aethereal

You didn't "imply" it was one, you directly stated it, suggesting that, "all the set's AoE are spenders." Of the three AoE powers in the set (Rending Flurry, Shred, and Savage Leap), only Rending Flurry is a spender.

Shred does not spend Blood Frenzy, it builds it. They at one point contemplated making it a spender, but as far as I know it never has been a spender on live. It certainly is not one now.

Well, who knows. I mean, maybe just a mistake to build that way, or maybe his build just didn't have enough recharge to drop Vengeful Slice from the attack chain. The classic non-Stalker DB chain uses Blinding Feint, which obviously isn't there on a Stalker. Assassin's Strike has a much longer recharge than BF, so you can't just sub it in. I'm a little surprised that he couldn't drop VS with both Zapp and AS, but... who knows.

I don't have any direct experience with DB Stalkers, but... I don't think so? It doesn't seem any different from Vengeful Slice on other ATs, and it's not generally one of the good moves in DB. Decently high damage marred by long cast time, with Ablating Strike and Sweeping Strike and Assassin's Blades all being superior in DPA.

This is extremely not true.

Regen: Level 4 Quick Recovery. +30% recovery Bio: Level 1 Inexhaustible. +25% recovery, +add'l 10% with Efficient Adaptation available at level 10. Radiation: Level 1 Gamma boost. Complicated recovery that's based on your hit points, don't know what it cashes out to. Bio at least is pretty straightforwardly better. You're right that most other sets don't come in to their endurance tools until more like level 16 or level 20, but also level 4 is in fact too early -- nobody has endurance problems at level 4. I tend to find that endurance problems come on in the late teens. Again, back in the day, these powers would come later -- you'd get them at level 28 or something, and in particular I find that the early 20s, when you often have bad end redx slotting, are a brutal time for endurance. But with the earlier primary/secondary powers of a few issues ago, Regen's advantage has again eroded here. And while in some cases those powers do come late enough that there is a slightly awkward gap, it's also the case that they are mostly better endurance tools than Regen's pretty small recovery bonus. Even for a newbie, the first 20 levels go pretty fast.

I really want to disagree that Regen has particularly good endurance management, and I frequently found myself in endurance binds when playing Regen characters. Yes, Quick Recovery is something. In the old days when Stamina came at level 20 with a painful two-speedbump prerequisite and far fewer armor sets had endurance tools, Regen had premiere endurance management. But the game has moved on. Now, armor sets with endurance tools: Bio Armor Dark Armor Electric Armor Energy Aura Fiery Aura Ice Armor Ninjutsu Psi Armor Radiation Armor Regeneration Willpower And it's hard for me to say that any of those sets has unqualified worse endurance tools than Regeneration (I haven't tried Obscure Sustenance, in fairness). Yes, there are nuanced questions -- like Electric Armor has great Endurance economy but it breaks late and that's legit a tradeoff. But I just wouldn't call out Regen as having a particular strength in Endurance management. It's not an actual weakness, like Invul/Super Reflexes/Shield/Stone, but it's not a particular strength.

Yes, it stacks with itself. -10.5% to-hit for 20 seconds (Tanker numbers).

Perfection of Body has a damage bonus.

Moment of Glory has +damage.

Ice melee clearly has good mitigation and AoE. Its weakness is ST (it has Frozen Touch --great -- but then GIS is mediocre, IS is mediocre to bad, and Frozen Fists is atrocious).

Well, the good news is that you're significantly before the ratification of the Geneva Convention.

I think that lots of people would argue that Kinetic Melee is the worst melee set on Scrappers. Staff isn't great. But OP, this is a pretty easy game, and your first character is very unlikely to end up with the dubious honors of setting performance standards for this old, mostly-dead, easy game. I wouldn't sweat it. Play what seems fun to you.

Why do you think it doesn't receive global bonuses? Boosts are copied to the pseudopet.

"Never" is a long time. Who knows, maybe in a few years we'll be able to ask superintelligent AI to create infinite content for CoH including dozens of new arcs leading into the whole Battalion story or whatever it is. But I don't think that the incarnate system will be "finished" in the sort of default forward-looking environment of Homecoming as it stands.

To hit debuff from the AA proc lasts 10 seconds. Not affected by enhancements. 7.5% to hit debuff, resistable.

It looks like Energy Aura has a maximum possible recharge bonus of +40% if you manage to hit ten targets with Entropic Aura.

Huh, I was just glancing at Cross Punch, and does it only get 5% chance to crit for Scrappers, no 10% for LT's/Bosses? That's mildly annoying for it.

It's an ordinary crit. Like most DoT powers, crits on both Stalkers and Scrappers do the full value of the DoT as an up front package. Scrappers get a 162 point crit with Hemorrhage due to their higher scalar. It's 100% out of hide instead of 50% out of hide like Headsplitter because Headsplitter is an AoE. Back a few years, Hemorrhage used to get an anomalously high amount of crit damage out of hide. Now it gets the summed value of its normal damage, with no bonus for blood fury. It's exactly what you'd expect it to be.

This used to be true but was fixed years ago. Stalker Hemorrhage is now just as mediocre as everyone else's Hemorrhage.

Savage Melee is pretty good, and is probably the set that most benefits from being on a Brute as opposed to one of the other melee classes. It breaks in a little late. Savage Leap is the true gem of the set, and Rending Flurry is nice. Hemorrhage is unfortunately kinda weak. I find it a little boring to play because a lot of it is "maiming slash > savage strike > vicious slash > savage strike" at least while you're leveling. But the damage is there, you get a the Savage Leap opener and if you want it a nice 15' radius AoE, and I personally like the animations. Street Justice is generally good, if with slightly weak AoE, though I've never played it on a Brute.

I mean, sure. Anyone can play +0/x1 while taking only one power from their armor set, as always. Or if you play in 8-man teams against most content in the game you can do literally whatever and be fine (including staying by the door). And yes, if you're in a league so you have maxed def and probably also resist you again have this layer of additional mitigation that other armors don't, just like if you rotate god mode on yourself.

Okay, so here's what I'd like to say to people contemplating the new Regen: The idea that Regen has a big problem with regeneration debuff resistance is based on nothing. It's a giant game of forum telephone, where someone at some point said, "Super Reflexes has 95% DDR, so Regen should have 95% RDR," and other people picked that up and amplified it despite it never having been a significant problem with the set, until it became common wisdom. Look, if you want to get Fast Healing, feel free, but you should be aware that if you have a character with Fast Healing or without, if you're not allowed to look at the powers screen or monitor combat attributes, you very likely will be literally unable to tell whether you have that power or not even if you play 10 hours against a wide variety of content. The problem that Regeneration has -- both the original set and the revamped one -- is with damage. Using only the powers in the set, it has weaker mitigation than most armor sets. Spaghetti Betty and others have realized that you can plug this hole by essentially playing "Moment of Glory, Rune of Power, Hybrid Melee, and Barrier defense," and then having the other powers in Regeneration serve as an additional layer of mitigation on top of basically playing a maxed def or resistance character. This is in fact powerful, because most sets have nowhere to go once they max their def or res, but the big virtue of regeneration is that it's a whole different layer of mitigation that stacks well with def/res. However, if you don't continuously keep yourself in god mode with MoG + non-regen powers -- whether because that's not a style of play you enjoy or for concept reasons or whatever else -- you're going to struggle not with regeneration debuffs but with totally ordinary damage that is done not by 1% of the game but by 100% of enemies. Not throwing power choices on mostly-useless powers leaves things open to take that Shadow Meld or Rune of Power that will help a lot more with your survivability than another 20% RDR. If you don't want to take those, you should choose it based largely on whether you can usefully have it mule whichever or defense or resistance that you're chasing. Or just take another attack power.

But it has zero debuff resistance. Again, you are talking about the difference between 75% resistance and 95% resistance, some-but-not-all-of-the-time. If we were talking about actual damage resistance, we wouldn't even call 75% resistance a "hole." People think that Shield has good DDR, and its DDR is usually around 75%. I really want to know: do you actually have experience being killed due to regen debuffs?

Regen is far from singularly reliant on regeneration! It has two heals, a meaningful layer of resistance, and of course a defense godmode. While it will of course be significantly impaired if its regen is debuffed, it has other tools! Also, I don't know how much people actually are following this advice, but I note that the big advocates for this set tend to also take Rune of Power, Melee Hybrid, Shadow Meld, or other additional panic buttons. But, more relevantly, note that we're not talking about the difference between 95% regen debuff resistance and 0% regen debuff resistance. We're talking about the difference between 95% and 75%, and only some of the time. Like, this is such a tiny hole that has so many ways to handle it. Okay, but you don't hear people saying, "Invulnerability is a useless armor set because it has a problem with Sappers it must be given end/recovery protection." People don't say, "Devouring Earth Crystals basically entirely negate defense armor so you can't play defense armors." Plenty of armors have toxic and psi holes that are clearly much more likely to come up than this RDR hole, and mostly people say, "It's not that big a deal, just counterplay it, don't obsess over closing these holes." Like, if someone has been killed all the time because of regen debuffs and has come to the conclusion that they really want to play regen but their lived experience is that it's miserable due to not having the absolute highest level of regen debuff resistance theoretically possible in every part of the game, that's fair. I just want to ask: is that in fact what your experience is? Do you have lots of experience with deaths due to regen debuffs? Or is this getting wrapped around the axle on the forums?