aethereal

I think there's something to this, and I argued before and during the beta for, instead of adding a toggle, to let IH be more useful as a survival button (I think IH as a survival button kinda sucks because you probably don't need 90 seconds of "oh shit things are going badly," and then the downtime for the power is inconveniently long to make up for the long duration that you probably are ignoring the back half of). That said, I think there are some styles of play/goals issues here: 1. There are players who really want to have a thematic regenerator. They aren't interested in making a character who builds a thick layer of resistance with Rune of Power and Melee Hybrid and then supplements that with regeneration, they want Wolverine. They are much more interested in a character who mostly relies on their regeneration for day-in-day-out mitigation, and to the extent that they supplement that with a layer of defense or resistance, they want it to be "invisible," so it doesn't interfere with the class fantasy. 2. Then there are players who just want to be a regenerator and who also don't want to do active clicking (and who for whatever reason don't like Willpower). 3. And finally there are people who are mostly concerned with performance, particularly performance on team content (probably mostly hard mode). These people have different preferences and I think people in group 1 and 2 will clearly prefer RR, while people in group 3 might find IH more appealing.

You mean Instant Healing rather than Fast Healing, right? Fast Healing is the auto-power that is frankly kinda bad, Instant Healing is the click power that is mutually exclusive with Reactive Regeneration. You're right that Reactive Regeneration's utility degrades if you rarely get hit. On the other hand, if you rarely get hit, then, uh... do you need it? In general, in high-level, large teams where people are giving substantial amounts of defense through support powersets, Maneuvers, or Barrier, you're going to find that you're highly durable with or without these powers except in situations that cut through a lot of defense (like Hard Mode content or highly defense-debuffing mobs), in which case... you're back to your usual tradeoffs because you are getting hit pretty often. Instant Healing is more powerful when it's up, but Reactive Regeneration has 100% uptime and Instant Healing does not.

I'm not sure about this, but I think the "updates durations" part of the stacking rule means that when you apply a second stack, the first stack gets its remaining duration reset to 45 seconds? Worth checking out, at least. EDIT: I just ran a quick test on Brainstorm. It does appear to work like that: I put 100% recharge enhancement in the power (so recharge time was 30s), then clicked it, and stacked three icons in my buff bar, with none of them blinking or anything, at the end of my 1 minute period of clicking every 30 seconds (so, t=0, click once, t=30, click second time, t=60, click third time, three buff icons, none of the icons blinking at any point).

Check out City of Data! It gives you this info. Hover over or tap the icon that looks like a clock on that power effect that you screenshotted: "stacks and updates durations of current effects up to three times."

Note that, somewhat uniquely for Scrapper sets, Concentrated Strike does not crit. So there's no benefit in having Concentrated Strike be one of the "heavy hitters" set up by Critical Strikes. Concentrated Strike has reasonable fundamentals for slotting Critical Strikes: its animation time is long, but only about half a second of that animation time is after the effect, so it doesn't waste much of the window of Critical Strikes. Maybe the biggest problem with putting the proc there is that if Concentrated Strike does recharge your Power Siphon, you would want to delay your use of Power Siphon until after the proc window, which seems fiddly.

It has lower Lethal resist than Smashing. Not necessarily enough to constitute a "hole."

Willpower also doesn't have a click heal, unless we're counting Resurgence.

Y'know what's totally hilarious? Repulsing Torrent also has a weak crit on top of everything else.

I think you're misreading that. It's a change to "-Res" modifiers, to powers that debuff resistance, not to armors that increase your own resistance. So for example Temporary Invulnerability gives a base +30% resistance to Smash/Lethal on both live and beta (while Brutes/Scrappers/Stalkers get +22.5% from the same power).

We see that in practice, this does not nearly make up for the Tanker advantage. Those people don't actually care about melee classes, to the extent that they believe this they can play Blasters and Corruptors. It's also broadly sophistry. People are like, "Four star content is the hardest in the game." Sure, by some measure, but it's hard in a very specific way (and a way that was specifically designed to undervalue mitigation in general and defense in particular). It's not representative of the rest of the game. This is kinda like saying, "The hardest thing in baseball is to do a super-fastball pitch (arguably true), so we don't need to care about whether someone can hit or catch a ball." Perhaps true if you only care about pitchers, but ignores 90% of the game.

This is a fundamentally bad lens for analysis. Yes, Tanker caps are the same for resistance/defense as Brutes -- but Tankers have a much, much easier time reaching those caps. This gives them vastly more build versatility than Brutes. It can make Tankers higher damage mitigation than Brutes (the Tanker can reach one cap and then build towards a second one in a way that Brutes simply can't achieve), or they can build overcap in various ways (Tankers certainly have a much easier time hitting incarnate softcap than Brutes do), or they can build for offense. Tanker's durability advantages can't be "free." They're a massive advantage that can be (imperfectly) traded off for other build goals. (I also think it's a mistake to imagine that Tankers will not, at some point in the future, be able to trade their inherent durability for offense. Procs might be nerfed in some way, but unless they nerf them specifically by only allowing one proc to be slotted per power, Tankers will still be able to fit more of them.)

Procs are a huge, huge, perhaps dominant, feature of CoH's meta across every AT. That's perhaps the exact reason why you can't say, "Well, before we do anything else, first we have to fix procs." Like, you think that people are upset in this thread, wait until every single engaged builder in on the boards turns out to post fifty times each about their feelings on your proposed proc fix. But it's also just straightforwardly true that large target caps are a big deal, they've been a big deal everywhere, and Tankers who get enlarged AoE areas and relaxed target caps without any loss of base damage to their AoE attacks have a huge advantage, even without procs.

Is there any chance that you're doing this against some kind of exotic mob that has huge Hold Resistance?

Yes.

Could it be intended as an AFK Farming nerf? Just trying to think about what situations people might do fairly low chip damage to a large number of mobs in a way that some might deem problematic.

I appreciate that concept, but the low-level powers for Regeneration are so underwhelming. When I did a lowbie Regenerator (before these changes that we're testing), Dull Pain was my panic-button power, the way Instant Healing later was, where it bailed me out when I was in over my head. It's not great -- the recharge is indeed too long for a lowbie -- but it was an okay compromise. If you don't want to move Second Wind down to T1-4, then consider moving Ailment Resistance earlier, or even Integration. I agree that Ailment Resistance + Restoration feels decent -- I noticed that in my testing, Restoration felt a lot better once I had Ailment Resistance. I think the core of the problem here is that Fast Healing and Quick Recovery are both low-end powers that are just not impressive, Restoration is fine but not really good until you get both Ailment Resistance and some recharge, and of the first four powers, only Ailment Resistance really feels impactful. I don't totally understand keeping Fast Healing and Recovery unchanged in a medium revamp of the set. It feels like even with the other improvements, Regen has some power budget to spare, and something to up both the power level (minorly) and the charisma (majorly) of the first half of the powerset would be welcome.

The gap narrows a lot if you increase the damage buff (because Tankers get more per percent of damage buff), and especially if you give them both procs. But the big juice for Tankers in terms of damage comparison with Brutes isn't in apples-to-apples comparisons (150% damage buff + 2 procs each, say). It's that Tankers have a (much) easier time fitting more procs in their attacks while hitting any given durability goal.

I'll do another +1 on Dull Pain's usage going from reactive early, when it can't be perma'd, to proactive late when it can. And Second Wind + Ailment Resistance is a good change which gets you half of the max HP earlier, and which also frees up your Second Wind usage to be somewhat more flexible by not pushing you as hard into the "you shouldn't care about the heal, just the max HP" paradigm. But then Second Wind comes super late in the set. Anyway, I did a little testing at 30, with better slotting, and predictably my endurance woes go away at this stage. Right now, MoG and Second Wind are in the somewhat frustrating "very low uptime" mode, but that's not really something that you can do anything about, it's just the City of Heroes global recharge situation.

Yes, it only has been for 15 years or whatever.

To some extent, sure. Longer and less powerful, but with a somewhat similar use case. But Regen is the reactive click set. It's gonna have several different powers with similar functions. Like, nobody complains that all of SR's powers are duplicates of each other except for different categories of defense. Why would it be a dealbreaker for regen to have powers of similar broad function but different details?

I really want to make the case that the basic problem with Instant Healing was just its duration versus its recharge. So its recharge was/is 650 seconds, its duration is 90 seconds. If you're slotted for 250% recharge (like: 180% for perma-hasten + 70% for near-maxed local recharge), then it has 185 second recharge, so a touch less than 50% uptime. 50% uptime isn't bad! It's a powerful power. But the problem is that 90 second duration. Since this isn't a power you can perma or come close to perma, you want to be strategic about using it. Once you use it, you have three minutes until you can click it again, even with level 50 kinds of recharge. So you use it sparingly. You build around mostly not needing instant healing and then use it to push you over the line. But that kind of use case almost certainly doesn't need to be 90 seconds. Probably in 15 seconds, you've pushed past whatever problem you had and now you're back in your default case of "you're doing okay." The remaining let's say 60-75 seconds of the power are largely wasted. And then you have 95 seconds without it. This means that you try not to click it until it's a real emergency, but Instant Healing actually struggles with really deep emergencies, it wants a little buffer to work with -- it is after all a regeneration power, it operates over time. If the power had a 30 second duration, and a 240 second recharge base, then the same 250% recharge assumption would put it at 68 second cooldown, so 30 seconds up and 38 seconds down. You could then use it to get yourself out of trouble with a spawn, back up to full health, and then have it available reasonably quickly again. The result of that is you feel better about clicking it when you start to need it, instead of trying to save it, and 30 seconds is almost certainly long enough to get yourself out of any trouble that you're going to get out of. Honestly, I think that simple a change to Instant Healing would be better than Reactive Regeneration, and better at making Regen feel unique.

Huh, well, maybe I'm wrong.

You're misunderstanding where to-hit checks exist. You seem to think it goes like this: Gather up all targets in area > roll to hits against them in some order > when a to-hit results in a hit, deduct the 1 from remaining target cap > stop when either you run out of targets or target cap hits the appropriate value. But it doesn't. It goes like this: Gather up all targets in area > if there are more than the target cap, remove from the target list any over the target cap > then roll to-hits against the remaining targets (if you miss, they still take up target cap) EDIT: I guess if you just remove the thing about to-hit, what you basically mean is you want the logic for excluding targets from the area when you need to cut the list down to the target cap to prioritize non-mezzed targets. I believe (but am not totally sure) that right now it just looks at distance from the center-point of the target. I don't imagine that a code change to intro mez status into the target cap selection process is in the cards, but it's an interesting idea!

That's not how target cap works: The game selects a number of targets in the area equal to the cap (if there are more targets in the area than the cap), then rolls to hit checks against them, it doesn't like roll-to-hit, then only if it's a hit does it count against the target cap.

8' radius autopower/toggle with 3.5 PPM proc rate: 31% 12' radius autopower/toggle with 3.5 PPM proc rate: 25% (Chance is checked every 10 seconds in each case, and it's per target. So approximately 1/4 of your targets will be hit by your proc every 10th second, rather than a little less than 1/3rd.)