more relevant? Are certain NPC groups too weak or over-performing? Is this more of a philosophical change, not necessarily related to balance? Is it just a stepping stone on the way to something more meaningful?

People here talk about +4x8 difficulty and that's important, especially for long term and endgame play, but how does this affect that already annoying stretch of levels where defense sets aren't at their full power? If I chose to level up an Energy Aura scrapper and haven't reached the IO level range, would I give up on that character or ask to be power leveled?

Is there a reason to not apply individual defense types against individual damage types for a given attack? For example, maybe you'd block the lethal damage from the grenade but not the fire damage if you didn't had enough fire defense. Anything else (and I'm including both pre- and post-update defense mechanics here) feels like the attacks are being misrepresented and skews survivability above/below what a corresponding set of resistances would do.

Yeah the engine limitations are pretty weird but there's probably still a few methods that could get you that desired effect. One option might be to grant nearby enemies a power that, when they attack you, grants you a single stack of a regeneration power. Thinking on being able to handle smaller attacks better than large ones... Imagine we've got a regen scrapper at level 1 with 100 HP. Enemies probably do what... somewhere between 5-15 damage per attack at this level range? We give our scrapper an absorb shield of 1HP (1% max health). The frequency of how often they're granted that absorb shield changes what it feels like: A one-time shield will reduce the next attack by 1. I'd probably think of it working like temporary HP or a proactive shield power. Once every ~2 seconds, like the blaster secondary powers, we're blocking 1 damage for the occasional attack. This probably feels like an innate ability, but more like a random dice roll than a guaranteed effect. At maybe twice per second or faster, we're consistently blocking 1 damage for most attacks. Large attacks and/or alpha strikes are still large, but small attacks become much less of a threat than before. If you squint your eyes, it kind of looks like instant healing.

As you've mentioned, regeneration is... Reactive, requiring players to activate powers after taking damage. Using these powers proactively is possible but wastes a lot of their potential. Clicky. You've got 4 powers on different cooldowns to manage if things go south. Weak against specific debuffs like -Recharge, -Healing, and -Regeneration, it doesn't really protect itself like other sets do (Resistance naturally resists resistance debuffs, and most defense-based sets provide defense debuff resistance). To that, I would also add these faults: Almost binary in terms survival - the regeneration set is dominated by sustain-type powers. If you're feeling nerdy enough you can average out the health-over-time value for the click powers and end up with a rough total health-per-second figure. Any environment where incoming damage exceeds that value is not sustainable over time. On the other end of this, any environment where the incoming damage is below that threshold is going to feel easy, maybe even too easy. Building upon that thought, regeneration is "shallow" in terms of damage mitigation. Compare it to other sets where healing is provided as a secondary concern to other forms of damage mitigation, and as a result the effective regained health is some multiple of the green number you see on the screen. An enemy can't directly remove the health regained though electric armor's Energize, for example, because that regained health is bolstered by resistances. They'd have to deal more damage than the heal provided to break even. Regeneration is very old and has had some serious ups and downs over its lifetime. When considering changing a power set like regeneration, there are some constraints I try keep in mind: Try not to require a respec: breaking this rule means players will feel like they need to respec or change their build in some way to get the most out of it, and that can be frustrating even if the end result is a universal improvement. Introducing new enhancement types: adding a bunch of enhanceable defense to Dull Pain would prompt players to reconsider the balance of Heal, Recharge, and Defense enchancements for the power. The cottage rule: the core purpose or intent of a power shouldn't be changed unless absolutely necessary. Swapping Moment of Glory out for something else entirely probably wouldn't fly. Changes should make sense thematically. Changing Reconstruction to steal life from nearby enemies like dark armor doesn't make sense. So to me this means we want to keep things thematically centered around healing, add more mitigation layering if possible, and attempt to make the set either more proactive or less reactive in some way. Add debuff resistances to click powers. By putting them into powers that aren't active at all times, we get some variability in game play and perhaps allow for a player to make conscious tradeoffs. Even with something as wasteful as Reconstruction, there could still be some benefit in hitting it earlier in a fight. Introduce the absorb mechanic. Absorb functionally works like a heal, but doesn't decrease downtime between fights since it doesn't contribute to the main health pool. As a bonus, absorb uses the same enhancement types that players are already using for this set. Add a constant, low-strength absorb shield to Integration or Instant Healing, similar to powers you can pick from blaster secondary sets like Frigid Protection. This would let you shrug off some static amount of DPS without simply out-healing it. If we make the tick rate for this absorb shield frequent enough, it starts to look more like a "flat -X damage per attack" rather than a "+X heal over time". I think this makes a ton of sense for a power named "Instant Healing". Add some amount of absorb to Dull Pain, either net-new or by replacing some portion of its current effects with Absorb. One option might be to consider the player's current health level to determine how much healing vs absorb it grants. At full health, you could give more +absorb and no +heal. Crazy idea time: pick one click power. Make it activate automatically if the player's health drops below a certain threshold.

I'm all for a "none" shield option, animation changes or not. I was going to make this thread if it didn't already exist!

Fire's always been serviceable, but perhaps not "top tier", which is kind of strange since it's supposed to trade extra effects for more damage. Unexpectedly, it's one of the better sets in terms of damage per endurance. The cool thing here, when considering possible buffs, is that there's already a delivery vector: the fire DoT. Much like rad's contamination, or psi's boggled, you could sneak in more conditional effects when the enemy is already burning, such as dealing extra damage up-front, lowering fire resistance, reducing regen, or adding a small fiery explosion (though that bit may step on rad melee's toes a bit).