Luminara

He said "no links", make fun of his sausage!

That approach would be possible. Check damage type, activate relevant heal which is baked into the Regeneration powers (as opposed to adding a Regen-only HoT to all attacks in the game). Wouldn't even be difficult to implement, just grab the SW code and tweak it. The "-19.5748 points of Special damage (all affected targets) after 10s" function is the relevant bit. The time before activation would have to be altered to pull its information from the character's current regeneration rate, and the amount of damage healed would also have to be matched to an equivalent HP tick if it's intended to mimic regeneration, but it would actually be relatively simple to implement. Since it's simply adding HP back via the Special Damage mechanic, it wouldn't require specific typed damage in the heal, only for checking damage type to determine whether to activate the heal. Yeah, that's totally doable, and wouldn't impact any non-Regeneration characters in any way. It might need some numerical jiggering or a check for external regeneration buffs to ensure it wasn't completely over the top, but that's just tweaking. ⭐

The method of power acquisition doesn't matter, the engine just doesn't currently support the basic idea. After the damage is removed from health, it's not typed any more, it's just less health. The engine doesn't record the types of damage taken between HP ticks (it records damage taken, but not type, as lost HP), sort and categorize the typed damage for future reference (no code for that, though buff/debuff code might be adaptable), or check for and apply specific Regeneration buffs to each damage type (doesn't currently exist). And it may not be capable of doing all of that before the next HP tick (base 12s, cap varies by archetype, but scrappers and stalkers have the highest cap, 3000%, which is a tick every 0.4s) when latency and Arcanatime are taken into account, which would require more redesign to speed up the storing, sorting, calculating and application of the New and Improved Regeneration. And even if they put the time into trying to make it work, they'd have to segregate Regeneration's specific typed regen from Health's regen, set bonus regen, Regeneration Aura's regen, and so on, just to keep Regeneration's rework from deleteriously impacting every character, which would leave Regeneration... well, kind of fucked in teams, since it wouldn't be receiving new Regeneration buffs, only regeneration buffs. Or it would impact every character, which would open up some serious holes in a lot of characters' survivability. Either way, it's more problems and headaches, more months of redesign and testing, more wrinkles to hammer flat. There's "difficult, but possible", and then there's "Maybe next game". I'm reasonably certain that this is the latter.

Also, that's not how damage types function. You can't regenerate only Lethal, or only Toxic, because you're not regenerating damage, you're regenerating HP and HP has no type distinctions. Once the damage is dealt, it's not Lethal or Toxic damage any more, it's just HP removed. It might be possible to create HP type distinctions, but it'd be a load of work, two loads of testing and probably a couple of years at the earliest before it could begin beta testing.

So, just be perfect, and only play with other perfect people, or quit every team/SG until you find one with perfect teammates, and it's a great inherent. Yeah... now it's even less attractive to me than it was on initial review.

That's stupid. There isn't even an F in incorrectly.

There we go. Now I have matching earrings.

That sounds like a punishment for other peoples' behavior (melee characters running off in different directions, soloing spawns and taking damage; ranged characters pulling spawns to the team before the current fight is over; everyone rushing ahead and expecting the defender to buff/debuff later; difficulty cranked up to the max when the team isn't capable of handling it; etc). Encouraging defenders to micro-manage other players actions, decisions and choices so they don't lose their Damage buff might not be the direction in which we want to go.

It attracts bees, and in a fight between a willy and a swarm of bees, my money's on the swarm.

You mean like @GM Impervium and @Bill Z Bubba? n00b. 😛

Was that a veiled reference to my ass? ARE YOU SAYING THIS CAPE MAKES MY BUTT LOOK BIG?!

He has to come back for the other one.

🔪

No, that was the cats. Time to clean the litter box.

The bonus shouldn't be significant enough to compensate for the time, effort and risk it takes to leverage it. It should be significant enough to help a struggling defender. With the right mechanical design, it's not as fine a line as it appears to be on the surface. Combat Jumping has a small Defense bonus, right? It's not enough to warrant six-slotting the power for +Def, and doing so doesn't really pay for the slot investment in the same way that more accessible and lower slot-cost set bonuses would, or the way putting the same slots into a stronger Defense power would. You can six-slot Combat Jumping to maximize its Defense, but why bother? There are better ways to get that Reactive Defenses 8.75% +Recharge bonus, better powers into which 5/6 Red Fortune can be slotted, better choices for boosting Def (All). That's how the +/-Special should pan out. Something beneficial, but not so much so that players deliberately build around it or try to leverage it. Your optimally slotted (3x +0 Defense Buff SOs) Deflection and Insulation Shields offer 23.4% Defense, and your Dispersion Bubble slotted the same way grants 15.6% Defense. If we peg the +/-Special at 10%, that would mean your "My team is really in trouble and my inherent is at full strength" Shields would then buff Defense by 25.74% and the Bubble by 17.6%. That's a total of 42.9% Defense you're giving your team, up from 39%, 17.6% of which scaled up on the fly because it's a toggle (you'd have to re-Shield your teammates to gain the benefit of the 10% increase on those powers). If you take that same build and add Maneuvers, slotted in the same way as the other +Def powers, your teammates' Defense goes up to 44.46% right now, no new Vigilance, no +/-SpecialSauce. 10% would push that up to 48.91%, and I know that you're already hammering that quote button and typing in ALL CAPS that it's overpowered... but it isn't, because that would only be 48.91% versus +0 minions. You and your team aren't fighting +0 minions, you're fighting a mix of minions and lieutenants and bosses and probably an AV at some point, and they're all going to be +2-+4 (or higher) to you. In other words, you're only soft-capped if you're playing solo in "story mode" (default difficulty). A +2 minion facing off against you with this +/-Special active would have an 11.09% chance to hit, not a 5% chance. A +2 lieutenant, 18.59%, and a +2 boss, 26.09%. The AV is going to have a minimum 36.09% hit chance. Taking that same character against those foes without the +/-Special, the +2 enemy hit chances are 15.54%, 23.04%, 30.54% and 40.54%. If the +/-Special capped at 15%, the same powers would grant 26.91% and 17.94% Defense, bringing the total up to 44.85% when you/your team are taking a lot of damage and the game "sees" that you need some help, a net increase of 5.85%. Throwing in Maneuvers (6.28% at 15% increase when slotted in the same way described for other powers mentioned in this post) nets you a total of 51.13% Defense for your team, and drops those +2 enemy hit chances to 8.87%, 16.37%, 23.87% and 33.87%. Again, that character without the +/-Special would be facing +2 enemies with the following hit chances: 15.54%, 23.04%, 30.54% and 40.54%. Versus +2 foes, the +/-Special would cut minion hit chances by half, lieutenant hit chances by a third, boss hit chances by a fourth and AV hit chances by a fifth. That's neither overpowered nor insignificant, despite being small. It's exactly what I described in my first post in this thread, a chance to turn a bad situation around. Not a guarantee of success, just a chance. And in contrast to the -End, this actually does something, rather than exist for the sake of existing. When you re-Shield your teammates with the +/-Special active, you're putting better Shields on them, not just refreshing the same buff with a lower cost and praying that a miracle occurs. And that's why the +/-Special can be small. It's not applied to one power, it's applied to all of your relevant powers, buffs and debuffs in your primary, debuffs in your secondary and pool buffs and debuffs. It's a cumulative benefit, not a single burst to a single power. It can be small and still be effective, and being both small and linked to team health keeps it from going into godmode territory. It doesn't need to, and shouldn't, double the strength of a defender's buffs/debuffs, because that would be overpowered. You can do the math for +3, +4 and higher spawns, and add Grant Invisibility if you want to know what kinds of totals you'd see with maximum buffs and the hardest foes. The net result will still be the same, you will be buffing your team more with +/-Special than you would without it, and it won't be turning you and your team into gods who are soft-capped against everything all the time. To more directly answer your question, yes, you would see an increase to the Defense provided by your FF/Beam character, just as I'd see an increase to the -ToHit provided by my TA/Dark, and Defender Dave/Diva would see an increase to his/her mitigatory capabilities. That's the entire point of the +/-Special, to make defenders, all defenders, better at being defenders, but doing it without making them OP and accomplishing it in a way that doesn't give them an always-on benefit which they can game. I would not add DDR to the +/-Special, that's something that needs to be controlled, not handed out freely, to keep a leash on creep.

It's not mud, it's uranium ore beneficiated via froth flotation that I'm attempting to refine manually since no-one will let me use a gas centrifuge. I'm making a boom-boom. I'd already be finished, but teacher keeps taking away my uranium hexafluoride and telling me not to blowedy uppy anyone's head.

There's no encouragement to exploit it. Trying to keep your teammates' HP bars in the orange or red while mitigating damage is self-defeating, they're going to improve and you're going to lose the +/-Special. Trying to game it by under-enhancing your powers won't work because the +/-Special would apply to the enhanced totals and fail to compensate for the under-slotting. And downed teammates wouldn't count toward it, so it'd be even less worthwhile to try to manipulate to any significant degree. And we're not talking about a bonus large enough to permit players to remove one or two SOs from every damage mitigation power, it's a 10-15% improvement to the powers. Not enough to replace SOs, or even DOs, and if they did try to use it as a replacement for a lowly DO, they'd be disappointed (refer back to sentence 3). There would be ways to leverage it, because there are always ways to leverage things. Everything can be leveraged in some way, by someone. But the ways I can conceive wouldn't be very palatable to teams, or individuals, and wouldn't be very popular or encouraging. For instance, I could talk one team member into taking a lot of damage and sitting out every fight, only stepping in to take more damage and ensure that his/her HP stays deep red, but I wouldn't be getting much out of one teammate's low HP and I'd be making another person very unhappy by treating him in such a poor manner, forcing him to stop playing so I can have my little 1-2.5% increase. Or I could withhold my buffs/debuffs until my teammates were in trouble, in order to maximize the scale, but in doing so, I'm risking losing the scale entirely if my entire team is defeated, not to mention making myself unwelcome on that team because of my selfish behavior. "Hey, great, thanks so much for using Flash Arrow just as my HP went to 1%, Lum. Remind me to hold a fucking parade for you later. Twat." Essentially, it doesn't prompt players to do stupid things like this because it's too small when it's not heavily leveraged, and too risky when it is heavily leveraged, it's not enough to justify the risk solo and it isn't the kind of effect that miraculously saves a team. It should (theoretically) function best in the mid range of team HP, where it's next to impossible to maintain a team if you're actively defending, evening out the large HP swings to smaller HP swings. This wasn't designed for the min/maxing exploity exploiters, like me, who spend a week in Mids' rebuilding a character to squeeze out 3.75% more global +Recharge or 15% more +Slow Res without giving up anything. This costs if you try to exploit it, and it doesn't give much back for doing so. It's for average players, new players, players on low level defenders and defenders struggling to add something meaningful to a team in big bad hard mode content. It's for defenders who need a little help, not defenders posting pylon and Trapdoor times. Also of note, the +/-Special I proposed doesn't include -Res or +Dam (or -Dam, but that's a given with how that debuff functions), so it's not a combat efficiency effect, it's purely a mitigation effect. RO isn't going to be flooring AV Resistances because they found a way to leverage the inherent, or hitting their damage caps with fewer AMs or Forts, it just doesn't do those things and can't be made to improve those abilities in that way. Saying that we shouldn't do this because there might be more than one defender on hand is ludicrous. Not one other archetype is penalized, in any way, for being present on a team in a number greater than one. Scrappers don't lose a percentage of their crit rate when other scrappers team with them. Brute Fury meters don't cap at a lower number than 100 when other brutes are on the team. Dominators don't lose 1 mag for every other dominator on the team. Why should the defender inherent specifically be designed without a useful tool like +/-Special simply because another defender might be present? Jesus' little brown nipples, the more defenders there are, the less likely they are to even need, much less even gain a fraction of a percent from, the +/-Special! The less it's needed, the less it does, and with multiple defenders, it's obviously less needed. There's zero power creep or risk of further overpowering the archetype here.