Blackjoy

Not exactly. /SR's problem is that it needs other forms of mitigation. The scaling resists tend to fail in the same situation when /SR's +DEF fails. When I made my thread asking the Dev's to look into it, I finally got people to at least admit, indirectly, that /SR has problems when you aren't capping +DEF. Specifically people conceded the mid-game is a prolem because encounters start hitting you with more AoE in the 30's. But by the 40's, people (especially those who are on these forums) have started completing their builds and /SR's problems are masked. The virtues of soft capping easily overcompensatesfor /SR's inherent issues. You shouldn't believe me. You should asks the devs to run the numbers and see where and when /SR falls behind and if it's enough to warrant fixes. Maybe it still performs within their internal goalposts. I don't know. And I certainly can't offer any proof that I'm right. That's false. But more importantly, you're subscribing to a fallacy. That being that whatever marginal increase that might happen at lvl 50, outweighs the benefit of /SR being middle of the pack. That fallacy includes an assumption that the level 50 improvement would be substantive. You have no way to understand the degree that any non +DEF change made to /SR would impact lvl 50. Let me repeat that for emphasis. You have no idea what the impact would be to lvl 50 if, for example, Practiced Brawler provided an incombat Endo boost, or an out of combat boost to +Regen. And I'm betting we could add those changes to lvl 50 an 93% of the player base wouldn't even notice it, with that number rising to 99.9% for people who didn't have the attribute monitor open to those stats. The problem with your statement here, and many like them, is you don't actually understand the nature of the problem. And I'm not saying I know it all either, I definitely do not. But many of your statements are fundamentally incorrect. I know that comes across as incendiary and arguably asinine, but this line of discussion gets old. Instead of actually trying to understand the problem, you're looking for a way to misrepresent things I've said to try and "win" the debate. I never said only the "mid-game" is the problem, but don't let the truth interrupt your narrative.

From a design perspective, the game is already "broken." Certainly at lvl 50, and arguably lower as a result of lvl 50's exemping down and totally outclassing their mentors. 4x8 is meant to be an extreme challenge for a team of 8, not a mild exercise for a single toon. It's funny that no one can even acknowledge that a little...well, there's one person who has talked about it. But's let's be clear. At this point, I'm not talking about changing the cap/floor, I'm talking about the developers making a decision that they want to actually balance the game at lvl 50. Because right now, I don't think they really care as long as things are within a really wide margin, even allowing a few anomalous data points. What you are seemingly blind to is that the ability for AT's to solo content that was intended to be an extreme challenge for a team has negative repercussions on many aspects of the game and specifically the player community at large. 1) It trivializes the team experience when a single tanker or scrapper or dominator can single handedly defeat every spawn.....at the hardest difficulty level. Many of the KTM ITF's I've been on, the scrappers/brutes/tankers just run off leaving the squishes to fend for themselves, and die. What was intended, was that this type of content would require AT's to work together. The only time I see this now, is on the raids. With no need for team cohesion to succeed, players lose out on the social payoff of working together. When I played on Live, you needed support, you loved support. Now, who cares if you have it. And I've seen it cut both ways, with blasters tanking 4x8 content. 2) lvl 50's exemping down generally trivializes content for players who are at those levels. 3) When you have some players who can solo extreme content strictly because of build, it makes it difficult for devs to develop balanced content for the average player. 4) When players can beat the game at the highest levels, they get bored. So...the game is already broken, IMO. I'm betting Aeon's Strike Force was never meant to be solo'd. So I don't think complaints from the 1% of the player base who can no longer do something that wasn't intended to be done in the first place, is a compelling argument. It probably gets you upvotes on a forum dominated by min/maxers, but the player base at large would probably enjoy the game more if actual combat tactics were a thing. I remember them being thing on Live. Now...lol. If you're lucky someone understand the concept of pulling, except you don't need it when the controller can take the alpha. 801? The difficulty is arbitrary. If something lowered the power level of lvl 50's, then someone will create 901 series and that will become the standard. If I understand correctly, PvP uses Elusivity instead of +DEF. That suggest you can change one without changing the other. Even if you can't, I think they have two sets of rules (evidenced by PvP/PvE enhancements) and PvP can stay the same until they can analyze it and decide if they think it's fair for all sets. I haven't done any PvP since Live. The few times I visited the zones on HC...they were entirely empty. I'm not convinced that's true. Or perhaps more accurately, I don't agree that not being able to solo +4's is "earth shaking." I don't even know what that means. But I'll bet that the content designers would be happy to see the extreme content no loner getting solo'd and instead force 8 players to actually work as a team. Maybe it would be "earth shattering" if a Tanker actually needed a Defender's support. Being a little melodramatic? You can't solo some arbitrary difficulty, and neither can anyone else, means means your build is "devastated?" Yeah if I'm a developer and I need to grow the player base to make money, I'm making that trade. HC doesn't really need to grow the player base, they just need to pay their overhead, so growth isn't really the issue it would be otherwise. As such, I don't seem them making any substantive changes. There may be daylight, or there may not be. Because there is no closed-formed solution, we simply don't know. So it may be that the problem isn't actually /Regen at all. And it would be unfortunate if the dev's botched /regen's play experience trying to tweak the wrong thing. The alleged "problems" for /Regen are an inability to solo "extreme" content for some arbitrary similarity in funds or effort. If no one else could solo that content (and we're talking about content that was never intended to be solo'd), then /Regen wouldn't need to be tweaked at all. Now to be fair, Kopok has a slightly different concern. But I think the issue is born from the same problem if he's saying it only happens at lvl 50. Again, I don't think the devs are fixing lvl 50. They may fix lvl 50 from screwing up lvls 1-49, but that's the best we can hope for.

Reordering powers isn't going to to do anything unless we know the reason for /SR's survival woes is predominately due to AoE. In fact, it's possible that putting Evasion earlier in the lineup might exasperate /SR's endurance issues. IME, /SR's problems aren't that it needs more +DEF, it's that it needs more layered mitigation or at least +RES that is actually effective against AVs and EBs. Granted, maybe that is intended kryptonite for /SR, along with endurance issues, no toxic or psi resist, and no defense against non-positional attacks. Except that nothing would "break." You just couldn't solo ITF at 4x8 as +DEF based character.. You might still doing at +0, but +4...not even close. Admittedly, there may be some Incarnate repercussions, but that could be fixed by dialing some of those specific modifiers down. To be more technically accurate, I realize that what I a really suggesting is that the to hit "floor" be raised to 20%. +DEF cap wouldn't even need to be touched. But reading that, it is even more unlikely that the devs would mess with the "floor" on principle alone. So really, I don't see anything being done to fix anyone at level 50. /Regen is undoubtedly within one standard deviation of what it's expected to do, and as specifically stated by a GM, they acknowledge that /regen is suppose to be a challenge at the extremes.

I was talking about the hard cap of 95% mitigation for +DEF, which, as I understand it, you typically reach with 45% +DEF. Is there a different +DEF hard cap for different ATs? Right, and that means chasing more +DEF is beneficial. I'm not sure I understand. I run at +45% +DEF. Against +4 ITF boses, that brings them down to about 8.XX% to hit. Popping Elude doesn't lower that value. Similar against +0 Avs. They floor at about 7.xx%. Adding more +DEF or even -To Hit doesn't lower it. I know that some Incarnate mobs have additional +To Hit, which means that if you come in at +45% DEF, the +4 bosses are hitting you at like 30%. In those situations more +DEF does matter. So It sounds like you're saying that this if I get my +DEF to 59%, I can soft cap those mobs as well? I'm suggesting that if you want to level the playing field and open up build choice, you look at making the 80% mitigation to +0, THE cap. That means your +4 incarnate mobs aren't going to be affected by adding more +DEF. Admittedly, I am not an expert on how Incarnate mobs are set up. I assume you can lower the lvl back down to +0 and make it do able with an 80% mitigation cap. Possibly. You may be 100% correct that some content would be unsurvivable. But that depends on whether the +lvl is fixed. More likely it would just send players back to square one on how to defeats these sections. Instead of relying on massive +DEF boosts, they might resort to more tactical approaches. But as I said, I am not an expert on that level of content, so I expect there might be some additional changes needed. As I said, it's arguably too late to make this type of change, regardless of whether or how it might improve the game long term. But I know there is at least one other person in this thread who thinks the lvl 50 game is somewhat overpowered. If the devs were ever going to address that, it wouldn't be by trying to balance each set one by one. They'd need to do something comprehensive/global. Yeah, it's a real mystery. It maybe that they needed that cap on the mob side i.e. they didn't have the tech to set it differently for foes vs characters. It may also be that 95 mitigation was just a default starting point, = since you'd never want +DEF or +RES to reach 100%. I wouldn't be surprised if they initially had both +RES and +DEF at 95% and they realized that +RES was more problematic at those levels. But they never went back and looked at +DEF. Or maybe by the level the players were reaching the +DEF cap, the devs didn't care. I recall posts in Live where they essentially said said they weren't going to balance the sets for end-game content. Because they can't and it's not worth their time unless something were so out of whack it was dramatically impacting the game on a wide scale.

Ah, you mean lower it down to 40% +DEF. Yeah, I was suggesting 35% as a start, expecting that when the rioting starts you'd have to raise it up. It would be interesting to what happens at level 50 with a 80% mitigation cap on +DEF. What's more fascinating is that there would be almost no perceived change below level 40, at least not for true-levels. LVL 50's exemping down would certainly notice the loss of everyday-god-mode. I think /SR would also notice the loss of god-mode with bubbles, but there are few FF defenders, it probably goes unnoticed.. At lvl 50, you'd see a dramatic change in the perceived power dynamic, without changing a single power. I'm guessng /Rad Armor with massive +Recharge would move to the top of the list. /Regen would move up by virtue of others moving down. This would most likely affect other AT's as well, especially some of the Defenders who can get that type of mitigation. You'd probably see a dramatic drop in the number of people doing 4x8 ITF. It's probably too late for the Devs to make a change like this. It would have to be made when starting the game over from the beginning. If you did it now, you'd have a sizable number of people rage quitting because they couldn't solo 4x8 ITF, +3 AVs, etc. There would probably be some other fad/FOTM shifts. Force Fields, while still being great for squishes, would not be nearly as beneficial for +DEF based scrappers. The Incarnate choices might change as well. I imagine 99.9% of the /Regen builds would be unaffected from 1-49. EDIT: One real down side, however, is that Tough might still feel mandatory, along with slotting up Health and Physical Perfection. With a lower +DEF cap, scrappers would be scrambling to add whatever non +DEF mitigation they could.

I can't imagine they'd ever lower the caps, but 40% seems pretty low. Why happens at that number? Wold you leave +RES at 75 for scrappers? Seems like you'd have to lower both. And then a /Regen would rule the world.

That's how I feel about Tough and Weave. In fact, I'm of the opinion that when the game was launched, the Fighting Pool wasn't even intended for scrappers, but specifically for squishes who wanted to have a concept squishy that could melee to some degree. It would be interesting to see the Fighting Pool off-limits to scrappers, stalkers, brutes, and tanks.

No, I don't. I want the devs to run the numbers on /SR, see that it's dead last in the mid-game, and make it so that the difference in survival time between it and the #1 set isn't like a factor of 4. I also think it needs some QoL improvements. But when you stop and recognize what happens to /SR when you lower the DEF cap, without changing /SR one iota, it's suddenly obvious how poorly the set is designed. Lowering the DEF cap is really the only safe way to make /Regen look better without actually doing anything to /Regen, because capping +DEF wouldn't be nearly as effective as it is now. I don't really give a rat's ass about what happens at lvl 50 because they aren't going to balance the game there. But I am still wondering why the +DEF cap is so high. EDIT: But I would not be opposed to seeing a way to stop lvl 50's from exemping down and just totally overpowering content. Maybe something you could choose for missions, like the Difficulty settings.

At no point did I suggest you fight an AV naked. First, the devs aren't going to balance the sets based on all the resources you have available to you. Second, the more off-AT mitigation you add when you start talking about "performance" the less you are talking about the AT and the more you are talking about the resources. It's like balancing a set, any set, based on all the inspirations you can take at any one time. Sure, that's a metric, but it's essentially useless in terms of understanding the problems or issues with a set. You are conflating the fact that you have to take power pools, with the fact that you have to choose the powers that offer direct mitigation. The first is a fact, the second is not. One of the very specific things the HC developers said is that they want to preserve "choice." You, in this very post, are complaining that /Regen doesn't have sufficient choice in achieving extreme performance. Bt the same thing can be said for any AT. How many scrappers feel they can reach the higher levels skipping the Fighting Pool, skipping RoP, Shadowmeld? So you are essentially arguing about subjective degrees of freedom in build choice. Not really actionable. But you know what is actionable? Seeing naked /SR come in dead last in survival time against other naked sets. Fixing that problem opens up build choice. At level 42, my Savage/Regen is using zero power pool mitigation and fighting +3s. I can absolutely be a lvl 50 scrapper with zero set bonuses, accolades, and power pool mitigation. So please stop resorting to hyperbole. That's actually 100% wrong. You cannot identify synergies if you do not know the baseline. If you don't know that /SR goes from dead last naked to top 3 with power pools, then you'll have zero understanding of what the power pools are doing. If you can't see that /Regen goes from #2 to dead last, you won't see how unbalanced the power pools are for certain sets. If you are trying to improve the balance of the game, you have to break it down in to its constituent parts. Something you seem to repeatedly not understand. This is an assertion, not a fact, and one I think is inaccurate I'll try my own assertion: /Regen underperforms because it's one of the only set where the majority of the performance is active. /Regen, unlike a set lke /SR or /WP, relies upon the player's ability to understand the game. In fact, I'm not the only who sees it that way. From GM Coldspark: Emphasis mine. /Regen will always underperform because it relies on a human to be effective. And as you move to the extreme end of the bell curve, the limitations of human reaction time and information process become more of a factor. Sure, there are other ways to compensate, give it more mitigation in whatever form. Remove all the things it is suppose to be weak against. The problem isn't that /Regen is "fragile," far from it. The problem is that power pool and set IO mitigation heavily favors +DEF. And any set that can get close to the cap gets exponentially more benefit. Set the +DEF cap at 75% (which is still 15% above what SR can achieve naked) and let's see how many people are lauding /SR...lol. 1. At no point did I say it's a "problem" You are still not fundamentally understanding the issue. 2. Level 50 is not the end-all be-all of what the devs should be focused on. If a player abandons their /SR or /DA or whatever at lvl 26 because it's a slog, then it doesn't matter what happens at lvl 50. Back when the devs nerfed and then rebalanced /Regen in i4, one of the arguments they rejected was that /regen being god at high level was balanced considering it was god-awful at low level. No. The sets should, as much as possible, be consistent. The fact that /SR is arguably overpowered at lvl 50 because of the bias of +DEF is no more correct than it being painful at lvl 30. 3. One dev outright stated they want to examine the effect the power pools are having. It should take them all of 2 hours to figure out there is way too much +DEF in the game. It's one reason why /Shield is considered Overpowered, it can both cap +DEF and get darn close on +RES. I'm guessing /WP can do the same. If they lower the +DEF cap to like 75%, then let's see how great you think /SR is. So if your opinion of /SR changes when no changes were actually made to the set, it says you aren't actually understanding the set at all. IMO, there is nothing wrong with /Regen. The issue arises because: 1) Player expectations of where the set needs to be balanced (4x8 solo) are unrealistic with the game's design. Lower player expectation and the human reaction limit on /regen will be less of a factor. 2) The +DEF cap is too high for scrappers (and probably everyone). The easier any set can reach the DEF cap, the more resources it can devote to layered mitigation. I'd lower scrappers and Tanks to 75% and everyone else to 60%. Then raise it a bit if you have to. 3) Make the soft cap a hard cap. Right now, doing Incarnate content at 4x8, you absolutely benefit from exceeding the softcap. Remove that and +DEF won't rule mitigation choices. And that leads me to ask, why was the DEF cap set so high? Was it so Force field buffs would feel more substantial? Sonic wasn't around at launch. Was it for Ice Tankers?

So as I have said many times, there's a fundamental difference between what you're doing as a result of /SR and what you're doing as result of an individual build. This is essentially the same argument that Kopok is making for why he thinks /Regen should be improved. Reread what Troo posted. /SR comes in dead least at survival time. If you are beating AVs, it's not because of /SR, it's because of all the off-AT mitigation that is adding nearly an order of magnitude more survivability. Let's look at some simple math. Defense is Schedule B, that means you're capped at 60% benefit from enhancements. At theoretical max, that's 31.2% from Toggle and Passives, which equals 62.4% mitigation. If you have 100 hit points, that's changing your "effective health" (looks at Kopok) to about 266 hit points. But if you can use power pools, set bonuses, or +DEF from a primary attack, to get to cap, you have an effective health of 2000 hps. Any scrapper build that can get to 95% mitigation on +DEF is getting the exact same benefit, on top top of their inherent forms of mitigation. But the cap for an AV is not 95%. Mob type and level raise it's accuracy. IIRC, when I fought a +0 AV, they still had a 7.xxx% to hit. Lowering the cap from .95 to .925 drops that 2000 hp scrapper down to 1333. Dropping 2.5% defense at the cap takes away 1/3 of your health. Now let's take that a theoretical /regen build that had +25% defense (50% mitigation) and faced that same AV? They lose 5% of their effective health vs the 33% of the capped /SR. At lvl 50, if a scrapper has around 1800 hps, .95 mitigation raises the EH to 36,000 hp. Dropping that mitigation 2% lowers the capped build's EH down to 25700. How long does it take an AV to punch through 25k in hp? How many HP's do AV's have? How long does it take you to beat the AV's effective health? That extra accuracy of AVs is devastating to /SRs or any build that strictly relies on +DEF. And at the AV damage levels, the passives resistances are doing almost nothing. So if you're claws/SR is having no trouble soloing AVs....which I would love to see, if you are on Excelsior, then it's because your damage output is tremendous (massive +recharge allowing you to cycle your T9 primary), or you've got lots of other forms of mitigation (heal procs, +RES, primary heals, substantial set IO +Regen). And to be clear, I can solo some +2 AVs as well, so this is isn't about whether you can do it with /SR, it's that you're not doing it because of /SR. I'm going to repeat what I've said several times before. /SR does well in the eyes of player (Translation: lvl 50 content) because it's the easiest set to get to the 95% defense cap at lvl 50. The build is easy to make. It's super easy to stack on almost 15% +DEF from Weave, Maneuvers, and Combat Jumping. Contrast that with /Regen which is relatively hard to get to the +DEF cap. And as others have pointed out, the power pools don't have a bunch of +Regen in them. Certainly not half as much as +Regen as /SR can get +DEF. Same is true for +RES. Outside of S/L, it's comparatively hard to find enough +RES to even get to 75% resistance across all damage types. But yeah, if you're on Excelsior, I'd love to see you solo some AVs.

You were actually the one person attempted to be have an actual discussion and I fully appreciated that, so no, I wasn't including you in that group. And no, I didn't "throw out" insults, and no, it had nothing to do with "disagreeing" with me, you are resorting to hyperbole and adding in ad hominem. When the first response to a detail post on why /SR needs to be examined is someone saying they are "shitcanning" the OP because they got the power orders wrong, I would call that text book trolling. Sorry that offends you. But go reread that thread and look at all the pages of asinine responses people posted before the last topic even came up. Most of them didn't even understanding the issue, you and Bill were the only two to concede anything. Apologies to anyone who posted in good faith and I forgot to acknowledge. I'm in this thread to talk about scrapper secondaries. How they work and how they are perceived and how people react to them. The misinformation and misconceptions that surround sets is, for me, part of that discussion. My focus in this thread is primarily /Regen, but that invariably involves comparing it to other sets and how they are perceived.

Now isn't that interesting. I had to deal with a small gang of trolls when I tried to bring attention to /SR as an underperforming set. But essentially nobody could understand the difference between what /SR can do and what off-AT mitigation can do. I pointed out, based on observation, that /SR was probably in the bottom three of scrapper secondaries, and I was told I was I was clueless. And while this post of yours doesn't prove it, it certainly lends credence to my assessment of the situation and exposes a lack of observational skills in others. Right...because everyone starts their /SR with 100m on an alt they just transfer over, or they broadcast on /LFG "Available as a sitter!" I couldn't even afford SO's leveling up. I ran DO"s or had to get lucky getting cheap IO's. The outcome is fairly obvious. Any +DEF powers will stack /SR's +DEF and when the build reaches softcap, It'll have 95% mitigation from +DEF. We know how 95% defense performs because of other sets can do it. Tough will marginally improve /SR's performance, but if /SR's +DEF isn't capped, Tough isn't really going to to do much. Go visit that IDF 4x8 without Tough and you won't notice a difference with it. The reason why more people don't realize how bad this set performs is because of the "I win" equation. /SR only has to last long enough to reach the crossover point, that being when you've killed enough of the spawn that the incoming dps is low enough your chance of defeat drops precipitously. This also why /SR sucks agains AVs and EBs because the crossover point doesn't occur until you defeat the encounter i.e. You never lower the incoming dps until the AV is dead.

As we both agree that there is no closed-form solution, nobody can do that on either side of the table. If we know there is no debuffs or we know that they compromise only X%, then we know what the upper bound is. But there is no way to prove anything is true about changes without implementing them and seeing what happens. How does one get the devs to acknowledge that there is a problem and then get them to investigate it? That isn't my "primary concern" but it's one area where I think the devs are will to fix problems. For me /SR has problems leveling up. I would also be willing to bet folding money that naked, it's near the bottom of the heap at 50, But since it doesn't run naked, since it's one of the easiest sets to build, I doubt the devs are going to make changes before (if) they address the power pools I didn't really notice that, but maybe running Double XP has something to do with it. But the irony here is that /SR has no survival tools. Once the cascade failure happens, I don't have any other forms of mitigation in the set. There is nothing an /SR can do once this happens outside beside possibly popping Elude. Even with my scaling resists, and the IO scaling resist and a base 20% resist to S/L from Set IO and 130 proc heal every cycle, and being at +DEF cap on all positions, I died in under 15 seconds once the cascade failure happened. So the question I have is whether DP+IH+MOG and my suite of bonuses can allow you to survive an 4x8 ITF spawn with two bosses longer? If it can, then we are in this unresolvable zone of what's fair? Is it fair that /Regen can always survive that when fresh and dies when it's not vs /SR who can typically survive that, but dies when it can't. I and I would bet that /SR naked, wouldn't last as long as /Regen naked. I think you're misconstruing my intent. This is an invitation.. I'm trying to get problems solved, so the first obstacle is getting them to agree there is a problem. If this is just a thread to talk about /Regen, then I'm over dressed. But your /regen thread and in-depth understanding says you have a goal, as do I, and if I don't have any way to get them to shine a light on it, then I feel talking about it is somewhat futile unless it increases my understanding of the problem (which I think this discussion definitely does). It's a maxim that Internet surveys are a tally of what people on the Internet think. What % of people who play the game are on the forums? I'm pretty sure that on Live, it was exceedingly small. Now let me ask what % of people on the forums have lvl 50's? So I'm not going to put a lot of stock in that survey as being representative of the player base at large, though I will concede that the Forum:Game ratio is probably much higher on HC than it was on Live for a variety of reasons. I'll also point out that there is so much 1-49 content that I doubt any average player gets through it all. Where as at lvl 50, I've run the same TFs over and over. But even if that survey is an accurate reflection, asking for more content at lvl 50 does not translate to people saying that they enjoy lvl 50 more than 1-49. And even if it is true, but that survey doesn't logically get you there. What I do suspect is true is that people with level 50's enjoy slumming it on sub 50 teams and feeling like gods against the weaker mobs and against the true-levels. And if that is the primary motivation, outside of Incarnate grinding, then I'll argue that isn't any place where balance is going to be investigated by the devs While that may be true, if I knew that my my concerns with /SR were only going to improve the game for .1% of the players, I would not spend time advocating for the changes. I might be motivated to discuss them in random threads, but I wouldn't expect anything to be done about it. Again, I certainly understand your POV with regard to wanting /regen to perform closer to its potential in the hands of the casual player.

Then let me apologize in advance if you already identified this, but other armor sets under what conditions? At what level? XP/Hour? Teamed, solo? Generalizations aren't helpful in a discussion about fixing specific things a small amount. I just got done playing /regen to 41 after playing /WP and /SR to 50 and I am not experiencing any difficulties with debuffs. Yes, they hit, but as you said, none of it is insurmountable. So I am not understanding what the issue is. Now, at 4x8 50 in ITF, sure, there's a lot of DDB. So much in fact that last night I took my capped /SR, sat in a the middle of a spawn with two Praefectus Contarum, or whatever they are called, and watched my /SR suffer from cascade failure of defense. The bosses went from 8.87% chance to hit with to 32% chance to hit before i died. It took a while for them to get it started, but once the first one hit and the the second one hit....the cascade failure was in full effect and the hits came on like monsoon in and I was dead in like 15 seconds. I tried it again and died before they got past 12% chance to hit. What I believe isn't really relevant in this discussion. What matters is what do the devs believe? They aren't going to balance something that isn't in the scope of what they believe should be balanced. Or put another way, I haven't seen anyone provide any insight of what the devs think that range of performance should be at lvl 50 with everything in play. Let's not resort to hyperbole. You can talk about anything you want. But if we are outside the scope of where the devs are looking to tune the system, then it's academic. If you've got facts about either, I'm interested to hear them. But earlier someone insisted that you play more at 50 than you do at 1-49 and for me that's not true. Once my characters get to 50, the game isn't nearly as much fun. I prefer leveling characters up and seeing how they perform. I don't know what % of people prefer to play at 50, but I can tell you that if you are going to grow the game, you have to continue to attract new players and they don't start at 50. So the idea that what happens at 50 should outweigh what happens from 1-49 is not something I am going to agree with. I find this to be an odd statement. After years of time on Live and a few months here, what is abundantly clear is that everyone talks about their experience as if it is the metric for what is true about the sets. But nobody is talking about the game in the same context. Which is why these discussion tend to be unproductive, we aren't comparing apples to apples. If we were, we could agree on what is and what is not happening. To wit, you and I have a very similar understanding of the nature of /regen, but we have very different game experiences. But that's a question that has to be overcome, regardless of who is asking it. The devs have limited time and they probably aren't going to work on a problem that is affecting .1% of the player base. Very similar to my /SR debate, people insist that /SR is within the range of performance. I say it's not. But we aren't talking about the same thing. And I know that if the devs are going to modify /SR, the answer to that question has to be an emphatic "Yes!" not a tepid one, and /SR has to be sub-standard where they are actually going to measure it. If we talk about /SR with pool powers, incarnates, and set IOs, it's absolutely not underperforming...but that isn't because of /SR. I can agree definitely understand your desire to see /Regen modified so it's easier to leverage. I have similar feelings about making /SR have a far better quality of life. What interest me is understanding how the devs determine if that's needed and how to do it.

The stuff people are complaining about crops up when you're doing 4x8 solo or trying to run 801.x solo,, or trying to solo AV's. That isn't in the wheelhouse of casual players. +4 IDF and ITF kill all kinds of scrappers and even tanks. I saw a /WP tank die several times on a 4x8 ITF. I seriously doubt ITF, Tin/Pex, and LRSF are the standard for what scrappers should be doing solo. Let's be more accurate. They aren't trying to "balance" things, they are explicitly trying to get things into a range of performance. They know it's impossible to achieve any kind of exact balance and they haven't even given us the metric or how many sigmas they are shooting for. What they are doing is looking to see if incarnate powers and screwing up non-incarnate content (which it is) and if pools powers are having asymmetric benefits (which they do). What they'll do about the latter remains to be seen. As to the former, It's most likely they'll just create some code that shuts off Incarnate powers/benefits for inappropriate content. They also seem to suggest that more sets are underperforming., but they didn't say that was in regard to scrappers, so I wouldn't hold your breath. That may be, but what percentage of the content is this? Psychologically, people are going to ignore all the encounters that they cruised through and focus on the ones they lost. This will tend to skew people's perceptions around the difficulty or inadequacy of their scrapper based on a small subset of encounters. If I'm not mistaken, /WP also has a rez. I wouldn't count it as one of the weaker sets. I interpret the rez as an acknowledgment by the Live developers that /Regen required more skill to play. As we've both acknowledged, there's a difference between good on paper and good in practice. Managing Recon, DP, and MoG is not trivial in the face of damage spikes that can kill you in 2-3 seconds. And more to the point, I think the devs recognized that if /Regen doesn't have DP and MoG up....you cannot survive the spike. Yes, but actually no 😉 I think /Regen is one of the rare sets that actually rewards system mastery. As you and I both acknowledge, it performs better as you perform better. I think it would be a mistake to make /regen more idiot proof. For me /Regen is fun specifically because of the style of play it demands. I think there is a tremendous amount of replay value in a secondary that takes some actually learning to master. Granted, I don't always want to work that hard, but sometimes I really enjoy the change of pace compared to /SR, /WP, /Shield. The other reason I say no, is because I think to fix that problem, you'd either have to make it OP on the casual stuff once someone got skilled, or you'd have to convert a bunch of the click mitigation to toggles or Autos and substantially change the game play. But...I could be wrong. Maybe there is something they could do to solve your problem without altering /Regen's median performance. I personally don't think the devs have that kind of precision because it would require tweaking and analysis. Over time, they might accomplish it, but I don't think they have that kind of time. Sure. I can absolutely agree when you play /Regen, your experience of either getting hit by -speed, -endo, and being alpha'd can create that perception. However, when you play /regen, and survive, you go into every fight with full health and full stamina. For me, going from /SR and /WP to /Regen was like a holiday. But some players are going to overlook what they've gained and focus on what they've lost. I originally was bragging to a friend how awesome /WP was, but then when I went and replayed /Regen, I felt the set was even better if I was willing to put in the work and be accepting of failure on occasion. It's not that I don't care, it's that we don't have a baseline for 50, so it's pointless to talk about what the expectation should be. We aren't comparing apples to apples. If the developers come out and talk about what that baseline is and the parameters under which it should be achieved, then it makes sense to talk about what is or what is not happening. If I am a developer, I'm an order of magnitude more concerned about a person's experience leveling up, because if it isn't fun, they'll never get to to 50 (ignoring farmers).

But as I said, in actual game play, the exposure to massively increased damage spikes counters the benefit of average team support. Support isn't always up 100% of the time. Worse, players in good support teams start to think they are invincible and start trying to soloing multiple 4x8 spawns and then suddenly face plant because the bubbles wore off. High +DEF or +RES sets are generally way more survivable because even when support drops, they aren't hit by spikes as badly and that leaves time for Support to provide corrective mitigation. My point is a repeat of something you said in another thread, or possibly this one: /Regen's mitigation on paper, is way better than it is in play. It depends on the context as to who gets more benefit. Running against Incarnate mobs, the soft cap isn't the cap. The IDF group that I stress test against has bosses who hit me at like a 20-30% clip when I'm at the cap. So Bubbles or Flash Arrow is doing a helluva lot more for me than a /regen. I do agree that /Regen can normally benefit more from Support than say +DEF (because the +DEF cap is so easy to hit). I do not know how many +RES based secondaries are running around at the +RES cap, but if they are 5-15% below it, stacking +RES on them is probably far more effective. I mean, you can make that assertion, but I am not seeing anything that convinces me its true. I do know for a fact that on Live they monitored population statistics. I think it's unequivocal that they knew defense debuff can cause cascade failure. We know this because they added DDR to /SR...a ton of it. Not adding it to /Regen is, by default, intentional. And it's not like DDB is a death sentence. It must means you have to be a lot more cautious around mobs that have it. You have to pull or kite or take them on in smaller chunks or like Malta and sappers, prioritize the ones that are debuffing you. I don't think so. I don't think the devs that kind of precision. There is no closed-form solution on any of this. So you'd have to pick a metric and then stats on that. Is that lvl 20, 30, 40, 50? How are you going to normalize that? I also think the problem is that you're solving a problem that isn't necessarily a problem, but a feature. At lvl 50, loaded up on incarnates and pool powers is so far off the bell curve of where the game was intended to be balanced, I am hard pressed to think the devs are paying attention. But I would argue that more "casual" players aren't operating in these extremes. And if you're talking about Sappers and what not, that's always been the downside of Regen. You see those guys, you kill them first, and you hit IH and you know that even with no Endurance, you have mitigation. I've done SBB with my /Regen and sure, the Tsoo slow me down to a snails pace, but it isn't a death sentence. Unlike the Psi monkeys who blast through /SR's resistance and their toxic gas blows past both the +DEF and the +RES and when the blasters use Build Up and also blow past +DEF. I would really like to see the number of mobs that cause -DEF. I haven't felt DDB has been a problem at all on an of my scrappers No more than -RES (which I seem to definitely feel is a problem for my /SR...goldbrickers always seem to work me). The only place where I see DDB raise it's head is ITF and I think it gets blown out of proportion as a result. Contrast that with psi and toxic, which seems to be everywhere. I will also point out that naked, /regen is probably better at dealing with spikes than any other set besides /Invul (maybe Rad?). Again, the problem is that much of this discussion is strictly focused on what happens at 50, where the vast majrority of mitigation is happening off-AT. The point being, /Regen doesn't really have a spike problem as designed. No scrapper was intended to be able to solo ITF at 4x8. But some can do it more easily (or should I say more cheaply?) than others and suddenly it becomes a balance issue. I am very much in agreement with your overall perspective. /Regen is still a very capable and high performance set, at least through lvl 40. I don't really care what happens at lvl 50 because you can't balance that and if you did, it would require that you address all the off-AT mitigation and Set IOs that are really the culprit....and they aren't going to do that.

I believe it was your claim in my /SR thread that /Regen was pathetic that got me to replay it this last month. Glad to see you are admitting to hyperbole. As someone who has recently (last six months) played /SR, /WP, /Regen, and /Shield (but a on Brute), I paid specific attention to how /Regen compared up to 40 (/SR and /WP to 50), I can say without hesitation that if we look at xp/hour solo, /Regen out performs /SR by a significant margin up to 40 and is probably about equal to /WP. I've run all these sets without Tough or Weave or Maneuvers, or inspiration. I did have Hasten on all the scrappers. Infrequently use it on /SR, and used it to cycle DP and IH on /Regen. I also did slot Overwhelming Fear and may have put in a Shield Wal +5 def at lvl 41. At lvl 40, my /regen can ran solo at +3x0 and typically take out three purple minions with just Recon. If you put a LT in there, I will either have to burn my build-up power, or use Dull Pain. Any mobs with Energy Melee and Total Focus are particularly dangerous to /regen. But that's true for /SR as well. Comparatively, /regen easily out performs /SR for up time. Without Hasten, I would venture that /WP is slightly better, but at 40, /WP doesn't have that peak performance. If the incoming /DPS is greater than the effective mitigation, you just die slowly. In my opinion, this is the crux of the player experience. /Regen is fairly unique among scrapper secondaries in that maximizing the set's mitigation is dependent on timing. As Kopak suggest, you have to have an internal sense of the incoming DPS to play /Regen effectively. The first time I went to Cimerora at 35, I fought +1's (stepped it down because I knew of the debuff). I died three times in two mission. Then I was able to completely clear three more of the timed missions without a single death. No inspirations, no Tough/Weave. At 40, I cranked it up to +2 and same results. With /SR, there isn't a need to understand what you fight other than avoiding toxic, psi, and PBAoE patches. /Regen's mitigation, however, is capped by a players ability to anticipate and react. Based on my experience (no inspiration, almost no Set IO bonuses, and essentially no pool powers beyond occasional Hasten), /Regen's max performance far exceeds both /SR and /WP. As a /Regen, biding my time is actually a tactic I can use against hard targets. In theory yes, in actually game play, that's not been my experience. As Kopak points out, /Regen's real issue is spike damage and a human's ability to react to it.. On large teams, you're exposed to larger amounts of spike damage. Especially at higher levels when running +4. Because you can't run at Max HPs the entire time, and because you will have moments where you are not getting mitigation buffs from teammates, /Regen is more prone to spike death than most other sets. I disagree. The entire point of debuffs are to debuff those things which cannot resist it. It's nonsensical to create a debuff and then give everyone resistance to it. It's like arguing /SR should have +DEF to Psi. IMO /regen's problem is that that the baseline expectation for what scrappers are suppose to be doing changes. It goes from soloing +1 or +2 content, to soloing 4x8 content with every power at your disposal. Exactly. And the lack of protection against debuffs is intentional. So if you also make /Regen more survivable against spikes, then you're essentially making it overpowered. It's also important to point out that the comparative problem for /regen is that people are not able to separate the impact of off-AT mitigation on their experiences. /SR isn't good without Set IOs and Pool Powers bringing it to the cap. If you're at 90% mitigation, that last 5% you're getting from a pool power or set IOs, is providing you with more effective health than all your secondary powers combined. IME, /Regen is fantastic naked (Hasten just stop me from having to wait around). I think Kopak may have suggested it already, but the line between /Regen being better and /Regen being OP is thin and grey. If the developers want /Regen to be able to compete with /Shield or /Rad, or even /SR, on 4x8 solo, then they're going to have to solve the spike damage issue and good luck doing that without either turning it into WP, or making it OP on everything else.

Apologies, I haven't had time to digest this all, but wanted to respond to some of these points sooner. One thing I should have brought up earlier, and maybe I did, is that I think there are two parts to his topic: 1) How do the secondaries perform empirically, 2) How do people perceive those outcomes? I do not think there is perfect alignment between how a set can perform and how a set performs in the hands of a player. I'll come back to this periodically, but just wanted to slip that in to explain some of how I approach this discussion. I'm not sure what you mean by "false due to scale." However, I will say that I am not attempting to incorporate any edge cases. My goal is to understand and map out the basics., the fundamentals, and then try and understand where it breaks down and does something completely different. So if I'm making conclusions, it's not about the actual sets, but just about the baseline mechanisms. The actual secondaries are far more complex and I do no think these models are sufficient. I don't think simplistic models I've discussed so far gives correct results because I don't think it comes close to accurately modeling the systems. I think it does shed light on why Tough isn't nearly as valuable to +DEF scrappers as they think it is, something I've witnesses first hand. I believe it also provides insight on why adding the same power pools to the different sets doesn't give the same results. As I'm sure you would agree, if the 5% from something like Weave puts you at the +DEF cap, it's a lot more valuable to you than to someone who is not at the cap. The underlying point is that power pools may provide asymmetrical benefits to some sets and thus make them look better than they actually are. As you point out, the +DEF cap for scrappers is higher, so depending on what the game throws at you, +DEF sets may seem to peform look better they actually are because that last bit of off-AT +DEF is actually adding as much survival time as the rest of the set combined. But this is a bit of digression. Sure. "assumed damage values" are used to study a specific aspect of the mitigation. As I believe you and I agree, there are too many variable to do this computationally, the truth has to come from statistics. But as I said before, my approach it so break it off in chunks and try to understand the pieces and see how/if that provides insight on the larger problem. Naturally I disagree. Part of that is the different mitigation model we are using. You're coming at it from the Effective Health approach and I'm looking at it from the Survival Time approach. Knowing that IH is best when I'm below health means I can probably buy more seconds by popping it after the fight starts and I've started taken damage. It means I will hold off on using Recon or DP to bring me to full health...and save those for counter-acting spikes or save them for when IH stops. I totally get why this seems a fruitful approach. You're 100% right that the "I win" equation is dependent on information I don't have and is hard to get. But, at least for me, it represent the most accurate model of what I am trying to understand, especially in how it speaks to the players concepts of "performance." I've also not had much success identifying a robust transformation for the different mechanics. I haven't looked closely at your models, so it may take me some time to wrap my head around them. So I may have phrased it like that, but that's no the intent. The point I'm trying to make, which I believe you agree with, is that stacking different forms of mitigation isn't the same as stacking the same form of mitigation. And when a set like /SR says it maxes out at 60% +RES, that's not the same as getting 60% +RES on a +RES based secondary. You're disagreeing with me for a reason that agrees with me. +DEF and +RES don't combine to scale linearly is exactly the point. Both can start out with 50% mitigation, but adding more +RES or +DEF will only stack linearly with itself. However...+RES and +REGEN do stack linearly where +DEF and +REGEN have an upper bound and will under perform. So it has everything to do with the mechanics of +DEF: Mitigations that are dependent upon the character getting hit/taking are totally curtailed by +DEF when +DEF applies. Everyone benefits from more mitigation, but some stack linearly and some don't. I'll look over the rest later, but enjoying the exchange.

So I feel like this conflates a bunch of concepts and evaluations. What it seems you're focusing on is that for scrappers, 95% mitigation is going to be better than 75% mitigation. Sure. But not everyone is at the cap. What happens when both have the same level of mitigation? And we need to define "out perform" because performance is contextual. +DEF will not out perform +RES if the damage is PBAoE. +DEF does not out perform +RES against AVs/GMs and in teams because +RES gives you more time to react to the incoming damage and benefit from all kinds of stop gap mitigation. +DEF will not outperform +RES when +DEF can't hit the cap, or when the mobs have +to hit that puts them above the soft cap. Yes. The resists work great against paper cuts and they do provide a much bigger window to use stop-gap mitigation than without them. But the problem for /SR, is that when your +DEF is not working, those resists are usually not effective either. Specifically when you're facing AVs or non-positional psionic/toxic damage. The devs added the scaling resists to help /SR in the mid-game, when you're still fighting +0 to +2 and on large teams with lots of minions. Those scaling resists slow down the incoming damage so you can actually see you're getting low on health. But go run ITF solo at 4x8 with no +DEF on and see how well those resists work. 😄. I have been using an IDF 4x8 door mission for a stress test and even with +DEF, they can kill my lvl 50 SR in like 10 seconds...and that's with all kind of set IO/proc +RES tacked on. And I've seen the same with /SR scrappers who had Tough. The problem is that they weren't +DEF capping those mobs and in the face of that much spike damage, scaling resist were adding only a few seconds of life. I am not coming away with that in my models. Or maybe I'm confused by what you mean. Like defenses stack additively. +DEF and +RES work multiplicatively. So as Erratic points out, you're only benefiting from +RES when you get hit. If your +DEF is 99%, you're only getting a 1% benefit from your +RES. Here's a simple illustration: Let's look at Scrapper RES and Scrapper DEF each with 100 hitpoints. RES has 50% +RES and DEF has 50% +DEF. If we say the incoming damage per second is 20. Then on average, they have the same mitigation and same life span. DEF gets hit (on average) ever other attack, takes 20 points on those hits, so after 2 seconds, averages out to 20 hp/s. On average, DEF dies after 5 seconds, but it could be longer or shorter (Gaussian distribution around 5 seconds) RES gets hit every attack takes half, so after two seconds, takes 20 hps. After 5 seconds, RES dies, and this is far more predictable than for the +DEF build (because in reality there is still a RNG working the hits). Now, let's add 30% +RES to both. RES is at 80% +RES. So the 20 dps gets reduced to 4 points. After two seconds, RES has taken 8 points, an average of 4 per round. 100/4 = 25 seconds it takes RES to get defeated. A 30% +RES has increased RES' lifespan by a multiple of 5 DEF gets tricky. It still is getting hit every other attack (on average), but it's not getting the benefit of +RES when it does not get hit. So the first second it gets hit for the full 20 minus 30% +RES = 14 points. The next attack misses. So after 2 seconds, DEF has taken 14 points, an average of 7 per round. 100/7= 14 seconds. Huge different despite adding the same +RES to both, when both have the same total mitigation of 50%. The same +RES boost to DEF only increase the life span by a multiple of slight less than 3. So this simple model shows that while +DEF still benefits from adding +RES, the more +DEF you have, the less benefit you get from that +RES comparatively. You're much better off adding +DEF to +DEF, if the incoming damage is always affected by +DEF. You add +RES to give you that "layered" benefit. In engineering terms, adding other forms of mitigation effectively gives you composite mitigation, which is more robust. The more types of mitigation you have, the better you'll perform on average. However, that is entirely dependent on the context. If +DEF worked all the time, then you're don't need other forms of mitigation. So the game has to throw things out there that +DEF doesn't work against so that other sets can shine. Adding +REGEN at least by my early models, says the benefit is the same, but +DEF only exist when DEF is below health, so +RES gets more actual benefit. The reason why +RES benefits more is the same reason as above. If a +DEF scrapper doesn't get hit....then it's not accruing any benefit from other mitigation. Let's look at our example from earlier: Let's add 5 hp/s +regen to both DEF and RES scrappers instead of adding the 30% +RES RES gets hit for 20 pts each hit, mitigates that to 10, and after 1 second, regens 5. RES is taking 5 pts a second. 100/5 = 20 second life span The benefit for DEF is tricky. If DEF gets hit the first attack, it takes 20 in round 1 but gets missed in round 2. It benefits from +regen both rounds and ends -10 hps after 2 seconds an that averages out to the same 5 /s. 100/5 20 second life span. Looks to be the same right? But what happens if DEF scrapper's incoming damage follows a different patter, but the same average? DEF scrapper gets missed twice in row but then gets hit twice in a row for 20 each hit. Same average 10 dps over that 4 second span. But the first two rounds, there's no +regen benefit because there is no damage. Then next two rounds, DEF regens 10 points total and is left with 30 points of damage after 4 seconds. That's an average of 7.5 dps. 100/7.5 = 13.3 second life span. The RES scrapper is lasting 50% longer with the same +regen benefit. It's important to note that as soon as a DEF goes a single round where it doesn't need the +regen, it's performance falls behind the RES. What's more, is that this is an asymmetrical outcome, or put another way, an upper bound. DEF will never out perfom than RES and is more likely to under perform. So given my examples above, we have some possible insight as to why the +DEF cap might be higher. If we find that the same amount of total mitigation of +RES actually outperforms +DEF when combined with other forms of mitigation, then we'd have to give +DEF a higher cap. Or put another way, +DEF at the 75% cap would not perform as well as +RES does at that same cap due to a variety of factors. And given that fact, they devs still put the +DEF cap at 95% vs 75%. It's possible the +DEF cap is a result of broader game mechanics, where as the RES cap is more specifically ties to AT performance. I don't know. But for me, it's informative to understand how these basic forms of mitigation work mechanically when combined and from where I sit, capping +DEF means you're getting less benefit from other forms of mitigation. Perhaps the only way to balance that is to raise the cap for +DEF. But, if other sets with lots of other forms of mitigation can all reach the soft cap, then a set that only relies on +DEF, is going to underperform at the high end. Granted, these are simplistic models used to examine basics. I still haven't looked at how +Heal /+Absorb, +Hit Points fit in these models. And no where close to understanding +recharge and how debuffs factor into secondary mitigation. But I do welcome any constructive criticism as to the models I've presented and where you think they might be counter-factual.

Mob level is irrelevant, but obviously anything that decreases the value of +DEF makes other forms of mitigation more valuable. Remember, the point is to build models that provide insight on what happens. Bolded for emphasis. That's right. It's a matter of how often you take damage. So if you're only getting hit 5% of the time. You're getting almost no benefit from Tough. If you're getting hit 50% of the time, you're getting benefit from every other attack. To put it another way, at the +DEF cap, you're not getting hit enough that Tough is helping your survival on average Now, Tough might be helpful against AV's or Incarnate mobs that are hitting you a higher clip, but it's waaaaaay more a factor if you're not relying on +DEF.

Agreed. I've been trying to do that from a theoretical approach rather than a computational one. For example, I've noticed that there's a lot of misunderstanding about "the caps" and the benefit in hitting them. I've also realized that there a lot of misconceptions about how beneficial some pool powers. For example, Tough isn't nearly as good for +DEF based characters. Or to put it another way, the benefit of +RES is inversely proportional to the amount of +DEF you have. Where as the benefit of +Regen is independent, but suffers from artifacts of how the systems are implemented. The challenge with modeling /Regen is that unlike most of the other sets, /Regen's survivability is dramatically impacted by the players skill and system mastery. In short, the timing of when you use Recon, Dull Pain, IH, MoG, dominate the player experience. So while the Survival Time when played optimally might far exceed other secondaries, when played by humans, it can be dramatically different. A perfect example occurred when my Sav/Regen hit 35 and went to Cimerora. The first two mission at +1, I died like three times total. The third and subsequent missions...no deaths. Then I ramped it up to +2 and no deaths. And this is without running any Insp or pool powers besides Hasten when I need to cycle DP or IH. By the third mission, I had a much better feel for the DPS and DPS spikes that /Regen would experience. And this is true for all encounters. I tend to die in missions when I fail to spot the Boss in the group or I am running up a mob type I'm not experienced against with /Regen. So two people can play the same build and have wildly different experiences with it because one is much more adept at predicting the incoming DPS/spikes.

Last week or so, I started a Savage/Regen as a contrast to the Claws/Regen I played on Live. Even though Savage lacks a lot of the soft mitigation prevalent on other sets, I am surprised at how effective the set feels at simply killing things. I contrast this with my more recent Dark Melee experience, and Savage feels like it kills a lot faster. My Sav/Regen is 40 and I just started running +3x0 with great results. I am able to kill +3/4 minion spawns just using Reconstruction (and sometimes not needing Recon). No Tough (I actually have it, but never turn it on), no Weave, no inspirations, no accolades (Wait..I might have Flames of Prometheus..not sure) I will use Hasten if I have to cycle DP or IH, but 80% of the combats, I am running naked Sav/Regen With the exception of running a fully slotting Shred with Overwhelming Fear, I only have IOs in attacks and defense....wait...I did add the 5% +DEF from Shield wall to MoG. Yes. I have had similar questions. For /Regen, especially if I have clickies on cooldown, I tend to avoid Exhausted to leverage the +Recharge. I am absolutely underutilizing BT as I tend to save it for Bosses and purple LTs for the +to hit. But I am now realizing that I can use it as a weak +Recharge boost. I also find Hemorrhage underwhelming. I generally only use it on bosses. I have not quite understood Savage Leap. If it's up and I have a clear path, I will start with it. But it seems to have low accuracy, even double accuracy slotted. I also don't use as part of any chain as i am under the impression it is not great in melee. You know, it's interesting that others also perceive the mechanics to be weird. I think it's the odd trade-off of having to use up your stacks for a PBAoE that isn't super powerful or a ST DoT. There is a feeling wanting to use Frenzy without burning the stacks, so you end up not using Frenzy in some cases where you might otherwise want to. Early on, I would short Frenzy. But, IIRC, using Hem or Frenzy still burns up your stacks....you just don't get Exhausted if you have less than 5. Regarding Hem, I am not sold on this power. DoT is the worst of all damage delivery methods, so it needs to be more powerful when balanced against Endo/Recharge. The main problem, I think, with Hem is that there isn't enough feedback for the player on the benefit. Contrast that with Midnight Grasp which crits upfront and can one-shot a target if used late in a chain. The other odd thing, for me, with Savage is all the DoT can be hard to optimize. Early on, I would definitely waste attacks on a mob that was going to die from Bleed. Now, I have more intuition on whether I need to follow up an attack. But I do love seeing the occasional runner drop on the way out. In summary, I think Savage is a great set to play despite its lack of utility. I love the animations. The enduro discount is a great quality of life benefit for many sets leveling up, but admittedly by 50 it's almost pointless unless you can leverage not having to proc for endo or choose Set IO's that forgo recovery. But at 50, I don't recall seeing any scrappers ever run out of endurance sans debuff. If there is one thing special about Savage I think it's the stacking +Recharge. I say this because of the "I win" equation: Time it takes to kill foes - Time it takes foes to kill you >0 For sets with cooldown mitigation like /Regen. +Recharge works both sides of the operator. I'm not aware of any other scrapper primaries that offer +Recharge.

I recently wrote a post talking about the shortcomings of /SR. Someone in that thread tried to insist /Regen was at or near the bottom of the curve, so rolled up a Savage/Regen and Double XP'd him up to 40+. I was amazed at how easy /Regen was and how much it comparatively feels like the energizer bunny of secondaries, but also being reacquainted with its limitations. Having already played /SR and /WP up to 50 and /Shield into the 30's, it got me thinking about how mitigation works and what explains the outcomes we experience. A lot of this stuff was explored a decade ago and perhaps some more recently in Homecoming. In truth, I've forgotten nearly all of it and have been having to relearn the mechanics. I've been looking at this as well, but I'll tell you straight up, it's arguably not possible on a spreadsheet. The more I identify all the moving pieces, the more I recognize how insurmountable it is to do this. The best you can do is define a narrow context and try and develop a model that provides insight....which is kind of what you're attempting. Yes. One of the biggest steps in solving complex problems is finding a way to reframe into something that is solvable. I've come to understand secondaries as part of basic equation (Time to bring incoming dps (and peak) dps below the crossover point) - (Time until failure of your mitigation) > 0 OR Kill Time - Survival Time > 0 Let's call this the "I win" equation. Put simply, your secondary only has to give you enough time to reach, what I call, the crossover point. This is the point where the steady-state and spike DPS is below the mitigation. I pulled this quote of yours from a thread on /regen. It believe this is also what contributes to the problems many have playing /regen. Managing damage spikes, particularly the Alpha is a skill that has to be mastered.. It's also much different at 25 than it is at 50.

Having played by /SR and /WP to 50, the answer to your question is context driven. To put it another way, where do you care most about your experience? Solo, in teams, lvl 20, lvl 50, on ITF/BAF/TinPex? Both sets have huge swings in their perceived efficacy and it really matters whether you have funds or you are going slumming it? Let's assume you aren't funded, and you are fighting at a +x level where your accuracy is above 75%. In my experience: /SR is essentially crap from about 25-35. Endurance will be a big issue, SJ isn't helping you out more than an other secondary, and you don't have much in the way of AoE protection. Your +DEF isn't at cap or even near it. The scaling resists do nothing against toxic and psi Big Elite Boss hits will annihilate you You are pretty good against alpha strikes and can go through some fights and barely get touched. Practice Brawler on Auto can feel annoying..but, it can be cast when mezzed. No Fear protection /WP is cruise mode through about the those same levels. You finish fights with full health and endo you've got a mix of mitigation so if one thing is defeated, you are still getting some mitigation Like /SR /WP is toggle and forget Fear protection Lower +DEF means you do get debuffed more. At around lvl 35, /SR starts to come on stronger because of some convergence of factors: You've most likely started adding more +DEF from set IOs and off-AT. It's a universal rule that every iota of stacking mitigation is more beneficial than the last iota. So that last bit of +DEF you can add from like Combat Jumping or even Stealth, can dramatically increase your survival time as you get near the cap (there's nothing magical about the cap, it's just the in-game limit) Your average time to kill your targets starts to dramatically decrease due to slotting and having money for enhancements. At 40, my Savage/Regen can do +2x0 (EDIT: I can do +3x0) spawns with nothing but Fast Healing and Reconstruction, and most a third of the time I don't need Reconstruction. The point is I'm killing stuff so fast, my secondary is not a factor. When you combine #1 & #2, /SR's ability survive the alpha strike makes it outperform other sets that have a higher steady-state survival. In other words, you last long enough to reduce the incoming DPS to the inflection point. But..this doesn't work against AVs because you cannot reduce the DPS until you kill the AV, so other sets do better against single hard targets. Also, because of so much of /SR's mitigation is +DEF, any high level mobs that have +to Hit above the cap, punish /SR extra hard. See #1. By 50 you're bringing on Incarnates and set and purple set bonuses and you are probably getting 50% of your mitigation or more, from things not your secondary. Reading the forums, the majority/overwhelming opinions on ATs are based on people's experience with their builds at lvl 50. So their perception is highly skewed by their build and what they've been able to do with it and not from an objective comparison of the sets. Other thoughts /SR is much easier to slot/build. Because /WP has a lot of mitigation mechanics, there's going to be a wider variation in performance based on system mastery. /SR has a much more variable experience. You can go from full to dead in two hits against hard targets. /WP has, ime, a more predictable decline. /SR's resistance goes a long way in slowing down its mean-time-to-failure, but if you're fighting +4s, Bosses, Elite Boses, AVs, and Giant Monsters, can punch right through it. TLDR; /WP has a better QoL leveling up. As you level up, /SR starts to feel like it can punch above its weight class because it survives alphas a little better due to pool powers. By 50, it's not about your secondary, but about your build. I would imagine /WP can get close to +DEF cap, especially combined with it's -to hit aura.

There is always a need to call out false gods when they arise. Arcana had so many people cowed and intimidated that no one would call her out, even when she was blatantly wrong. I'm done talking about her. This thread isn't about her. It's about asking the devs to run the numbers. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe SR is within tolerance, but others have admitted to problems below 35, so there is something to investigate.