ClawsandEffect

I don't have a hard time playing Regen. I have hundreds of hours of experience playing it from live to now. My main was a Regen Scrapper. I've played a bunch of other sets too, though. That's how I know what Regen's weaknesses are. But I do have a hard time accepting the idea that you are required to go outside the set and use things you don't even get until well after you hit level 50 in order to keep up with the other sets. No other melee armor set that I can think of has to lean on that many powers outside of the set to keep up with other sets that don't have to do that. Barrier and Melee Hybrid. Cool. How do those powers help you at level 40?

Well, if that's their stance then the things they've added to the game since then have ensured it will forever be the least played set. Relying on healing and nothing else to keep you alive means you're going to get 2-shotted by things on a regular basis.

I'm not a programmer, but it seems to me that a change to a single power in a set would be easier to implement than a mechanic that would have to be spread across the entire game. That's why I suggested what I did. It's more likely to be a feasible idea.

Regen's biggest problem is and always has been dealing with large amounts of burst damage coming in all at once. It can weather lesser damage coming in consistently, but 4-5 big hits happening quickly can easily drop you before you have a chance to heal or regenerate. The set is so narrowly focused on regeneration and self heals that there's very little it can do about that problem. You can build for defense, and it's effective enough, but the complete lack of DDR means it is extremely vulnerable to cascading defense failure. Getting significant amounts of resistance to anything other than S/L damage is nigh impossible. My proposed solution: Take Instant Healing and change it from a very long recharge, passive regen power into an absorb shield similar to Ablative Carapace (Bio Armor) or Particle Shielding (Rad Armor). Make the base values the same as Ablative Carapace and reduce the amount of passive regen it grants because the power would be able to be constantly up. A similar idea has already been done with the Sentinel version of Regen, and I think the Scrappter/Stalker/Brute version is long overdue for a similar buff. It works from a theme standpoint (You heal so fast the damage might as well not have happened at all), and any existing Regen character would not have to change anything in their slotting because the same enhancements would be used in it. It would go a long way to making Regen a more viable set for the more challenging endgame content that it currently struggles with. Regen is still fine for doing solo content, but the more challenging things get the more it falls behind other sets because it just doesn't have the tools to deal with the newer enemy groups. Another idea I had that is more of a secondary concern is maybe adding a small amount of universal defense to Resilience. Not a lot, maybe the same base value as Weave. I know it is possible to softcap a Dark Armor scrapper or brute to all damage types other than toxic and psi because I've done it. It's possible because Cloak of Darkness is essentially a second copy of Weave giving the same amount of defense. If Regen had something similar it would be possible to do with it as well. Sure, defense debuffs are going to strip it away pretty quick, but the regeneration and heals of the set are much more effective when you're not eating every hit to the face all the time. I was part of a group of people back on the live forums that discussed things Regen needed. We hashed it out in a thread over a few weeks and the devs ended up implementing a couple of the ideas that were tossed around (regen debuff resistance and expanding Resilience to all damage instead of just S/L). We talked about a lot more than that, but we were happy that they paid attention at all and looked into it for themselves. No one brought up an absorb shield back then because the mechanic didn't exist yet (this was in maybe 2009 or so). Anyway, I personally think converting Instant Healing to an absorb shield power would improve Regen enough for it to no longer be viewed as the red-headed stepchild of armor sets. Thoughts?

I'm not reading all 29 pages of this to see if someone has mentioned it yet. But the last power in the Thrown Blades set would thematically work with the Hail of Bullets animation from Dual Pistols.

I'd actually rather NOT see that happen, to be honest. As it stands now, anyone can play on the most basic computers you can buy nowadays. You don't have to have a dedicated gaming system to play. How many people would have to quit the game because it now has much higher system requirements that they might not be able to afford? It's a 20 year old MMO that costs nothing to play. It shouldn't require you to go out and spend $1,000 on a computer to play a free game. Create a sequel on a better game engine? Absolutely. Switching the current game over to one would do more harm than good.

Depends on the exact build. If it's a hover blaster then I shoot for ranged defense and pick a secondary that doesn't need to be in melee to shine. If I plan on being in melee a lot and there's no other particular theme I take Scorpion Shield and softcap S/L/E defense. Both ways are viable without sacrificing damage output. It's not so much that I'm worried about defense to keep my blasters alive. I want to keep them as mez free as possible. If the mezzes don't hit I can keep using my harder hitting attacks.

Thanks for owning up to it and apologizing for letting get the better of you. Happens to all of us on occasion. My argument against it actually has nothing to do with the visuals. Well, it sorta does, but that's a secondary concern. My argument against it is based in the fact that a temp power that exactly duplicates a power pick in appearance is a way of sidestepping choosing that power. That matters because a power pick, which you get a finite number of, is considerably more valuable than influence spent on a temp power, which is effectively limitless. If you get your way and the devs create this, what's to stop people from asking for a snipe power for their scrapper or stalker so they can take Body Mastery as their Ancillary for the extra recovery and just buy the snipe that is basically the only reason anyone takes any other epic pool for those ATs? I realize you cannot slot temp powers, but they are affected by damage buffs from other sources. It just opens a can of worms that can (and if my experience on both this and the old forum is any indication) will lead to people asking for ways to spend influence on avoiding having to take certain pools to get a single power they want. And they will point to this right here as their example of why they should get it, regardless of whether that is the reason you want this or not. You might be purely concerned about the visuals. Other people will look for ways to game the system with their own requests.

So let me see if I have this right. The visual of a jetpack that you'll be using for a few seconds at a time bothers you MORE than the fact that your character (that you have canonically decided through your build choices cannot fly on his own) is suddenly hovering in the air beating on something? Because, as someone else who builds for theme first, if I built a character who couldn't fly naturally and they were in the air without some sort of visual aid, that would bother me more than the jetpack. Regardless of their origin.

I have a relevant question that hasn't been asked yet: Why are you so dead set against taking Fly or Mystic Flight when you have acknowledged several times in this thread that they are better than the temp power? 🤔 I would think if you wanted your character to be able to fly under their own power, a version that you can actually slot and get set bonuses from would be the ideal solution? Is it because you want to buy your way out of having to use a power pool choice on it to better min/max your character? Please explain why you would prefer to have an inferior flight power (that you yourself pointed out) over one that can be slotted to make your character better. If I want a character to be a flyer, I take both Fly and Hover so I can slot a LotG in Hover and 2 BotZ in Fly (for ranged defense). That would make your character objectively better than a temp power AND have the appearance you want. But you don't want to do that. I'm curious as to why.

No. You haven't lost anyone at all. You're just being disagreed with and you don't like it. Everyone reading this thread is well aware of exactly what you want. There are just a number of us who don't think you should be able to have your cake and eat it too for approximately the same amount of influence I earn in 30 seconds in a fire farm. Every temp power in the game has a specific visual tied to it, precisely because it is NOT a power that is inherent to your character. It is literally something they bought. And from everything you've said here, it is plainly apparent that you want a flight power that IS inherent to your character but only costs 50,000 inf for a half hour instead of a power pool pick....like every other power that is inherent to your character. You want to have a productive discussion? Coming at people like they're too stupid to understand what you're saying isn't how you do that.

Your characters are so bound by their theme that a sorcerer would refuse to use a tech derived jetpack to fly, thus saving his magical energy for something more important? Even when the technology for said jetpack is readily available at retail stores all over the city he's active in? Seriously, according to the lore of the game, he can literally walk into a technology store and BUY a jetpack. The Hero Corps rep in Steel Canyon hands out hundreds of them like Halloween candy every day. Your character's origin doesn't matter at all to use one. Especially when they are apparently so simple to use that the Hero Corps guy will happily hand one over to a time displaced Roman Legionary who is still dumbfounded by the existence of cars. Sorry, dude. It really sounds like you just want Flight without spending a power pool pick on it.

There's a two handed broadsword model available for Katana as well. It actually looks really good with the animations.

Congrats. My DA/BS tank just got his T4 Alpha. I had to do it with threads and Empyrean Merits because he has had 4 Shards drop for him TOTAL. I usually try to at least use Shards and Notices to craft my T3s, but it wasn't an option on that character because he only ever got enough Shards to craft a single common component. I've been playing him consistently through the Dark Astoria content. He hasn't had a Shard drop in over a week. Your experience is your own, and by no means reflects the experience of others. Not everyone ever gets enough Shards to be useful for anything. Since I've already got the only power you can use them at T4, any more that I have drop will be completely useless for anything but converting into threads.

This. I have a tank I'm working on. His Alpha is already tier 4 via the threads/Empyrean route. Why? Because he has had a grand total of FOUR Shards drop in that time span. Getting rid of Shards I'd be in favor of.