Heraclea

A good idea, but this may be incompatible with the game we have, where serial animations appear to be baked into things.

Tons of fun to level, thanks to Quick Recovery at 4. Poorly adapted to the endgame we were given (though the real endgame remains rolling an alt.) You can spend millions in inf and/or hundreds of merits bringing it up to the state where something like Willpower, Radiation, or Bio is on SOs. It can be done - I tried it, and succeeded within reasonable expectations - but if you want a tough character, with Regen you're starting from way behind. There really is no reason to choose it over other concept friendly armor sets like WP or Inv. Powers are balanced - and have been notoriously rebalanced - over animation times. This makes Regen a trap for the unwary and the newbie. The game, for instance, allows you to create characters with profoundly negative synergy like an Energy Melee/Regen brute. The animation traps that Energy Melee has been saddled with are inconsistent with a set whose survivability comes from click heals. (So was Fire armor, which prompted the stripping and exile of a fire/EM tanker back on Victory.) I have two level 50 regen melee characters on HC. One is a fire melee/regen scrapper, one where I remade a favorite concept from Victory here. I made this character when Fire was ported to scrappers, to check it out. The pairing has very little synergy; Fire melee lacks +defense or any meaningful control. I had no experience of pre-nerf Regen. Then and now she is a niche character. On this one I did not bother with Fighting pool or anything similar; the paltry amount of defense and resistance you'd get from pool powers would be lipstick on a pig here. She has several niches she fits. She raids Hamidon when I want to have a scrapper there. Neither defense nor resistance are all that helpful here, and her four click heals are. She also is or was my go-to when something like Synapse is the weekly. Regen actually shines in the under-35 game. I also will run her on a Shadow Shard TF; she flies, and has Afterburner, and the one thing Regen has going for it is that damage is damage. She still has the flaw of being insta-ganked by damage that comes in too fast to react, or caught in an animation trap. The other was a science experiment, born of the last time Regen was the weekly topic. This one is an attempt to build a tanking brute using Regen armor. I chose Staff as the primary, because I specifically wanted busy animations for the test, although the advantages of Staff are probably mostly lost on /Regen. If you have relatively deep reserves of merits and inf it can be done, but you're starting from behind compared with any other brute armor. This one has enough smashing and lethal resistance -- around 65% -- to allow the trouble buttons to work. Still wouldn't be my first choice for a TF master badge run, What I think the set needs is massive debuff resistance. Regen needs to have native 90% resistance to -recharge, -HP, -regen, -recovery, -endurance, and -heal. If you're going to have an armor set that depends on all of these click powers, you need to preserve the opportunity to use them and let them work as described. A broad spectrum increase in damage resistance, to buy the set time to do its thing, would also do a great deal to buy the set the time it needs. I have not played the Sentinel or the Stalker versions of the armor set. I understand that the Sentinel version is fairly highly regarded. And Sentinels of course have the advantage of range, which is the moral equivalent of resistance: it buys time and allows players to react.

Orkestra Obsolete - Blue Monday

Ministry - Everyday Is Halloween

Sisters of Your Sunshine Vapor - The Lord Is My Gun

My method has always been to try to bring the Rikti into the bowl myself. I go out of the bowl to topside, usually to one of the lower path areas. There will typically be a lot of Rikti standing around idle there. I learned on HC that taunting or attacking one of the unused bomb grates brings all the boys to the yard. I will do this a couple times until I have a fair number of Rikti in melee range. Then I jump away towards the bowl, using the rims and drop-offs to break line of sight momentarily with the herd. Once they follow me down the rim, I move to the next one, and ultimately into the bowl. The bigger challenge is getting them into the bowl past the crowd of stray lore, MM, and controller pets that have usually wandered away from the big scrum and towards the edges. If this tactic would be disrupted by someone running Steamy Mist or Shadowfall, I don't understand how, unless running them means that fewer Rikti appear topside to use the tactic on. I am but one of many in a ship raid, and they tend to be rather hectic and a bit laggy, so I've never really surveyed their numbers.

Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

The Scaffold - Lily the Pink

I also have several music-related character names, including Rhythm Stick, Elselein, and Janitor of Lunacy; then there's Ice Minstrel, whose banter binds are quotations from Stephen Foster, James Whitcomb Riley, Al Jolson, and Cab Calloway. Yodeling Berserker may also count, and Plaster Caster is also music related.

I chose well very early on in HC. Inv/Dark Melee for overall toughness. Bio/Spines for aggro holding ability and earning potential.

Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs - Little Red Riding Hood

Joy Division - New Dawn Fades

Count Five - Psychotic Reaction

Rolling Stones - Love is Strong

Firemullet Groupies FM-5401 @Heraclea

Tom Waits - What's He Building In There?

It helps that I've written for Wikipedia.....

Getting your alpha to t4 requires a trip down the path not taken to t3. By the time you're ready for that step, you probably have enough. This is also the chief use for Notices of the Well.

I've already done just about all of this for New Colchis, also linked in the signature; been doing this since Victory days.

Mac Davis - I Believe in Music RIP Mac Davis

Helen Reddy - Angie Baby RIP Helen Reddy

Had fun and we got it done. Here's a screenshot of the league chasing down buds, to quell any doubts.....

It did not fit my playstyle at all either. It does have some hard hitting attacks, if you are able to land them. Too often all the mobs you hoped to decimate are dead by the time you got there. It was 'overpowered' because of solid performance in doing things like soloing Rikti pylons, where you have a non-moving target and no teammates to defeat them before you even started. I rolled one but shelved her after some time; the character never exemped well, and all the talk about nerfing TW did nothing to motivate me to play her. All the numeric 'evidence' that 'TW is OP' ignores the awkward feel, humungous endurance costs, and poor match to the pace of the game. If the nerf goes live her likely fate is to be stripped of set IOs and sent to a seldom visited server.

Andy Stewart - Donald Where's Your Troosers

I'm more interested in the Longbow pilot who destroyed Galaxy City. The official explanation was different.