Galaxy Brain

@America's Angel, you do realize all the sets across the 4 ATs are essentially the same outside of some tweaks stalkers have? The blaster sustain changes are very relevant here as they were all changed in roughly the same manner. Turning like powers into (toggles) is definitely analogous.

If it were to have scaling anything, I think itd be cool to have it scale up with High HP rather than low so say, at full HP you have a very strong layer of resistance that is whittled as you take big hits, but then your regen should be able to stabilize you again.

Ok mom

While true, other sets can also pick up leadership/etc (You can only have 1 origin pool unfortunately 😕 ) and still have their other goodies. For example, say you have Shield/ that gets built for incredibly high res to all on top of 55%+ positional defenses. Invuln may have more HP and a bit more resistance, but it cannot compete with Shield Charge AND agaisnt all odds AND grant cover. This is all personal tastes though along with just the niche Invuln has sort of being covered by the IO system and newer sets. It would just be nice if Invuln had something unique to where you couldn't just emulate its performance with other sets.

Right, because I personally would like to see it more modernized. Does it necessarily need it? No. Would it be really cool? I think so.

The bigger issue with Regen than any pure stat changes is that it is almost completely reaction based, and the way the game works makes that not always reliable. There are... 4 main clicks (Recon, DP, IH, MoG) to juggle at any given time, as well as Revive which is sorta :shrug: given its a self res that only works if you fail. The click powers have activation times, mainly for Recon and DP, that when combined with queuing them up mid-attack mean you have to wait for healing to be applied which can mean life or death depending on the situation. On a less severe note, even if everything is going well all the clicks in the set mean you spend less time actually using attack powers as you refocus on the defensive clicks. Throwing regen a bone to allow it to be less "busy" should be a priority, and other threads have gone over just how that could be accomplished while retaining similar overall performance.

Most powersets do, especially when you take Tough! 🙂 I should be more transparent though, I do agree that on the list of things that need tweaks, Invulnerability is on the last page in the margins, if it's there at all. The issue I personally have with it is that it is simply functional when other sets are flashy and get "tough enough" to make their "flash" more attractive than invuln to me. The set is extremely popular for sure, but often that is due to it being "Invulnerability" and not "Physical Durability" or the like. One of those names has way more thematic weight for character building. Mechanically, other sets can get great S/L mitigation on top of other goodies like better non S/L resists / healing / utility / offense which makes Invuln unfortunately a bit soured. Invuln just sorta does defenses "better" than other sets with the ability to get more HP and solid res/def and some debuff resists. Not saying this is a bad thing by any means, but it also doesn't make it stand out (at least to me). Invincibility's ToHit boost is sweet, but it is quickly overshadowed as well in today's game... hell, maybe thats why I always glaze over it now when making alts since other sets can get "tough enough" + extras! I guess I just have a desire to make Invuln stand out a bit more in some unique way. Making it so like, you are immune to X amount of damage straight up to emulate how (Superman) just never gets harmed by handguns. Make it so unstoppable gives all your melee attacks knockdown / running into enemies causes knockdown to be like a Juggernaut. Something to make it stand out again!

Cool, so why would a non-lowbie / semi-casual player pick invuln over another armor set?

The OP's question comes up then: what makes invuln attractive over other sets on a lower lvl than elite players?

As Replacement said, broad strokes to like powers have been applied numerous times. All these armor T9s are basically the same type of power and would probably have the same fixed unless we dove super into unique perks per set. Or would you rather they just stay as set mules rather than proper capstones?

So, for everyone who isn't endowed with tons of inf or lvl 54 incarnate....?

Specifically, fun things to do with Travel Powers. I mean, how iconic is it to have Super-Speed races??? 😄

Pretty much this. Bots can put out INSANE -Regen (-1000%) which allow them to cheese tough fights despite having the worst ST output, and like with their AoE the set leans incredibly hard on the Assault Bot for this with it's Plasma Blasts. I can confidently say that Bots would be worse than Mercs by a good margin if it weren't for the Assault Bot carrying the team. They have a very odd dynamic where they can blow away trash mobs with missiles, but then spend the next 5 minutes lasering stragglers. A boss fight can be either a slog or done in record time depending on if they have a ton of HP or not which is kind of backwards as well.

I dont think anyone would mind the values being nerfed if were in exchange for the MASSIVE buff that is mitigating the crashes

assuming the values are adjusted, what do you think of the concept though?

This is an amazing proposal @Nanolathe! I think the switch to a toggle with very harsh costs is a great compromise, and is infinitely better than what we have now... but my only concern is that this is essentially the same as crashless. 60 seconds with the toggle on -> shut it off. There is no penalty aside from waiting for it to recharge, and you get 100% full benefit of having the T9 values. Lets look at Unstoppable for a sec. Scrapper/Brute/Stalker it gives 52.5% res to all but Psy and on Tankers it gives 70%, a good heaping helping of Mez Protection to all but the most exotic of effects, and 100% recovery rate all for 180 sec. With simply taking the other resist powers in the set, we're looking at: Near capped res to all for Scrapper/Stalker, and 86.3% res for S/L on a Brute. And Capped res to all on a Tanker. I know you didn't want to get into numbers, but this is more to just highlight something. As-is if you turn them into toggles with 60sec of 100% value, it would be broken if you could just turn it off. Unstoppable alone would let Invuln have essentially capped resists to all but Psychic on demand without slotting, and definitely capped res with it. (Checking, 3 slotting with SO's in the basic powers will 100% let Scrappers and Stalkers max resists to all, and Brutes can cap S/L and have room to go with the rest). With no real drawbacks, that seems broken. Tossing this out there, but what if they were just incredibly expensive at all times? Instead of say, a 60 sec delay before it turns into a ~ 15sec timer (7%ish a sec drain), why not just have it cost a decent amount of end/sec out the gate? That way you can strive to build around it similar to how Stone handles Granite, and gives some amount of cost to stacking up such huge defenses. Not every T9 is Unstoppable levels of mitigation, but layered on the main set we'd see similar power levels. So, maybe even reduce the "extreme" values a bit, allow them to be used as long as you can maintain them with extreme costs, and I think they have a worthy trade off.

As I said in my post about it, it would be a layer that is always there, essentially rapidly refreshing to the point of never ever going down

Amazing stuff @BGSacho! As Monos said though, procs are very shaky to use as a balance point given how variable they are set to set, power to power, or even proc to proc. If the baselines are in a better spot, then I think there is a stronger foundation for all players. As for the Pet chains, this is something I'm testing as well with just the Rikti dummies on the test server and monitoring pet attack use over X time frame to get averages. My hypothesis is that it is not too too far off from our initial ballparks though when it comes to comparative strengths. If we get estimates on how often their powers come into rotations, the "average" chains can be assumed as well without necessarily needing a pylon (which has other factors).

Again, popular =/= good. Regen is a major trope so people will take it by name alone. That said, Willpower is much closer to the "Healing Factor" trope most associate with regen, and as @Zeraphiasaid it suffers from an almost Jekyll/Hyde syndrome where its either amazing or awful. There are buffs that would make it a smoother experience for all that I think are warranted even in an IO world.

A small absorb layer will not plug a psy hole

The reason people want to see it improved IS because it is so popular, and it only needs a few things to really "click". Yes, it can work well but when you compare it to other sets that also give layered defenses on top of the ability to boost regen or self heal.... yeah

TBH that happened back when dinosaurs roamed the earth , tho you right! 😛 I think there is value with some of what the OP is stating, particularly with the combining of some of the passives into one and opening up a new power (+Unstoppable changing to legit anything lol). One idea that floated around was like, a Perma-Absorb layer from an auto power that behaved like a small amount of "Damage Negation". To emulate how an invulnerable character simply cannot be harmed by certain amounts of damage, this layer would subtract X damage directly before ever touching your HP and allow you to actually be "Invulnerable" to a certain small threshold.

@Monos King and I have taken a dive into MM's recently and are trying to come up with fun, targeted improvements 🙂

Popular =/= amazing. Regen is an incredibly THEMATIC pick, so yes it will be incredibly popular. Similarly, Elec/Elec blasters are very popular for theme despite Elec Blast being lacking.

More details here, but recently eyeballing the primary attacks show that they cost about 1.31x more end than they "should". The end penalty extends to their secondary powers (likely not to the same extent, but it is anywhere between 1.2 - 1.3x more expensive than on other AT's). Sure, they should have a balancing factor but that just is not fun.