Psi-bolt

I'm going to go with an old anime character, Ranma Saotome. https://hero.fandom.com/wiki/Ranma_Saotome#Physical_Abilities Ranma is a martial artist who like many anime protagonists has abilities that cross into the superhuman. As the main character, he definitely draws his share of attention and has "tanked" for many of the support cast.

Exactly. I know SR just as well as Regen. But I don't like it. It sucks for how I like to play. In your other post about speed runs, you described how you like to play and I can see SR (eventually) being extremely good for that. I literally can't stand sets that don't have a heal and/or endurance management tools. It's why /EA might be the best set FOR ME even if it's not exactly the best. Regen isn't the best set, not by a mile. Not for the way I like to play nor for how you like to play. But the set is fine. It needs a buff, but any buff that doesn't turn the set into something completely different would not likely change your evaluation of the set. And if I have had a point in this whole thread it is this. Regen is different. Much different than other sets. That doesn't make it bad, it just makes it different. For the game that the devs created through EOS, it works fine solo for most content. In teams it does even better with a few buffers. Realistically, defense stacking shouldn't have ever been as easy as the devs made it after Inventions. But what's done is done. Inventions ticked me off so much because I literally couldn't understand why Regen needed to be nerfed so hard if they were going to let the defense based sets be gods. But...oh well.

Speed runs are just another way to play the game and equally valid. Knowing the objectives and how best to complete them quickly can be fun. So long as the TF leader communicates the expectations, everyone should have fun playing their way.

Off-topic but when they buffed the Sentinel AT, I think its Team viability went way up. The Vulnerability debuff and damage changes help a lot.

This is right. We even see this in the structure of sets like Stone Armor and in the very early iterations of the mez protection toggles in Invulnerability and Stone.

There are a few reasons I think including: 1) Smashing, Lethal damage was far and away the most common damage type at launch; 2) Power Pools weren't really intended to be used by characters who already had those powers in their primary/secondary; 3) the game was intended (but not designed) to be much slower and harder than it actually was; and 4) the developers thought about building characters like developers and not players. A little bit more on that last point. What I mean by that is that especially early on in MMORPGs, many, many developers failed to even consider min-maxing as a thing and the CoH devs had this blind spot worse than most. I guarantee that Statesman at the time would never even have considered the idea that players might want to stack additional resistance with a set like Super Reflexes because it was "good enough" for how they thought the game would be played. I swear, developers seem to have this weird idea that players will ever consider a character "good enough". Sure some people will, but most MMORPG players would build their characters all the way to the power level we see in the Mender Ramiel arc if they were allowed to. So the fighting pool was intended to be used by characters who didn't have many attacks and little defenses like Controllers. The devs said as much. They probably didn't see why anyone would want even more resistance powers in the pools. "Who would take them?"; I can see them saying. Until they saw it with their own eyes they never considered that melee players would want to stack as much resistance/defense possible on their characters.

I agree with all of this. I do think that if you want to do a KM for a TF that is normally sped through at certain points like Manticore, then the team leader should be VERY clear on that point while recruiting and prior to starting the TF.

Invulnerability works and plays very differently for sure. It is much more survivable to be sure. It's not any easier to slot or play, I would argue. Regen is actually pretty easy to use. It just doesn't give you as much mitigation as Invulnerability.

Ironically, Instant Healing was so good that people actually ignored how good the rest of the set was. IIRC, Integration used to be a 400% regen buff at launch. That's literally the same value that Regen gets with slotting now outside of Instant Healing. And you could slot from there. It's just that Instant Healing being a 1000% Regen buff (enhanceable to 3000%) was loony toons broken. As for being unkillable, it was darn near immortal, but getting Dull Pain as close to permanent as possible was essential to that. There were absolutely enemies and mobs that could one-shot a Scrapper pre-HP accolades and Dull Pain. Taking Tough to shave off some damage was also helpful with that. Taking Stamina and give it and Quick Recovery SIX slots so you had enough endurance to attack was essential. In other words, just like today, you had to add things outside of the set to make it immortal. It required a very specific and restricting build, Stamina wasn't inherent then. This is why I think there's no real fix that will make folks that don't like Regen happy. As you stated, stacking Resistance/Defense is just not something that Regen will ever be able to do to the same extent that the other sets will absent a complete rework of the set. Even if we gave Regen back toggle Instant Healing at the same numbers that it is at as a click now AND gave it 100% regeneration debuff resistance, it would still not match sets that can softcap defense, have a decent amount of resistance behind that, and has a heal (looking at you Ninjitsu, Invul, EA, etc.).

This used to drive me so nuts. I also remember that even after they added real numbers, Statesman would occasionally make comments to the effect that people didn't really need them to play the game. Absolutely insane.

I remember getting on a big team and street sweeping in Perez Park on a lowbie team. That was really fun.

Absolutely fair point. It's like SR isn't for me. It's a great set, but for me it's not fun.

Have done so many times, most people think it's OK but too clicky. I have given people tips on how to make it less so. Usually this is when I'm playing my Brute and people are surprised that I'm not dying. No one is saying that Regen is some godlike set that stands above all others. As I said earlier in the thread, it's not that, and frankly even going back to Issue 1 it wasn't that. But likewise, no one I have interacted with has said that Regen is this terrible set that has no value. Regen's issues have been debated ad nauseum in this thread, so I won't rehash. I'll just reiterate my point. Regen is...fine. Not good, not bad, just fine. It plays so much differently than other sets that I think most players would just prefer to take a set that allows you to softcap defense and steamroll. Hell, I personally enjoy that too. I'm a big fan of Ninjitsu and Energy Aura for that reason.

The darn horse took Revive, Snarky. It’s not our fault it keeps coming back for more.

No quarrel with your point here, but I remember when I was playing SWTOR and PvPing regularly if there were a power like MoG given to any class, there would have been a riot talking about how broken and unfair it is. City of Heroes is a funny but deeply odd game.

It would be...fine. Still not great, but much better than it is now. The issue I have with Regen is probably the same as everyone else's, the set is too focused on reacting to damage instead of protecting you from being damaged. Sentinel Instant healing helps with that, but the concern that I have with absorb shields is that it's not as easy to stack different sources to improve your mitigation like with defense and resistance. For Sentinels, this is almost irrelevant because they don't draw as much damage as melee characters. If I were to be allowed to "fix" Regen, my main goal would be to turn Instant Healing to a power similar to Invincibility or Rise to the Challenge. I.e. a power that scales it's mitigation. Thus it could be more potent and would work better in a set like Regen that, to your point, doesn't need help with easier content. What kind of mitigation wouldn't be super important, but I think for everyone to really enjoy the set again it would have to be resistance or defense.

I have an Ice/Regen Scrapper. I created with the same idea as you did. I thought it was survivable enough, but yes I thought it was much too slow at killing for a Scrapper. My Ice/Regen Sentinel is more fun.

Honestly, hyperbole like this is where you lose me. Saying that ANY set that can handle +4/x8 spawns of ANY faction is "complete and utter garbage" is just over the top. It has problems, it's not for everyone, certainly it's not for you anymore. Regen which gets most of its protection in a reactive manner is not ever going to be as good as some other sets. Even Issue 1 Regen MAY just barely survive the standard you've set for it.

As I said back in 2004-2005 to Statesman and Geko, I don't think Regen was ever as good as everyone portrayed it. We forget now what kind of loony crap you could do prior to ED. I remember Fire Tankers herding most of the NPCs in Brickstown and burning them down. Invulnerability basically not dying because the damage sources were even more biased towards Smashing, Lethal than they are now. Regen had a particular problem. If it survived the first 2-5 seconds of the fight, it won. Period. AVs, large mobs of enemies, whatever. The catch was that you didn't always survive those first 2-5 seconds. Also as someone noted above, it also was a set where you played to level 28, got Instant Healing, and then rebuilt your whole secondary around having that one power on at all times. The developers at the time repeatedly took the wrong tack to correct this problem by removing regeneration from Integration and Instant Healing. Then they made Instant Healing a long term click because they were too unimaginative to realize that changing a power from a toggle to a click was every bit as much of a change in the essential nature of the power as changing it from a regeneration buff to a resistance buff or something. But that's water under the bridge. Frankly, Regen is maybe the worst set for some. I honestly don't see it as that bad, even though I think it should be buffed (a bit).

I’m not sure what difficulty you will be using but at baseline all four of those sets should be able to make it to 25 without any deaths at all unless you’re pushing the difficulty way beyond what lowbies are expected to accomplish. I’m not sure what the point would be, then. There are other considerations such as time investment since to the extent that Regen has any advantage over other sets, limited downtime is one.

This is a painful topic. Regen was within a doubt the set that was nerfed the most among armor sets. It plays completely differently than it did in the beginning.

I don’t want to straw man either you or Solarverse so I’ll just ask directly. What level of performance do you believe is necessary before a set is considered “good” or even “acceptable?” I confess that we might be coming to the question from vastly different assumptions.

The standard you’re suggesting isn’t a set that is decent or good. What you’re suggesting is a level of play that is well beyond what I think any sane developer would balance a set around. I know some sets can achieve this level of play but the inability to solo Arachnos maps at +4/x8 doesn’t make a set weak or imbalanced. By the way, last week’s Khan WST showed me that Regen can handle +1 or +2 Arachnos just fine.

If we are trying to get Regen where it is perceived to be even with the other sets it needs another toggle. The set is too click heavy, my comments above notwithstanding

The thing is almost every power set needs IOs in order to be worth something. Any defense set (well except maybe Tanker SR) needs to improve its defense to get to the softcap. Most resistance focused sets needs help to cap out the most important resistances. Both kinds of sets need to layer on the other type to get really good. Regen is really no different. Its problem is that, yes, it is too focused on clicks which pushes you to build differently than most folks are used to. But I don’t find that it takes more investment that any other melee armor set to get good.