Maelwys

This. FWIW, the recharge time on my Fire Blaster's Inferno is ~42s; and the Incarnate Pyro Judgement Nuke is every ~90s. And Rise of the Phoenix (slotted for Dmg and Rech and with a KB>KD IO!) also recharges in ~90s. That's roughly one "Nuke" every ~20-25 seconds; providing the rest of the team actually let me faceplant whenever i want to... 😁

Regen's main shtick is getting Health back fast after you've already been hit. Aside from the tweaked version of the set that Sentinels get; it's the same set that has been around for decades with minimal tweaks - so it has plenty of +MaxHP (in Dull Pain) but no +Absorb. It also recovers Endurance very quickly (Quick Recovery) and it has a short duration GodMode power in Moment of Glory. There is one passive power (Resilience) that contains a smidge of damage resistance; but it is a very click heavy powerset (Dull Pain, Reconstruction, Instant Healing; Moment of Glory) and most of those clicky powers are reactionary - assuming you have "Perma Dull Pain" the only click that will help you BEFORE you start taking damage is Moment of Glory. IMO taking Hasten and building for lots of Global Recharge is practically a must to get Perma Dull Pain and both IH and MoG up sooner; and getting some Defence or Resistance on top of all that +MaxHP and Regeneration/Healing is extremely effective - whilst you can look at Tough/Weave, set bonuses and things like Rune of Protection... on Scrappers and Stalkers IMO an easy way to go is to lean into Shadow Meld from the Soul Mastery Patron pool; or pick a primary with a stacking +Def boost like Katana or SR. Personally I'd take Tough + slot Resilience and aim for ~65% S/L damage resistance with set bonuses + Incarnates; then lean into Rune of Protection to get me to the hardcap. That'd give me a decent survivability baseline plus some additional situational buffage with minimal build tradeoffs (leaving plenty of wiggle room to push for "moar damage"!) Disclaimer: I mained a Katana/Regen Scrapper on live; but it's never been top of my list to remake on HC. IMO the powerset just lags too far behind stuff like Bio or Rad.

Yeah mine too. I went hoking on the forum archive, but can't seem to find the original video or rant threads. There are plenty of comments from the circa-i4/i5 days that touch on it; but the closest summary I could find of the event which matches my own memory is this one (and Arcanaville's followup a few posts down!)

Aimed Shot has a base recharge time of 4 seconds. The Recharge Debuff limit is -75%. That means the maximum time Aimed Shot can take to recharge is 4/(1-0.75) = 16 seconds. Therefore Aimed Shot getting debuffed to "over 8" seconds net recharge time is quite within the realms of possibility; especially if you were on a TF with lots of debuffs flying around. Plus; the Manticore TF caps out at level 35; so even if you were exemplaring down you likely wouldn't have had a full set of powers/set bonuses available to increase your defence or debuff resistances or global recharge in order to combat those debuffs. So there's nothing suspect about that at all. However... the OP came out with some suspect absolute statements like ""There's literally no way to fight back" and "it needs to be changed back, or at least toned down. Right now, it's basically impossible to fight some of these guys" alongside multiple claims which are blatantly factually incorrect such as "An enemy with ice powers can hit me once, and ALL my powers suddenly take 40+ seconds to recharge" and "I have a Dark Melee/Willpower Brute who, being around L17 at the time, tried to take on 3 Cogs on a rooftop. All three shot at him, and his endurance dropped to perhaps 10%.". Spinning Kick (which the OP originally mentioned via "My Spinning Kick power cooldown counter went up to 44 seconds, but then dropped back down to normal a few moments later") has a base recharge time of 10 seconds. It's literally impossible for that power's recharge time to be debuffed beyond 40s; let alone 44s. Clockwork "Cogs" only have one ranged attack which drain one endurance per hit; and so simply cannot drop your entire blue bar to "perhaps 10%" with one salvo. Now bugs are certainly possible; but the scenarios that the OP was claiming here had as about as much chance of occurring as being hit by lightning on a subway train; and yet they were doubling down on it rather than fact checking themselves. Eventually it turned out that the power they meant which recharged in 44s was in fact Spinning Strike; which has a base recharge time of 16s and so theoretically could have ended up at a maximum of 64s. So we checked; just in case... and a test encounter against the enemy mentioned (which only has one single recharge debuff according to their CoDv2 profile) confirmed that those debuffs were currently working correctly and could not possibly have induced more than 15% recharge debuff with a single attack. Therefore in the absence of a more coherent description of the situation in which the recharge discrepancies occurred... the evidence all points either to a UI bug (and/or lag) or the OP misremembering important details (e.g. they were under at least five copies of the same debuff, which can be countered by things like jousting, popping insps, or playing a toon with noteworthy defense buffs such as the defensive powerset they were apparently using at the time...). Speaking personally... I believe in giving someone the benefit of the doubt if/when they see strange stuff happening in CoH; as this game is old and complex and buggy and so are many of its players. I don't even get particularly uppity whenever someone leaves out information that might be crucial for diagnostic purposes (what mob, what power, what mission, what level, etc) as I've worked in IT support for decades and am well used to having to tease that kind of stuff out. However when someone gives inaccurate information and wild claims with no supporting evidence; that's a red flag; and the longer someone's been around and the more inaccurate information they spout and the more they double down on nonsensical claims/absolute statements/blanket assertions the lower my opinion of them will drop. Either here or in RL. (That said - I'm from the UK. So my typical response to being annoyed with someone is a bit of light ribbing or at absolute worst dropping the "Kind" from "Kind regards" in my email signature...) Regarding toxicity... I'd hope that if/when a new player posts, or even someone who has been around for a while and genuinely wishes to engage/learn (and who doesn't have major post history baggage) posts then they would get a slightly more patient response then someone who just comes on and rants without providing any evidence and/or a coherent argument. And I've seen this recently even in posts where a query has already been fully answered less than two threads down - people tend to play nice as long as they don't perceive a post as lazy or utter garbage. But portions of the forum community are rather more prone to resorting to mockery if someone has been around for a long time and repeatedly posts incoherent or factually incorrect statements. And FWIW in this particular case I'd say the OP got off extremely lightly... at most a 2 on the Diantane scale.

Better yet, perform the same search in the Tanker forum. Fiery Aura Brutes have sucked for farming since 2022 (see the i27p4 aggro revamp which made farming survivability requirements skyrocket and the i27p5 nerf to Burn which stopped it summoning multiple patches) and also Spines hasn't been in favour ever since the introduction of Radiation Melee in i25. Whilst it's still possible to Farm on them, it takes considerably more effort (and therefore more influence) to hit the new survivability requirement thresholds and no matter what you do they'll woodchipper through foes more slowly compared to an equivalent Tanker.

Don't discount Vigor or Nerve (Accuracy, plus either Defense or Healing) if you're trying to maximise Proc damage. Brutes lean into Fury rather than big base numbers for the bulk of their damage. So often it can work out better to six slot an attack with damage procs instead of slotting any damage aspect in it at all (especially if you have one of the offensive powersets that can take additional Damage Procs via secondary effects like -Def and -ToHit and Knockback). However if you're going that route then you won't be slotting any accuracy aspect into the attack in question, so you'll struggle to hit higher level foes unless you have a ToHit buffing ability like Rage to fall back on or are getting substantial accuracy buffs via set bonuses and/or your alpha slot. Personally I tend to go the "2x Acc/Dam HOs plus 4x Procs" route plus Musculature Radial (the Endurance Recovery boost is almost always better over going Musculature Core) but "6x Procs plus Nerve Core" may well be mathematically optimal for a Procbombing SR Brute (for example).

They're mostly still accurate. See here for the full stats/powers list. A few things to keep in mind: (i) IMO the Invulnerable Radial Lore pets are the only ones worth a damn unless you are playing at very low difficulty settings or have very strong allied buffs/heals. The others die far too quickly. We're talking a few seconds under sustained fire at +4x8. (ii) Good Radial Lore Pets include BP (because it deals damage and has a mediocre repeating AoE buff) and Talons (because it has strong repeating AoE buffs and a ST heal) and Carnies (because it has a strong repeating Single Target damage buff and a ST heal). There are a few other non-radial pets with situational usefulness like the Longbow Boss's -Regen debuff. (iii) Pets with "toggles" unfortunately do not perform well as the toggle will not stay active indefinitely but instead flicks on and off again. For this reason the only pets with a reliable lasting +Defense buff are Clockwork (Field Projector can be kept up on 3-4 allies indefinitely) and Arachnos (Mind Link lasts 90s once per summoning)

Yep, they've both got "other benefits" on a Crit in lieu of dealing full double damage. Energy Transfer heals you instead of damaging you (meh) but Total Focus grants 2x Energy Focus buffs instead of one (meaning that you get to use 2x "Quick mode" Energy Transfers before your next TF instead of one quick and one slow; which typically results in you being able to fit in an extra "free" Bonesmasher into your attack chain). So of the main primary Energy Melee attacks, IMO the one that has the least value critting is Energy Transfer. Plus it's also used pretty often in an EM Scrapper's attack chain. So it's a shoo-in for slotting the Crit Proc; and ends up providing me with regular decent opportunities for additional crit chance to kick in on 2-3 BS, a TF and a Patron Snipe.

There is a full thread about the details just two posts up, but the short version is "no, the guy who told you otherwise was wrong". The +50% Crit Proc works off PPM chance just like most other procs, so its chance to activate will depend on the base recharge rate and recharge enhancement aspect slotting of the power in which you place it. Then whenever that power is actually triggered (midway through its attack animation will be a point when its effects actually trigger, known as ATBE or Animation Time Before Effect), a timer of a little over 4.25s starts counting (3.25s+0.5s+0.5s+Arcanatime roundups). Any subsequent attacks that trigger before that timer runs out will get +50% extra Crit chance. You can often fit 2 and occasionally 3 followup attacks in there depending on their animation times and ATBEs. For Energy Melee I personally put the proc in Energy Transfer, because you get more benefit from Bonesmasher and Total Focus critting than you do from from Energy Transfer itself critting.

FWIW, since it came up again recently here and I can't see any further definitive testing/confirmation on the exact Scrapper ATO time window... I've revisited this notion. With the more visible Decimation and Gaussian procs the "Build Up" buff is definitely lasting well beyond its stated 5.25s window. But the math has to get a little wonky in order to even roughly fit the observed in-game behaviour. OK. So; the Decimation Proc IO functions in the same way under the hood as the Gaussian Proc IO and the SCS ATO Proc IO. In each of these cases the IO itself has an ATBE of 0.5s; and its effects apply a Set Bonus that has a ATBE of 0.5s (which finally applies a buff - and in the case of the Decimation Proc; it's a buff to Damage and ToHit with a listed duration of 5.25s). However whenever the Decimation proc activates it has a major measurable impact in your combat log (unlike the SCS proc, which is random as hell) so in theory we can manipulate a few attack chains and narrow down just when its buff window actually expires; and use that as a guidestick for when the SCS ATO proc's buff window will actually expire. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SCENARIO #1: Consider Quick Moonbeam + Barrage + Bone Smasher + Total Focus. "Quick" Moonbeam has a total Arcanatime of 1.584s, and a stated ATBE of 0.933s; 1.584-0.933=0.651s remaining arcanatime after its ATBE. Barrage + Bonesmasher gives a combined arcanatime of 1.584+1.452=3.036. Total Focus has a ATBE of 1.767. 0.651+3.036+1.767 is 5.454s. Therefore if a Decimation IO is slotted in Moonbeam, Total Focus should NOT be affected by its 5.25s buff unless it's delayed by AT LEAST ONE of those extra 0.5s ATBEs. Note the damage figures of the first Barrage and that last TF; and compare them to standalone hits without any Decimation buffs in effect at all: In each case the first is ~39% higher damage than the second. So the 5.25s Decimation Buff window is definitely getting extended/delayed by at least 0.204s. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SCENARIO #2: Now... consider Quick Moonbeam + Bone Smasher + Total Focus + Whirling Hands. "Quick" Moonbeam has a total Arcanatime of 1.584s, and a stated ATBE of 0.933s; 1.584-0.933=0.651s remaining arcanatime after its ATBE. Bonesmasher + Total Focus gives a combined arcanatime of 1.452+2.772=4.224s. Whirling Hands has a ATBE of 1.2. 0.651+4.224+1.2 is 6.075s. So if a Decimation IO is slotted in Moonbeam, Whirling Hands should NOT be affected by its 5.25s buff unless it's delayed by MORE THAN ONE of those 0.5s ATBEs. And once again compare the Total Focus and Whirling Hands hits with standalone hits without any Decimation buffs in effect at all: In each case the first is ~39% higher damage than the second. So the 5.25s Decimation Buff window is definitely getting extended/delayed by at least 0.825s. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SCENARIO #3: Now... consider Quick Moonbeam + Barrage + Slow Energy Transfer + Whirling Hands. "Quick" Moonbeam has a total Arcanatime of 1.584s, and a stated ATBE of 0.933s; 1.584-0.933=0.651s remaining arcanatime after its ATBE. Barrage + Slow Energy Transfer gives a combined arcanatime of 1.584+2.904=4.488s. Whirling Hands has a ATBE of 1.2. 0.651+4.488+1.2 is 6.339s. So if a Decimation IO is slotted in Moonbeam, Whirling Hands should NOT be affected by its 5.25s buff unless it's delayed by MORE THAN TWO of those 0.5s ATBEs. And yet again compare the Barrage and Whirling Hands hits with standalone hits without any Decimation buffs in effect at all: In each case the first is ~39% higher damage than the second. So the 5.25s Decimation Buff window is definitely getting extended/delayed by at least 1.089s. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SCENARIO #4: Now... consider Quick Moonbeam + Total Focus + Whirling Hands + Barrage. "Quick" Moonbeam has a total Arcanatime of 1.584s, and a stated ATBE of 0.933s; 1.584-0.933=0.651s remaining arcanatime after its ATBE. Total Focus + Whirling Hands gives a combined Arcanatime of 2.772+2.64=5.412s. Barrage has a ATBE of 0.5. 0.651+5.412+0.5 is 6.563s. So if a Decimation IO is slotted in Moonbeam, Barrage should NOT be affected by its 5.25s buff unless it's delayed by MORE THAN TWO of those 0.5s ATBEs. And yet again compare the Barrage and Whirling Hands hits with standalone hits without any Decimation buffs in effect at all: FINALLY! The first WH is ~39% higher damage but the Barrage Hits are identical. So the 5.25s Decimation Buff window is NOT getting extended/delayed by 1.313s. Therefore in "Quick Moonbeam", Decimation's stated 5.25s buff window is actually being extended/delayed by somewhere between 1.089 and 1.313s (so "6.339-6.563s" total) I suspect that it's actually only getting extended/delayed by 1.0s (both instances of the 0.5s ATBEs) for 6.25s total; and that the discrepancy I'm seeing above is to do with the fact that powers in CoH (including IO Proc and set bonus effects) can only trigger on the next available Arcanatime tick. If we adjust Quick Moonbeam's ATBE for Arcanatime we get 1.056s (instead of 0.933s) which would mean that when the Decimation Proc actually starts "kicking in" there is 1.584-1.056 = 0.528 remaining Arcanatime on Moonbeam. Quick Moonbeam + Barrage + Slow Energy Transfer + Whirling Hands in this case would be 0.528+4.488+1.2 is 6.216s. (less than 6.25s = OK!) Quick Moonbeam + Total Focus + Whirling Hands + Barrage in that case would be 0.528+5.412+0.5 = 6.44s. (more than 6.25s = TOO LATE!) So the above suspicion appears to check out mathwise. It's using the arcanatime of the originating power's ATBE and being extended/delayed by both the IO Proc and Set Bonus +0.5s ATBEs. However there's also one other interesting thing: If we assume that both those 0.5s ATBEs are DELAYING the Decimation 5.25s damage buff rather than EXTENDING it; then in Scenarios #1 and #3 Barrage would have come very, very close to not getting the benefit of the +damage buff. Because "Quick" Moonbeam would have only 0.528s remaining arcanatime after its ATBE; but Barrage has a ATBE of 0.5s - so if the 5.25s buff window was getting delayed by 1.0s then Barrage would only qualify for the buff by the skin of its teeth - a margin of merely 0.028s! As it would happen, I have a few other characters with Decimation procs handy: and one of them is a Soldier VEAT with Gloom. Gloom's listed ATBE is 0.833s and its Arcanatime is 1.32s... which is low enough to test whether that extra ~1.0s time window on Decimation's 5.25 buff is effectively working as a Delay or as an Extension. Regardless of whether Gloom's ATBE is actually being rounded up for arcanatime or not, the remaining duration on its animation afterwards is still going to be low enough (0.487s or 0.396s) that triggering a low ATBE power like Pulverize (0.5s) is still going to get in under that 1.0s window. SCENARIO #5: As above: Gloom followed by Pulverize. Now compare that Pulverize to a standalone hit without any Decimation buffs in effect at all: That's about ~33% higher damage on the first hit. So it appears as though for all intents and purposes the Decimation buff is getting extended; not delayed. So from what I can tell: (i) The Decimation IO's listed 5.25s buff is effectively getting extended by 1.0s (presumably due to the 0.5s ATBE here and the 0.5s ATBE here) (ii) The start of that 6.25s "total buff time window" is starting on the ATBE of the power in which the Decimation proc is slotted rounded up for Arcanatime. Therefore given that the Scrapper Critical Strikes proc ATO works in exactly the same manner "under the hood"; I would assume that: (i) The Scrapper ATO's listed 3.25s buff will likely be effectively getting extended by 1.0s (presumably due to the 0.5s ATBE here and the 0.5s ATBE here) (ii) The start of that 4.25s "total buff time window" will likely start on the ATBE of the power in which the Scrapper ATO proc is slotted rounded up for Arcanatime. Anyways, I'm completely done with smacking Pylons for now so make of the above what you will! 🙂

Think the best examples are here: and here: Although the point in that 1st link about the 0.5s ATBE value within the proc events list is worth highlighting: as far as I'm aware this is effectively a delay to the proc's effects kicking in... so you'd look at the ATBE of the attack in which you slot the ATO then add another 0.5s (or potentially even two sets of 0.5s, for an extra 1.0s total - see here!) to find when the 3.25 second proc duration window actually starts. (This seems to be occurring for the Gaussian and Decimation procs; both of which function in exactly the same way as the SCS proc but have effects that are considerably easier to isolate in the combat log than "Critical hits that have been generated by an ATO instead of by the regular baseline Scrapper Inherent"!)

Yeah that 10 second lockout on the hide proc can definitely get annoying if you're spamming attacks constantly (e.g. vs a pylon) using that rotation for the TS build; as you'll eventually encounter the 10% chance for it "not to kick in" on Zapp which will throw things off unless you can correct it. If you're paying attention then it's possible to swap the chain around on the fly (fitting CI in after the next AS instead of BL; by using an additional CB or popping Build Up etc to make up the extra ~0.918s)... or you could just move Zapp and BL both back a place so that CI always goes after AS instead (trading a little potential damage for more consistency). When I'm soloing on Stalkers I always tend to aim for 3x Focus stacks between ASs for consistency (although aiming for 2x Focus stacks between ASs likely gives better average DPA!) and that aversion to spikiness may well be why in regular (non pylon) situations I also prefer the notion of opening with BL out of Hide vs groups and Zapp out of Hide vs Single Targets instead of just using TS vs both (as TS's AoE output tends to rely on procs which are less consistent and can't crit; even before you get into any of those ATBE/corpse blasting conversations from earlier in the thread!). I think that TS rotation with your previously posted build will require both Ageless running and a Base buff to be completely seamless - as otherwise towards the tail end of Ageless there'll be a very short gap before the second AS will be ready with just the "raw" global recharge. A quick eyeball suggests that it's not worth substituting HP for CB for extra wiggle room (despite the better chance for 2x Focus stacks) but it could potentially let you shuffle the slotting of CI around a bit (e.g. swapping the Dam/Rech for a Dam then +5 ing everything). In any case; glad to see things aren't hugely different on the median values in actual testing even with all the potential variance! 👍

JL can however be used as a decent filler to gain Assassin's Focus; and since it's up twice as often as TS you also end up with better -Res proc coverage. With like-for-like builds, the overall picture looks roughly like the below (using the average chance where appropriate for both Focus stack accumulation and damage/-res proc activation). Basically from what i can see the JL version starts out very slightly ahead; then the TS version gains more benefit from the Hide Proc; and then the JL version gains more benefit from the Gladiator -Res proc so in the end there's still only a smidge separating the two. So which is "best" will probably come down to a mixture of personal playstyle and whether or not you have teammates/pets to take advantage of the increased -res coverage. The builds referred to in the above are: Stalker - Electric_SD IOed (Rech + Procced JL).mbd Stalker - Electric_SD IOed (Rech + Procced TS).mbd Although I'll throw one more spanner in the works... because there is a little bit of extra wiggle room in the JL build's attack chain (e.g. you can sacrifice some global recharge for additional damage procs and have it still be "seamless") - the best I could come up with this afternoon was the below by proccing out both AS and JL: Stalker - Electric_SD IOed (Procced AS + JL).mbd This does however come at the cost of slightly increased downtime on the two nukes... so whether it's "better" will still depend on the player's goals + preferences. The changes to TS have been very beneficial though; and it's worth pointing out that Mids (at the time of writing) is still using the wrong values for it. I needed to refer to CoDv2 and manually poke at my Mids database to get accurate numbers appearing for TS's Single Target PVE damage during the above comparison... 😑

That's the thing though... we have plenty of high HP characters running around now with bigger numbers across the board than those old pre ED Regen Scrappers ever had. I ballparked oldskool Regen capping out at about ~167 HP/Sec (with accolades and Perma Dull Pain and IH + Integration + Fast Healing all 6-slotted with Heal SOs). Nowadays the same powerset on the same AT can easily reach the same health regeneration numbers whilst IH is running (so about a 50% uptime) plus things like Panacea Procs and Defense / Damage Resistance set bonuses; and a much better panic button in "new" Moment of Glory. And that's not even considering things like Rune of Protection and Barrier/Rebirth Destiny and Melee Core Hybrid. However Regen as a set has been utterly left in the dust defensively by things like Bio Armor (which beats it even in terms of Health regeneration) and almost any build these days will have sufficient endurance recovery to spam their attacks repeatedly so Regen has lost most of its old niches despite it still being roughly equivalent in performance to pre ED. And offensively it's not even close. The best a Regen Scrapper used to be able to achieve was about ~3.0x base damage (with their attacks 6 slotted for damage) with Focused Accuracy and Quick Recovery and 6-slotted Hasten to keep them hitting and ticking. Nowadays Scrappers will be sitting at ~2.3x base damage (attacks at ED capped damage aspect plus Musculature Core) plus ATOs and Damage Procs and -Res Procs and Reactive Interface and Assault Hybrid and oodles of non-Hasten-reliant global recharge. I honestly think it's a case of Rose Tinted lenses combined with new enemy groups and higher difficulty sliders. ((And that's before Challenges and Hard mode and "cheating" mobs that deal oodles of -Regen or -MaxHP like the infamous Crimson Prototype in Market Crash!)). Remember that before ED hit the toughest things we were fighting were stuff like Freakshow, Redside didn't exist yet and AVs/GMs still didn't regenerate a notable amount of health.

Last I ran the numbers the survivability performance ceiling of a pre-ED Regen was roughly equivalent to what they can achieve these days when IOed up even without Incarnates. The rest of the game has simply experienced so much power creep that it feels worse...