aethereal

I feel like all the elec/shield energy went to Stalkers.

In my mind the advantage of -damage is not that it adds up with resistance to reach the normal damage mitigation cap of resistance, it's that it can take you overcap. Get 90% resistance and 30% -damage and enjoy 93% mitigation.

I'd probably use it. Not for leveling all the way to 50. But an hour's worth to get to level 20 or so? Sure.

Guys, you are literally killing me. @EmperorSteele there is no realistic scenario in CoH as it stands where an enemy hits a Def 0 character 95% of the time and hits a "soft-capped" character 5% of the time. Like, that's theoretically possible within the mechanics -- for an enemy who has normal (1.0) Accuracy and +45% to-hit, and where your "soft-capped" character has 90% defense (not 45%). But there are no enemies with +45% to hit and no accuracy, and 90 defense is an insane bar. @Troo streakbreaker is irrelevant to high-defense characters. It would only kick in after 99 consecutive misses from the same opponent. That's a vanishingly rare proposition -- the hits you get from normal probability are much more common than a streakbreaker hit. The basic deal is that 45% defense mitigates 90% damage in ordinary content. Not 95%. 90%. Yes, there are exceptions and caveats. But if the level of nuance that you're looking for is "one sentence," then here it is: "In ordinary content, 45% mitigates 90% of damage, just like 90% resistance."

Some scattershot further thoughts on Defense, To-Hit, and mitigation. Something that I got wrong earlier in the thread, and which is... maybe important here is that the total mitigation that can be provided by Defense scales to the base to-hit of your opponent -- in the opposite direction from what you may expect. Though the amount of Defense required to get that mitigation scales the way you'd intuitively imagine. So, imagine an opponent with an Incarnate-style 63.75% base chance to hit, and no Accuracy bonus. Against a Defense 0 character, it hits... 63.75% of the time. Against a Defense 58.75% character, it hits 5% of the time. This allows the Defense character to get to greater than 90% mitigation (92.2% mitigation, specifically). That's... kinda weird. The ways that Accuracy and To Hit interplay are confusing. If an enemy had the standard 50% chance to hit, and sufficient Accuracy to bring their total chance to hit up to 63.75%, then 45 Defense would softcap you to them, and their floored to-hit chance would be 6.375%, and you'd have 90% mitigation. If on the other hand an enemy had 63.75% chance to hit and 1.0 Accuracy, then you need more Defense to floor their to-hit chance (58.75%), but that Defense would result in a lower chance to hit (5% instead of 6.375%), and thus a greater total mitigation (92.16%). (Note that 92% mitigation is significantly greater mitigation than 90%! You're talking about taking 20% less damage). Wacky. In an environment where that Defense level is relatively easy to achieve (full teams, for example), the thing where Incarnate enemies get a bunch of to-hit but no greater accuracy is actually a disadvantage to them. In HM content, where I believe (?) you're locked into +4 enemies (and thus high Accuracy) and the to-hit bonus is that much greater, this prooooobably doesn't cash out to a super big deal? That is, unlike at least some Incarnate content, you will have a hard time reaching Defense values that effectively mitigate you. It also seems like on some level the answer for Hard Mode mitigation has to be "both Defense and Resistance." It's also the case that enemies with below normal chance to hit can't be fully mitigated by Defense. Like, if something has a 40% base chance to hit you, well, sorry, the smallest a to hit chance can be is 5%, no matter what. That's only 87.5% mitigation. I don't think this actually actually matters all that much? Like, if something has a 40% base chance to hit you, it's almost certainly a pretty minor threat no matter what, so who cares that your mitigation is a little less effective. But it's theoretically possible that something could be added to the game that did ferocious levels of damage but only had a 25% base chance to hit, and then you'd find that Defense is a notably weaker mitigation strategy against it than Resistance. What does all this cash out to? Like, is this number-juggling for the hell of it? If something has like a 5% to 10.5% chance to hit you when its to-hit rating is floored, does it actually matter whether that's 90% of its damage to a theoretical 0 Defense character, or 87.5%, or 92.5%? Maybe we shouldn't pay much attention to "how much mitigation is it," versus "what is its actual chance to hit?" I think there's some validity there, but it does inform Resistance/Defense tradeoffs. Though again, in the hardest content, I think it's reasonable to question how much of a tradeoff there actually is. It's not resistance or defense, it's both. TL;DR: Defensive damage mitigation is crazily nuanced in CoH.

The thing that improved my Bio play was understanding DNA Siphon (which was thanks to some kind-forgotten individual on this board). DNA Siphon gives you healing per live enemy, but Regeneration per dead enemy in its effect. It's easy to overcap the healing it can give -- at risk of starting the obvious, you can't heal above 100% health. But the Regen is a gift that keeps on giving. So you want to pop DNA Siphon at the right time, after you've killed a bunch of, but not all of, the minions in a given spawn. You'll still go up to full health, but you'll get a nice chunk of ongoing mitigation through your Regen. Parasitic Aura is for the beginning moments of attacking a spawn, when most everything is still alive. Ablative carapace is for towards the end when you don't have many targets for DNA Siphon or Parasitic Aura.

My version of this was soloing Manticore on what was in retrospect a pretty shoddy archery/ninjutsu sentinel build. I just baaaaarely had the DPS to do it, so it took forever. Sentinel Archery's highest DPA attack is stunning shot, which leaves a discarded arrow on the ground, and at the end of the fight I was surrounded by a circle of probably 200+ discarded arrow. Sorry, it was a long time ago, no screenshots.

I did way back on Live, in a very different environment from today. I abandoned the character because it felt too fragile. But this was in an environment where I had much greater difficulty affording IOs. I think the big issue with all the various thoughts about ramping up healing/regeneration through whichever strategy is that unlike resistance and defense, you don't go through an increasing-returns curve with healing/regen. So the deal with defense/resistance is it gets harder and harder to build as you stack more and more of it (you exhaust the easy things like for example the +def/res-all unique IOs, and the powers, and you start having to go 5 or 6 deep in sets to get a bonus to two def/res types), but on the other hand you also get more and more return for that deeper investment. With heal/regen, you have a similar thing of exhausting the low-hanging fruit and relatively powerful options and have to give up more and more from the rest of your build to get another heal or regen bonus, but you get linear returns instead of increasing returns. And, I mean, on some level maybe that's how defense and resistance should've worked from the start, maybe the increasing returns curve there was a mistake. It certainly deforms the meta. But as long as that's the comparison, I think it's going to feel frustrating to, for example, sacrifice a ton of damage in your powers by slotting the +chance for self heals from Power Transfer in all your attacks. (Of course, per a point I think you made earlier in the thread, we could imagine the devs tuning the linear return on healing to be so high that despite the lack of increasing returns, characters were able to reach the kind of mitigation levels that are obtainable with softcapped def/hardcapped res. Or even more! Nothing stops them from making Regen heal you back to full health every second! But, I mean, in practice they aren't going to do that. So that's why I generally focus on the beaten path, established by Willpower and Bio, that getting Regen up to being a well-performing mitigation set will involve some substantial increase in layering in either Resistance or Defense.)

I didn't realize that Accuracy (uniquely among stats in CoH to the best of my knowledge) stacks multiplicatively with itself instead of additively. But I see that that's correct. I stand corrected on the amounts, I was assuming it was 1 + 0.2 + 0.3 + 0.4 = 1.9 for the boss example. Mea culpa! It's still not common to exceed Accuracy 1.9 all told outside of AV fights (assuming no +to-hit). A normal +4 boss is 1.3 * 1.4 = 1.82 accuracy -- it needs a high-accuracy power to breach 1.9. A +4 lieutenant is 1.61 Accuracy, although with a 1.2 accuracy power, it gets to very barely above 1.9 Accuracy (1.92 -- the mitigation of 45% defense drops from 90% to 89.83%).

Your post gives the strong impression that any amount of Accuracy reduces the mitigation provided by Defense. You never at any point in your first post mention that Accuracy equal to or below 1.9 (for enemies without ToHit bonuses) do not result in mitigation reduction for Defense. And 1.9 Accuracy is a pretty high bar -- a +4 Boss with a 1.2 base accuracy power would reach 1.9 Accuracy, but not exceed it. A +4 AV with a 1.0 base accuracy power reaches but doesn't exceed 1.9 Accuracy -- so you either need a +4 AV with a higher-than-usual accuracy power, or a +4 Boss with a higher-than-"normal high"-accuracy power, or whatever. So yes, I was disagreeing with what you wrote. I don't claim to know what was in your head when you wrote it, but the text that you wrote does a bad job of explaining the reality of the situation. In contrast, the text I wrote was careful to explain the caveats, and it seems like you didn't read it or didn't understand it.

Dude. I said that in the message you just quoted.

No, you add up the ToHit and the defense -- so -20% ToHit and 35% defense is the equivalent of 55% defense (so it's 10 over softcap for ordinary content). So, I mean... yes, that would decrease damage by 90% in typical content, but so would -10% ToHit and 35% defense. To be clear: I'm talking about the amount of ToHit debuff that lands, not the amount that your power nominally does. As a debuff, ToHit is affected by the purple patch -- so if you're using it on a +4 enemy, the nominal amount of the power is multiplied by 0.48 before it lands. And ToHit is I believe further affected by AV resistance. This is why, I think, many people in the ultra-high performance crowd are less enthusiastic about ToHit debuffs than they are about defense. Defense (including ToHit debuffs) and Resistance are multiplicative in effect. So if you have floored enemy to-hit chance (by whatever combo of to-hit and defense) and gotten to Tanker resist cap, then you have mitigated damage to 10% * 10% = 1% (99% damage mitigation). So yes. Any amount of resistance combined with floored to hit will mitigate damage by more than 90%.

I think this is a valuable point. In a lot of ways, we focus too much on the expected case here. Unless you're open to faceplanting every, what, tenth spawn to twentieth, what we should be considering is how much damage you take not in the expected case, but the 90th or 95th percentile of unlucky cases. Note that luck does play a factor for Resistance-based characters as well -- if enemies hit you 50% of the time (ie, they're even-conn minions with no to-hit bonuses, and you have no Defense), then they can still hit more than 50% of the time and you'll take more damage when they roll well. However, the downside is greater for Defense-based characters than Resistance-based characters. If the enemies expect to hit you 50% of the time, then your maximally unlucky case is they hit you 100% of the time, and thus you take 2x your expected incoming DPS. If the enemies expect to hit you 5% of the time, then your maximally unlucky case is they hit you 100% of the time, and thus you take 20x your expected incoming DPS. Note that the maximally unlucky case for the Defense character is much more unlucky than the maximally unlucky case for the Resistance character. But also note that when you're talking enemies who have say a 70% chance to hit you (because of Accuracy bonuses), your unlucky downside is that much more reduced. The whole mitigation question is almost impossibly nuanced, which is why we often retreat to simple cases.

Yes (besides cases where you're at extreme level shifts (+6 or more) or where enemies get +to-hit from their powers. I believe so, though it's shockingly hard to get information on the to-hit bonus for Incarnate characters. This is the common wisdom at leaast. I don't think so. I understand this to be the place where the to-hit bonus for Four Star content is added: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=challenge_empowerment.challenge_empowerment_3.hard_mode_3 That suggests as far as I can see +25% to-hit. That would mean that enemies would have a base 75% chance to hit, so you'd need 70% defense to floor their to-hit chance, so 70% defense to get 90% damage mitigation. EDIT: Caveat about hard mode (especially) and incarnate content: because of the higher base chance to hit, you're much more likely to be in the scenario where accuracy bonuses overcap the base chance to hit, and thus flooring the chance-to-hit mitigates damage by less than 90%. In normal content, enemies need 1.90 Accuracy to touch 95% chance to hit you. In Four Star content, they need only 1.27 Accuracy to touch 95% chance to hit, so it's pretty likely that they will be way over cap on to-hit chance, so mitigation will be less than 90% even by flooring their to-hit. I am open to being wrong about incarnates and hard mode!

Yes, 45% defense and 90% resistance both decrease damage by 90%, assuming no to hit buffs (and other minor caveats). Contra @America's Angel, accuracy doesn't change the mitigation provided by defense. Consider an enemy who attacks with accuracy 1.2. Against a defense 0 target, the attack hits .5 * 1.2 = 60% of the time. Against a defense 45 target, the attack hits (.5 - .45) * 1.2 = 6% of the time -- a reduction of 90%. To hit bonuses change the mitigation provided. Accuracy bonuses do not (with caveats). Enemies with enhanced accuracy hit more than 5% of the time, but they hit 10% as often as they would without defense. And neither commonly occuring level difference nor rank bonuses give to hit bonuses. Incarnate/hard mode do give to hit bonuses, 45% defense is not 90% mitigation there. The big caveat: if an enemy has so much accuracy that it overcaps to hit chance (ie, it would naturally have a greater than 95% chance to hit and it's capped down to 95%), then some of its accuracy is "wasted" against defense 0 characters but is functional against defense 45 characters and then softcap defense provides less than 90% mitigation.

I don't think that's possible with current powers tech. You could however do one of these things: 1. Put a toggle together with very high regen (or indeed repeated healing if regen wasn't able to get fast enough for your taste) but which had a high endurance cost and a recovery debuff. 2. A powerful, low-or-no-recharge-time heal with a quick animation that had a substantial endurance cost and put a stacking recovery debuff on you. In both cases you'd get something similar to what you're imagining -- very powerful damage mitigation that you can't just use all the time because it ruins your endurance. All that said, I'm not sure that something like that would actually be something that people want to play? I think that having limited power use because of endurance issues is generally frustrating rather than tactically interesting, because being out of endurance is so painful in CoH.

@Captain Fabulous is right. Almost all powers changes/additions can be done at the DB level without requiring any new code. I mean, there have been powers code additions in the HC era -- the new knock system, allowing multiple effects grouped together in an effect group, etc. And those have enabled some new powers (like the "reverse repel" that we've recently seen in for example Axe Cyclone). But most powerset creations/revamps don't do any code changes.

This ship has sailed. Play a savage melee character, your DoTs will work on robots, Devouring Earth granites, ghosts, etc.

I'm sure there have been lots of reasons over the years, but a few probably are: 1. The initial overpowered natured of Regen and subsequent nerfs took a lot of the design energy early on. 2. The Regen revamp didn't respect the cottage rule and was called "Willpower." That sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room for a cottage-rule-respecting Regen revamp. 3. It's remained a popular set because people want to make Wolverine and so it's never seemed that urgent to attack. 4. It's, like, hard. There's not a super obvious way to fix Regen and to some extent I'm sure people have looked at it and thrown up their hands and said, "I'm not sure what to do here." One thing that hangs heavy over the whole topic that I realize I forgot to explicitly state is the thresholded nature of regeneration/healing as a mitigation strategy. The stylized example is: Suppose that you have three sets that commonly face 100 DPS incoming damage and want to mitigate it down to 20 DPS. So you have 40 Defense, which mitigates 100 DPS to 20 DPS Or you have 80 Resistance, which mitigates 100 DPS to 20 DPS Or you have 80 hp/s healing, which mitigates 100 DPS to 20 DPS Now, you get hit by a debuff or an ambush happens or whatever, and you're facing 120 DPS instead of 100 DPS. Not a ton more damage, but some. With 40 Defense, you now take 20% of that 120 DPS, which is to say 24 DPS, which is to say 20% more damage than you did before With 80 Resistance, you now take 20% of that 120 DPS, which is to say 24 DPS, which is to say 20% more damage than you did before With 80 hp/s healing, you now take... 33% of that 120 DPS, which is to say 40 DPS, which is to say 100% more damage than you did before This is why things like "make Instant Healing a toggle" don't really solve fundamental regen problems -- as long as Regen depends on static heals and regeneration, it'll remain very fragile to scenarios where you expect more DPS than usual. Willpower and Bio both scale the regeneration that you get to the number of enemies around you (Willpower through RttC and Bio through DNA Siphon), which helps remove a lot of this thresholding (and also makes both of them slightly fragile to single hard-target enemies). And they also both have a lot more defense/resistance than Regen does. But that's sucked a lot of the design oxygen out of fixing the same problem for Regen. Do we basically just clone RttC for Regeneration? It'd be expedient, but it's another identity problem for the set.

I understand why people look to absorb as a solution to Regen's problems, but in terms of giving the set an identity, I think that Bio is already a heals-and-regen-plus-absorb based set, and a good one that also provides a damage aura and an offensive bonus. It's hard for me to imagine Regen not suffering in comparison to Bio if given an absorb layer.

I know. I presume you are referring to my suggestion that Regen needs to find four defense power pools -- that's because it can slot one of the LotG in MoG. 26% resistance to regen debuff, yes, though I don't think that in practice that's a very meaningful amount. It is of course 75% regen, and that's not nothing. But it's like 1/5th of my character's total regeneration (when not using Instant Healing), and there's no increasing returns deal with regeneration. So it's... I don't know, it's not like the power is exactly bad. But it's definitely not amazing. It could use something. I can't imagine that happening. Also seems deeply unlikely. I also think it's a very boring approach to Regen that would neither fix its problems nor give it identity.

This thread will be heavily on the "Feedback" side of "Feedback and Suggestions." I've come to think that creating detailed proposals isn't very worthwhile. So I've been playing an Energy Melee/Regen Brute recently. Brute for the higher hit points, given that Regeneration is a somewhat struggling armor set. Energy Melee mostly because I just like EM and thought of a theme that worked for the character. Things that Are Just Table Stakes for Regen I'm not here to rail against the click-heavy nature of Regen. I actually like active-play secondaries, and enjoy that Regen involves lots of clickies. If I wanted a non-clicky Regen, I'd use Willpower. I'm also not here to complain about debuff protection. Could Regen use some Slow Protection? Sure. Does it need Regen Debuff Protection? Not really, in my experience. But neither of these are crucial. Some Nice Things About Regen Moment of Glory feels very good. The animation time is pretty long, but with the effect kicking in about a second rather than waiting to the end of the animation time, you can be very reactive about MoG. I've punched it when my health was around 10% a lot of times, and I think only once have I hit it too late and died before it kicked in. It's not to be underestimated how much QoL there is in having just one toggle on an armor set! Especially early game when I'd often Revive after face-planting, it was nice to have my durability set up without 10 seconds of animation time for clicking seven toggles. Obviously, as you fill in your build, you end up with toggles from pools, but I appreciated the minimal toggles of the set. While Regen ain't a great armor set, once you force your way through some of initial awkwardness, it's not as bad as its reputation implies. I play at slightly lower difficulties than my other melee characters, but that means like +2/x4 at level 39, not like +0/x1 at level 39. You can easily feel like a superhero, playing Regen. Observations on Some Fundamental Issues with Regen Global Recharge and Its Awkwardness Okay, so Regen lives and dies by its clicks, and thus wants global recharge in spades. Nothing wrong with that conceptually, recharge is powerful to build for your other powers as well. However, this sets up a couple of different annoying dynamics with Regen. First, it creates an uneven leveling experience. Second, it sits uncomfortably with Regen's important secondary mitigation layer choices (ie, Defense vs Resistance). So first, the leveling. We live in an environment in which you can shoot for 180% global recharge or so, and a Regen character really should be looking for perma-hasten, given how much of their durability is tied up in Reconstruction, Dull Pain, Instant Healing, and Moment of Glory (and maybe also Shadow Meld for Scrappers/Stalkers). But that global recharge tends to come late in the build, since you'll get it through pool powers (Hasten and defense powers to put LotG into) that you'll mostly push off until after more powerful primary/secondary powers are available, and in the 10% global recharge set bonuses that are only available at level 50 (Purples/Superior ATOs). Before you get substantial global recharge, you have awkward downtime periods while you wait out cooldowns on MoG and Instant Healing (and even Dull Pain), if you want to push your performance. Obviously this is an endemic issue in CoH, but it's perhaps more painful for Regen than any other armor set. Second, Resistance/Defense choices. Regen would like to be able to build its secondary mitigation through Resistance, because it gets a decent base layer of resistance in-set, and because it gets no DDR, and because it's generally more thematic for Regeneration to be resistant than defensive. That also complements Rune of Protection, which seems like a good fit for Regen if you go that way (I'm playing a non-magic character and am ignoring RoP). Buuuuuuuuuut. You really, really, really want to go ahead and find four LotG slotting opportunities to make Regen work, and if you're buying four defense powers in pools, at that point it kinda feels like you should just go ahead and build Defense? In general, the tying of global recharge to defense through LotG is an awkward point in CoH's meta. The General Lack of Anything Special So Regen underperforms as a pure mitigation set. That's not terrible. Fiery Aura underperforms as a pure mitigation set too. But Fiery Aura, in return, gets pretty massive offensive capabilities. Regen gets... nothing. There's no real reason to suffer through Regen's mitigation problems, the set doesn't get you much of anything special. I guess in high-level team play, where you can expect to get beyond-softcapped defense through your teammates, you may find that you're more durable than other players because some of their mitigation is redundant, while yours likely isn't. But that feels like a small niche. At the dawn of CoH, Regen's schtick was "low downtime." In an environment where people might spend a significant amount of time between each spawn healing or waiting for endurance to return, early Regen perhaps had a meaningful niche here. But in modern CoH, everything is low-downtime, and as mentioned above, Regen's reliance on long-cooldown panic button powers may actually mean it has more downtime than other armor sets. As we'll see in the power-by-power commentary, a lot of Regen's powers suffer from the sucky feeling of being clones of other (better) powersets' powers. Power By Power Commentary Fast Healing Well, it's a power, all right. Honestly, I kind of wonder if, now that T1s in armor sets can be skipped, it's a good choice to skip this power. Seems hard to imagine that you'll notice it that much in mid to high level play. Reconstruction Your bread-and-butter mitigation in Regen, Reconstruction is a fine power, but something that doesn't feel awesome is that it's strictly inferior to Fiery Aura's Healing Flames. It feels a little like a slap in the face that you aren't even the best at generic click healing. It could use something, whether it's a lower animation time perhaps resist-all for a short duration. As click heals go, this doesn't feel special. (It's also worth noting that while other sets' click heals aren't necessarily strictly superior to Reconstruction, there are a lot of click heals, and a lot of them are either baaaaasically as good as Reconstruction or Arguably Better, If Not In Every Way. Electric, Dark, Energy, Ninjutsu, Fiery Aura, Radiation Armor, and Bio all have click heals and I mean mooooost of them are better?) Quick Recovery How the mighty have fallen. This was a really exciting power back in the day, when there were few armor sets that got any endurance tool, when Stamina wasn't inherent and wasn't available until level 20 after a painful two speedbumps, and before the profligate availability of IO endurance tools. Nowadays, I mean, I guess it's another place to slot the Power Transfer proc. There was a time when endurance management was a big strength of Regen, but I would much rather having a click endurance power like Ninjutsu's or Electric/Energy than Quick Recovery. (It would be hard for me to list Regen has having a particularly good endurance management component, at this point: I think Elec, Energy, Bio, Rad, and Ninjutsu are all better than Regen, and Willpower has the exact same power, so, while end management isn't a weakness the way it is for like SR, Invul, Dark, Shield, Regen is kind of middle of the pack). Dull Pain An important bread-and-butter power, serving as your first panic button early on, and then eventually being perma'd for the effective regeneration increase/hit points. Like Reconstruction, it's hard to feel like this is a cool special power when it's shared by Invulnerability, while Ice Armor gets a strictly superior version, and Stone Armor gets something similar and arguably better. At low levels, the cooldown is awkward and contributes to a downtime problem, though this mostly goes away by mid levels. I'd personally rather have the +hp in the toggle or an auto power, and have just a second pure click heal on a longer cooldown that could serve as a mini-panic button. Integration As previously mentioned, I like the one-toggle approach to Regen and appreciate that they didn't break up the +regen and the status protection into different powers. Bravo. Other than that, not much to say. Resilience The stunned protection/resistance is cute and thematic, and the resistance is sorely needed (though see above comments about resistance/defense for Regen). Might be nice to provide a small amount of enhanceable defense just so that it's a spot for another LotG, thus putting less pressure on Regenners to get four pool defense powers. Would be a good spot for some slow resistance. Instant Healing I basically hate this power. Everything about it is user-hostile. It's a panic-button power that you have to use preemptively, since it doesn't actually provide enough mitigation to rescue you if you're at very low health levels. It lasts too long for a panic button, taking you awkwardly past the mob that you're in, and pays for that with an obnoxious, painfully long cooldown. It's just a power that's expensive to use and hard to use well. Mostly I end up not using it, which sucks because obviously it's got a lot of power. It would be a much better power with a three minute cooldown and a 30 second duration. It would be better yet if it was completely rethought into something overall better. Revive I like Revive! Early-game, I just treated it as another panic button power -- this one used after you actually died. I found I was very able to Revive and successfully fight my way out of a mob that had just killed me, partially due to the Untouchable buff you get from it (that I didn't get killed through, unlike the P2W self-rez powers where I typically do get killed through them if there are significant numbers of enemies around), partly because of Regen's user-friendly one-toggle approach. Still, it has to be said that like Reconstruction and Dull Pain, Revive is Not Special. Armor sets that have a self-rez: Willpower, Fiery Aura, Dark Armor. And is Regeneration's the worst of the four? I think it might be? It's just deflating. Obviously, making the self-rez be the T8/T9 of a set is an old design choice and especially on Regen I think it's a missed opportunity. You're most likely to need a self-rez in early levelling, not once your build is mostly together, and it's a bread-and-butter trick for Wolverine and Deadpool. Moment of Glory Great, no notes, 10/10. Perhaps the only thing in Regen that truly feels unique and awesome. So What Should Be Done? Like I said, I'm not going to try to give detailed suggestions here -- the track record of HC staff taking people's extensive suggestions and putting them into practice is, what 0 for 10,000? But what Regen needs -- what was successfully given to sets like Energy Melee and Sonic Blast (and I think maybe Trick Arrow and others) in HC revamps -- is an identity. It needs a coherent thesis statement for "why should I make a Regen character?" I think that could be something like "we'll give you a bunch of damage bonuses after you click your clicky powers" and make Regen kind of another version of Fiery Aura -- a low-mitigation, offense-oriented powerset. Or maybe we could ramp up the resistance provided by Regen (again, maybe keeping with the click powers for identity) and make it a mitigation powerhouse, albeit an attention-intensive one. Or maybe something more exotic. But it needs, not just fixing some of its grievous flaws, but a reason for being.

Yep! I believe the thought is that this compensates for inability to use slow assassin's strike effectively/general lower value of ST/higher value of AoE, allowing Stalkers to usefully contribute on a large team. Note that Assassin's Strike has no chance to crit "naturally," no matter team size, you need to use Assassin's Focus to make it crit.

Stalkers usually crit at 10% solo plus 3% per team member. The way the game expresses that is "7% plus 3% per team member," but it's important to understand that you count yourself as a team member.

I agree, regeneration debuff resistance isn't regeneration's only or even main problem. Yeah, man, I wish people would take one step closer than just looking at the set name. If your regen is floored in Regen, you still have Reconstruction, Dull Pain, and Moment of Glory to mitigate damage. (And Revive to stand you up again, hopefully sans debuffs, if you fall). If Regen has a debuff resistance that it badly needs, it's Slow Resistance, but even that isn't its only or even main problem.