UberGuy

The core issue with buffing Regen is twofold. Clicks cost time, but those who enjoy active sets need them to be click happy. HP recovery is the weakest survival mechanic on its own, but adding significant defense/resistance to the set will reduce the need for the set to be played actively. Note that these observations don't mean I don't think Regen can't or shouldn't be buffed, but no buffs that will preserve its unique play will ever put it on survival par with sets that have high resistance or defense (or both). Given that in real play, it is strong enough to be serviceable, even for some really outrageous game goals, and that alternatives exist for people who don't enjoy clicking a lot, I don't want Regen to change style too dramatically. I wouldn't resist it changing at all.

Isn't it obvious? Because Regen has almost no passive/toggle resist or defense. WP gets both, and Bio beats WP on resists and just general toolsets. Bio is like three way love child of Regen, WP and Invul, with some stuff none of them get. I'm not trying to say there's some test where Regen wins on raw numbers. Not against Bio for sure. There are some burst damage cases I think it can win vs WP, simply because WP has so little reactive capability. Your test produces numbers, and any "hard" numbers "feel" authoritative, but I believe the test you ran shows self-evident things (because no def/res on Regen), and the actual numbers don't reflect anything especially practical, because the situation they measure is unrealistic. A more useful test would be something like what you did for attack powerset performance. Pick a relatively mitigation neutral primary, (Fire Melee?), and compare how well the secondaries do at letting you clear your AE test map. Try not to get killed (much), and see how that impacts time to completion. My guess is that you'll still get the same ranking, but I think WP and Regen will be (even) closer together and Bio will cruise to victory.

I'll certainly concede the obvious - it could have been faster on anything less threatened by the Cims, since it's clear that if you don't have to click or run or wait to heal then you can just plow through everything. I spent about 3 hours on the first 3 missions, then went to bed. (I was, for whatever reason, doing this on a weeknight.) The fourth mission took me another 3 hours. I know people who can solo the whole TF it in 4 hours, though there's a whole lot of variation by AT and powerset. (Anything with Flight can avoid tons of damage from the Cims proper.) Offhand I can't remember how many, if any of them, were intentionally restricting themselves the way I did. Someone with a more ideal / less fiddly character who also uses everything at their disposal will be the fastest, naturally. To be fair though, I had never tried this on any character before, so some of my slowness was just deciding how to proceed at major junctions, like clearing the puffballs. I don't usually wait around for clicks, though I might pause briefly for a fresh Barrier. (I will not stand around waiting for a fresh one, only pause if it's imminent.) I play these Regen characters a lot, and I know how to manage them fairly well. As such, I don't spend much time running away from things. I tend to avoid inspirations in normal play (on any "finished" character) unless it's painfully obvious I need them to succeed. As a result, I tend to know my break points, and while I obviously sometimes miscalculate (because we all do), knowing my limits well translates to mostly avoiding situations where I have to run away. However, knowing my limits also means picking my fights - no aggroing multiple spawns of Cims if I could help it. (I don't do that with most content on these characters.) I certainly didn't stand around pulling unless I absolutely needed to, but I also was careful to approach things from angles that would not aggro multiple groups. I still sometimes did pull multiples and survived, but clearly playing this way is slower than simply rolling along knowing you can take the heat. And if I wasn't trying to avoid any deaths, I would have pushed the envelope harder. Pretty obviously I did this on a heavily IO'd and fully Incarnate character. I don't think most people who solo this TF do it at +4/x8 without that, though I am sure some could do it on IOs alone. Especially if they let themselves have inspirations. Initially, I started with a very conservative Incarnate "loadout". I had Barrier Core Destiny, Melee Core Hybrid, Spiritual Core Alpha, and Reactive Radial Interface. My Lore was a Core - I usually only take the Radial Lore with the support LT on farmers, for the indestructible aggro source. All this was T4. After playing for a while, I decided I was doing well enough that I did not need to be so conservative, and switched the Hybrid to Assault Core. After finding regular Romulus was a total chicken ****, I tried changing out my Interface to a freshly crafted Degen Core (no DoT), and that did seem to cause less running. (Nictus Rom was way less of a runner.) I kept Spiritual Alpha slotted for most of the TF to help get clicks back faster, but once I cleared the puffballs in the end fight, I switched Alpha to Muscular Core. I wasn't going to spend time cycling clicks constantly - I needed to focus on DPS. The actual end fight was long, and it was probably half of that 3 hours. This was for two main reasons. (1) I could not ignore ambushes, and had to peel off of DPSing Nictus Rom to clear them. (2) As you can see in the screenshot, this character has modest E/N defense, so Rom's heal hit regularly. He was also healed once by a Surgeon in one of the ambushes. (They heal a fixed % health, so that was a big setback.) I learned to time popping MoG around when I expected Rom to pop his heal, and had modest success with using that to avoid him hitting with it. I did not use it otherwise unless he hit me. Popping MoG when I was hit served to counteract the -def until it expired and give me time to heal back up.

You should know this is set up for Regen (and to some extent WP) to fail. Regen has the weakest of the three's def/res stats. In that scenario, you must defeat enemies in order to reduce the DPS you face. By ignoring MoG, you deprive Regen of 15 seconds it could spend killing things to reduce what it's up against. By not killing anything, you demand that IH's HP recovery exceed the applied DPS and never do anything to reduce it. That's not how the powerset works. Regen is about burst survival. Winning fights is about getting your foe to zero HP before they can do the same to you, and Regen can buy you enough time to do that quickly, or you lose. Measuring how long you can stand around willy-nilly ignoring your enemies has an element of pure academia about it. That's not how we actually play. And of course it shows that a set with both extreme HP recovery and decent resists can stand around for a long time. (It also shows why Bio is probably going to get a nerf bat in the face eventually.)

lol, fixed. That was a very strange autocorrect failure. That's what I get for posting on mobile.

I soloed the ITF on +4/x8 with a DB/Regen. I very much wanted to do it using no inspirations and no temp powers, but I did not engage the limitations, just in case. In the end I was forced to use yellow Inspirations to hit Romulus, and I used a Jet Pack initially during the fight with Nictus puffballs. No amplifiers, no Lucks or Robusts, no base crafted buffs, etc. I only died once, thanks to two (edit: went back and read my notes from the time and it was three) hits in a row from Nictus Rom in the final fight with him after the last ambush. Probably obviously, I did not pile into the Romans, and fought just the groups I needed to. The hardest part of it all was just that regular Romulus ran like a track star all the time, which brutalized my ability to maintain DPS against him. That and his high defense were the reasons I needed to resort to yellow inspirations, because otherwise it was just going to take forever to kill him. I get it if people don't like playing Regen. I get that because of the limitations of activation time for powers, having to use clicks hurts DPS, though I think it's a real design failure in this game is that so much of the game requires so few clicks except to spam attacks. But anyone who says that Regen can't do stupid things beyond what anyone actually needs it to do to play CoH really well is playing it wrong. Citation, at least re: number of deaths:

Totally what I do. I never activate it in a scrum unless I'm desperate.

It's because of this that any time I join a thread arguing for buffs to Regen (usually anchored on "bring back toggle IH", because, hey), this is one of the core things I argue for - give Regen good base resistance to -recharge. There is some mechanical precedent for it - when Fiery Aura got it's one big rebalance pass pre-sunset, resistance to -recharge was added to Temperature Protection. The motive here seems obvious, meaning I don't think this was added for thematic purposes. FA has one survival-based click, that cliick was re-balanced in ways that made the set more survivable (buffing the scale and reducing the base recharge of Healing Flames), and it seems clear that the resistance to -recharge was to let it get that heal back more often even in the face of -recharge debuffs. People still go on about Regen needing better resistance to -regen, and while I think that would be both thematic and useful, I don't think it's the most useful resistance it needs, by far. I say that honor belongs to recharge, because, as GB mentions, it relies not only on Reconstruction (the ur-version of Healing Flames), but Dull Pain, MoG and IH. Regen needed more -regen resist back when its survival was dominated by toggle IH, but that's no longer the way the set works. I fight things like L54 CoT and Malta all the time, and they can shut down +regen handily. (More on Malta in a sec.) I definitely notice it, but it isn't enough on its own to get me killed unless I'm not paying attention. (Not paying attention is pretty dangerous when playing Regen anyway.) What gets me killed (other than raging DPS I can't possible handle) is having my survival clicks turned into tiny dots by some god-awful quantity of -recharge, like an AV hitting me with Lingering Radiation, or too many KoA landing web grenades on me. (The latter is very rare, but its happened on the oddball case where they stripped my defense and I didn't do something fast enough.) Oh, and high-notoriety Arachnoids are a huge problem for the same reason, except they stack slows on you way easier. The Poison slow the bosses can hit you with is devastating. I compensate for more mundane sources of -recharge with IOs, especially WinterOs. But I think Regen should be much better at resisting -recharge. I say explain this as the character having a raging metabolism. Sure, that only explains toxins or freezing cold, and not things like netting/webbing, but you know, this is a comic-book-based game where we heal people's wounds by spraying them with radiation, and tech SOs boost fear by enhancing your face with scary robotic reconfiguration capability. Malta plasma burns are very harsh, and the way they work reads to me as something from when IH defined Regen. It is one of the few non-mez effects in the game that is resisted on duration, not magnitude. In other words, if you have -regen resistance, you make the -10,000% debuff Malta bots apply last less long. I mean, I guess it's a bit of a blessing that you get to do anything to it, as 90% resistance to this scale of debuff is still -1000%, at even level. At least it's a random chance and doesn't happen every time. IMO, these should work more like Twilight Grasp - a large, but scale resistable debuff. (CoT Death Mages have a -500% regen debuff at even level, but it always applies when the power lands. Given that CoT spawns seem boss heavy - 3-4 per spawn - I'm basically permanently at nill regen when fighting CoT on high notoriety.) The other tweaks I remember wanting for the set were: Remove the half unenhanceable limitation on Fast Healing. Add an up-front heal, roughly Reconstruction scale, to Instant Healing. This would make it more effective as a reactionary power. Right now if you use it too late, when your HP are already under half or so and still dropping, it probably won't save you. That kind of sucks for a power with such a high recharge. Something like the scaling resists that SR has would also be a potent buff to the set. This would need some careful testing / tuning, though. Explain it as short-term scar tissue / scabbing.

Not sure what the relevance of the old Wiki link is. If it was a sleep, it was from a time before ParagonWiki even existed.

To be fair, there are plenty of sets that will flat out die hardcore if you fiteclub with 54/x8 spawns of Cimerorans, especially at Scrapper/Stalker resist caps. If you don't have high DDR, they will floor your defense due to cascade failure, and then you're screwed. Brutes and Tankers have less to worry about against them if they can at least cap their L/S resists. Personally, I think the worst non-Rularuu foes for anyone vulnerable to -def are not Cimeorans, but L45+ PPD Quantums. That's ranged -def attached to energy damage. A x8 spawn of those is pretty damn horrible. Prae Resistance and L45+ Family get a nod here too, for the same reasons, but the PPD are a bit more focused about piling the energy defense strippage on you. Only villains really need to deal with PPD ever, though. L54 Rularuu, of course, are very few build's idea of fun.

Very late to the party, but I certainly think Regen (and yes, I mean Regen, not WP) is worth playing. However, it is not for everyone. Who is Regen for? It's for people who actively enjoy a click intensive playstyle. I actually wish more powersets in CoH required this. I derive significant enjoyment from knowing that my success in combat actually consistently depends on knowing the right time to do something, whether proactively or reactively. Regen, at least played under stress, is far less likely to survive if you don't use the right powers at the right time. While I was pissed when Regen was nerfed away from toggle IH back in the day, I actually am glad it was, because I discovered I enjoyed the "new" version's resulting playstyle a lot more. IMO, people who want toggle IH back should basically just play WP. It's not the same thing, but it's close. At the time of the I4 nerfs I had one Regen. Now I have 3 level 50 Regens - two Scrappers and a Stalker. I have another level ~30 Regen Stalker, but it's pretty similar to one of the others so I may never get it to 50. Notably, I have zero WPs. WP is the anti-Regen in terms of Playstyle. It has one click power whose recharge you can't even modify. It's not without its tactical requirements, but getting a lot of foes around you is pretty standard fare for melee characters, which mostly leaves killing the most dangerous things first, which is standard fare for everyone. I'm not blind to Regen's limitations, and while I would not want its clicky playstyle removed, I do think the set could use some tweaks that would improve it. None, however can change the core challenge it faces. As others in the thread have mentioned, relying heavily on lost HP replacement to survive competes poorly with both high +Defense and +Resist, because of how their benefits scale with increasing value. Increasing HP replacement / time offsets incoming DPS in a linear way - 1 HP/s recovered survives 1/HP/s of damage suffered, while Def/Res have a (1-1/X) impact on your time-to-defeat. That's hard math that won't change without radical changes to the combat system (which I would not advocate, for reasons mentioned about why this game is fun after ~17 years). To compete, Regen has to follow some fairly narrow build paths to crank its defense and resist, even in bursts, so that its other tools can keep up. (Note that I don't consider it a requirement to pair Regen with specific primaries, like Kat/ or BS/, but it definitely can take some of the build pressure off if you do.) I'm OK with that.

This combination of errors, where you were playing but kicked out, the message about a connectivity issue, and the game client not being able to reach the login server, sounds like a legit inability to reach the game. There may be a problem between your ISP and the game servers.

I wonder if the player version was originally a sleep. I have had an Ice Blaster since the first couple of weeks after release and don't recall if it ever being a sleep for players, but it could have been one in the Beta.

FYI, I am not sure we should expect to see this expanded. It's very buggy and problematic with things like Flashbacks, and causes very strange behavior with teams doing anything in open zones. Hunting for Winter Lord GMs in Atlas, for example, is complicated when part of your team disappears from your map and says they found a GM - that no one else can find because the people who found it are hidden from view / targeting. Basically our devs appear to have long hated dealing with this tech, thus I'm not sure they're likely to increase how often it comes into play.

They were also added as a nostalgia nod to the original raid, where they were the way you got Hami enhancement drops. The orgiinal I9 version of the raid did not have them. They were added (back) by the HC team. So even beyond the functional purpose of the badge they grant, they exist for a non-functional but still valid reason. (The badge for them was, obviously, added to make clearing them something people would actually want to do, since they no longer drop HOs.)

Crystal Armor is probably a doubly out-of-date oversight, as I believe it long ago provided psi damage resistance. More things that suffer from this are any Reconstruction-like power, which combines self-healing with +resist (usually to Toxic damage). They all ignore external boosts, which makes them immune to +heal set bonuses and, probably more whack (though nice if you're the user), -heal effects from things like Poison/Weaken. The inconsistency is almost certainly one borne of lack of revisiting powers once per-attribmod blocking of external became a feature of the game. So it's not a bug in a strict sense - this is how the powers were built on purpose. But they could, in theory, be revisited. Edit: Note that +def powers may not be left entirely alone if this is removed, as sometimes this seems to be used as a balance consideration. Comparing Cold to FF "boost-ability" in a vacuum is not valid - Cold does things that FF does not, and generally Cold is considered better for it.

I thought about that, but I'm actually not sure if that would do it or not. It may be that removing DR slotting would fix it, and/or flagging the DR attribmod to ignore enhancement. It kind of depends on where the schedule enforcement comes into play, and what it's checking. That code is probably unchanged from the old-ish copy I have access to, but I can't peer at it now.

Damage resistance is on "Schedule B", where single same-level SO enhancement strength is 20%, while damage is "Schedule A", where SO strength is 33.3%. It seems clear that your damage enhancement is obeying Schedule B. The problem here is almost certainly related to the fact that damage and damage resistance are, mechanically, the same attribute. This is why, for example, most powers with damage resistance are flagged to ignore external (non-enhancement) boosts - if they didn't, things like Build Up would boost damage resistance. Offhand, I can't think of examples of player powers that let you combine damage dealing and damage resistance in the same power. As such, I'm not even sure this can be fixed.

Not only can non-50s drop them, but non-50s can get them as drops. I've gotten them more than once playing lowbies on trick-or-treat teams in PI.

Played since pre-release headstart. Never a thing.

Both are good. A Corr that can self-buff is going to be more self-sufficient, and one that can debuff foes will probably be able to take down stronger enemies at the high end. I have Ice Blast characters of both ATs, and I enjoy them both. The damage output from the Blaster is noticeably higher (even though mine, an Ice/Dev has basically no damage boost from his secondary) and that higher damage is less fiddly to sustain. As a result my Blaster clears x8 missions more quickly. But the Corr (Ice/Dark in my case) can pull off "stupid character tricks" like soloing AVs and GMs much more reliably than the Blaster can.

As much as I feel this system is in need of change, if it were to be tweaked, I'd dig this approach.

One additional comment on this. The streak breaker is intended to have a narrow purpose - to reduce repeated missing. It biases attack roll outcomes so that, the better you are at hitting your target, the less often you'll miss multiple attacks in a row. This is important - it's not an arbitrary hit chance improvement, and it doesn't let you "bank" your automatic hits for future misses. It specifically seeks to break up runs of multiple misses that happen in a row. The fact that it forces a hit even when you might have hit anyway isn't particularly relevant to its job. A forced hit when you would have is still a hit, and a forced hit when you would have missed (and it was time for it to intervene) means it did its job. Checking to see if you missed before intervening isn't necessary for what the breaker was meant to achieve. We still can experience frustrating miss patterns that the breaker will not help with. For example, if your best DPA or otherwise most important attack is in your chain every third attack, even with a 90%+ hit chance, the breaker will happily let you miss just that attack several times in a row, which can devastate your short term performance and maybe even get your character killed. But this kind of outcome is perfectly possible even with the purest and most entropic of RNGs. Truly random things can "clump" certain outcomes in the short term, and those clumps don't have to be delivered in a strictly successive streak of events. The streak breaker only aims to modify immediately successive misses.

C's rand(). Which has been studied to death, and as long as it's properly seeded, is more than sufficiently random for things like game combat and random drops. True sources of entropy are critically important for things like cryptography, where it's essential that it be unreasonable to determine patterns in the generation of things like encryption keys. Such sources are both overkill for most gaming purposes, and also potentially impractical. Sources of entropy are easy to exhaust through constant polling for random bits - real-world entropy only produces so many bits of data per unit of time. When exhausted, calls to such sources either block the requester until enough bits of entropy are available (impractical in a game server) or they must resort back to pseudorandom data.

OK, final tally: 15098 attack rolls with Fire Ball 757 misses 757 forced hits 14341 total hits That's 94.99% average hit rate on a nominal 95%. (I confirmed that every attack roll message lists a 95.00% hit chance.) Attached is a zip file containing the attack roll logs and the files I used to create the arc. (I didn't create the costume you'll see just for this - it's a gag costume file I had and I couldn't resist setting it on fire for a few hours.) The only powers I was using during the test were auto powers like those in the Fitness Pool, Hasten, Accelerate Metabolism, and Ageless Core Epiphany, to speed up rate of fire. I didn't monitor the test the whole time, so I didn't activate these +recharge powers consistently, so if you go through the attack timestamps you'll be able to see my recharge vary. I also occasionally popped Secondary Mutation, and even got a Quick Reflexes at one point. Fire Ball had 5 pieces of Superior Winter's Bite, one of which was the immob proc, which I swapped out for a L50 common recharge. The foes in the attached mission are melee-focused AVs with no attacks and the resist+regen powers from Willpower. Since they have no attacks, you don't even need to use AE test settings to make yourself invincible. They'll run up to you and mill around. Eventually, most of them will find a "stable" place to be near you and sit still. During my test, one guy kept running around at the outside of the huddle, but I had 20 stationary targets clumped under me on a 16-target max power, which I achieved by dragging my aggro cluster onto another well-clustered spawn. Hit_Roll_Testing.zip