aethereal

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.

You'll fine the AoE in DM improved on all ATs compared to when you played it, and Tankers will get a wider cone and I believe a bigger AoE on Touch of Fear, plus greater target caps for them.

Well, Tankers get their usual AoE bonuses. I don't know if you played the DM on Scrapper before or after the DM tweaks, but Shadow Maul was improved and Touch of Fear got an AoE damage component.

Correct, though Bio does have both a taunt aura and a damage aura (but the taunt is not actually in the damage aura, per @InvaderStych's point).

The double XP buff removes a completely trivial amount of inf. You can earn plenty of inf while leveling while keeping double XP running -- merits are the easiest way, but there are others. Common IOs are cheaper than constantly upgrading SOs. However, I really encourage people to, even if self funding, even if allergic to learning slightly complicated strategies for earning inf, buy at least cheap sets. It's a trivial amount of money and it improves the leveling experience so much. SOs are the lazy strategy, not the cheap one. Sentinel sets are pretty forgiving while leveling, with lots of endurance tools etc. Energy Aura and Ninjutsu both are defense sets (good, powerful) with heals and endurance heals (useful, forgiving). Electric for the primary maybe? But honestly, if I were you, for the primary I'd just go with whatever looks good to you. I don't think there are serious trap sets that are terrible.

They're left/right mirrored, not front/back. That said, I think people continue to make too much of the coding work necessary to make them unmirrored. There are plenty of parts of the costume that don't use mirroring. I don't think it's a huge amount of work: I think the problem is, okay, let's say they unlock this technological capability. Then what? HC for whatever reason has been reluctant to greatly expand the costume options. Who's going to make and QA some giant number of asymmetrical textures in order to make this change pay off?

There are plenty of asymmetrical head patterns, too, not just detail 1 and detail 2. Both the base face and the colors that you can apply to the face are asymmetrical for a variety of patterns. It obviously would require coding for chest and lower-body patterns to be asymmetrical, but there's no reason to believe that the coding challenge is insurmountable.

I played an elec/elec scrapper and respecced out of Fitness in the early 40s. I joked that my character's autobiography was going to be called, "Seven Toggles and No Stamina: The Terry Watt Story." But we got inherent fitness when the character was like 49th level.

You're right about the stacking. That suggests that if four players had Ageless Radial and were pretty disciplined about applying it in rotation, they could achieve high DDR all the time (or almost all the time, considering imperfections in rotations). One character on the team who applies significant defense (Forcefields or Time or whatever), or a whole team of people who all have Maneuvers, or a few players with Barrier or whatever, plus four players with Ageless seems like it could put you into very high defense situation that's very robust -- but you're right that it's a high-team-coordination thing.

So I believe this is the power: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=incarnate.destiny.ageless_total_radial_invocation&at=tanker Looks like the DDR is 85% for 15 seconds, then 42.5% until the 30 second mark, then 21.25% until the 60 second mark. 85% will generally protect you strongly from defense debuffers, 42.5% will protect you from weaker debuffers or if you have a significant overcap amount, and honestly I don't think you'll notice the 21.25% DDR -- the cascade will make it irrelevant. So holistically I'd say, "It'll get you through alpha once every 2 minutes with your defense in good shape, but not more than that." It doesn't stack with other people's ageless, if I'm understanding CoD correctly, but an eight person team could theoretically with good coordination keep 85% up all the time, and 42.5% with many bursts up to 85% seems pretty plausible (if and only if the entire team, or like 6+ of them, have Ageless Radial).

Well, gosh, that's the weirdest way to eat the animation time of weapon redraw that I can think of, but you're right, I can clearly see it happening. I stand corrected.