aethereal

It's really great how responsive Cobalt Arachne is.

I leveled to 25 and got Reactive Regeneration, three-slotted it, and put in Harmonized Healing. -------- I started off by pushing difficulty to +1/x4 doing the Unholy Masquerade mission or whatever it's called from the Freaklok arc. I died a lot, but, like, that mission is really annoying? So I started the Roy Cooling arc and did the first mission there (still at +1/x4). So, first of all, personal idiosyncratic feedback: I don't really like that Reactive Regeneration is a toggle. I'd have preferred a click power (but not instant healing, which has just a garbage combo of long recharge and long duration). I think that some of the charm in Regeneration is having only one toggle, it makes it stand out. I particularly think it's kinda weird in the set as it is currently constituted that what will ultimately be a pretty click-heavy set only has one click in until you hit the last few powers. I imagine that most people will disagree with me here, but for whatever it's worth, I think a click would be more fun than the toggle. More universal feedback: Reactive Regeneration felt relatively strong, but I didn't get much flavor from it. Its baseline regeneration seems like it swamps the reactive regeneration it gives. My normal regen was about 35 health per second, and when I was fully in the middle of a mob and topping out the reactive regeneration, it was 45 health per second. I mean, that's not a bad amount of difference per se, but it was hard to feel viscerally. Since it ticks up pretty slowly (two seconds), it was still pretty easy to get overwhelmed. It did have a nice synchronous play with Restoration, I often felt like, "Oh, Restoration gives me the breathing room for Reactive Regen to come up to speed," but just the speed it came up to was kinda underwhelming. Regen still feels thresholded at this level: one spawn was no real problem, but two spawns went very rapidly to dead. This is always a problem with Regen and maybe it's part of the intended flavor of the set, but to me it #feelsbad that there's such a thin line between "you're not in any trouble at all" and "you're dead." I was thinking Reactive Regen would help with this, but at least at this level I didn't really feel it. I also continue to have endurance problems -- I was chewing blue insps all through the mission. This is no doubt due partially to my (intentionally) lackluster slotting, and like all endurance problems in CoH it'll work itself out as enhancement values become better and slots become more plentiful, but it's kinda annoying. Bottom line: With Reactive Regen and Ailment Resistance, regen feels reasonably sturdy (in a way that's positive compared to the old set), but at this level not really very interesting or distinctive.

According to @macskull the Tanker inherent taunt does not drop off, so you can control aggro pretty effectively even if you're doing lousy to your last several targets.

Level 20/21: I slotted 4 of one of the Brute ATOs, and 5 of Harmonized Healing in Restoration, all of Bruising Blow in a couple of attacks, then I put SO level 20 healing and accuracies in powers that wanted them. Still not fully enhanced, but pretty close. ----- I did the first two missions of the Freaklok arc (Agent Watkins), still on 0/x3. Definitely having more powers and slotting them made a difference. I remained pretty insp-dependent on the first mission, with heavy-hitting Vazhilok doing a lot of damage. On the second mission, mostly Freaks, they were embarrassingly unable to move my health bar, but I kept running out of endurance, and had to manage that pretty carefully, which was... not bad, but less good than I would've imagined for an armor set with only one toggle and an endurance tool even if it's a bad one (seriously, can we please replace Quick Recovery?) Anyhow especially when I leveled partway through mission 2, it was pretty lol-worthy. I just facerolled Dubstitch at the end with no insp defense. His Zoombies and sneaky champions and he himself did get me to fairly low health, but I took him out fast. Regeneration definitely feels better than it did on live (I played basically this same character through solo levelling on live). Like, I think it took me into the 30s before I was doing 0/x3 on this character on live. Amazing the difference that Ailment Resistance makes, as I think that's the only real difference I've so far actually encountered in the new set. Since I'm still only really testing ailment resistance, I think I'll push my level again and try to get to some of the new powers.

Okay, so my lowbie adventures continue: I did the Chernobog and, uh... whatever the next EB mission is called, with the female Skull who teleports in and out to attack the councilwoman? Whatever. Both at 0/x3 with solo bosses turned on. 0/x3 is pretty rough for lowbie Regen that's slotted with just a smattering of DOs. The EBs themselves are pretty easy for me with Energy Melee, but the normal mobs require about two orange/purple insps to survive for the most part. That feels about right? Like, trying to do that difficulty level at levels 10, 11, and 12 with bad enhancements feels about right. ---- Ailment Resistance feels like the first Regen power that actually #feelsgood. It's not a dramatic difference in survivability, but it gives you a little buffer to eat insps/click Restoration before you go down. It makes Restoration better as well, I assume. I put one DO healing enhancement in it -- I'm not sure it makes sense to slot heavily with its only-half-enhancibility? And... that was basically it for Regen at those levels, I picked up I think Quick Recovery at level 12, after the missions were over. Getting knocked around was getting annoying in the latter missions. Next up: I raised myself to level 20, picked up Integration (huzzah!) and the auto-power that gives resist damage/resist stun. I'm going to actually slot some enhancements, which is how I'd normally do it if I were levelling myself solo (I buy attuned sets early) and find some mission to do. More later.

It is genuinely startling how much of the meta of City of Heroes turns almost entirely on the hinge of procs. Like, think about just how much the falloff in performance of Tanks in this patch comes from going from "given favorable treatment in terms of proc chances" to "given normal treatment in terms of proc chances." Think of how much of the performance in Tanks is dependent on their ability to fit more procs into a functional build than other classes. Here, I think it is definitely not crazy to prefer the patch 1 version of seeds to patch 2 -- that says a LOT about how big a deal procs are. Any change to procs would definitely be super controversial exactly because they are so extremely powerful, but it's hard for me to see how they aren't taking up too much design space.

Oh, ooops, just got to level 10 and realized that Ailment Resistance is just one power after Quick Recovery: obviously that means that swapping them isn't very impactful -- I had in my head that it was much later. Ailment Resistance feels noticeable in the early game in a way that the T1-4 powers do not. Character is running smoother now.

Okay, some low-level testing: I made an Energy Melee/Regen brute. Did a little street-sweeping in Atlas -- unsurprisingly, that went fine, got a couple of levels, normal stuff. Leveled myself to seven and did the Toothbreaker Jones mission at +0/x2, slotted with just the prestige enhancements from START. Toothbreaker mission went very smoothly, leveled up to 8 during it. Picked up Whirling Hands and did the next mission at 8 -- kinda stupidly died in ambush by hitting an attack instead of a green insp. Finished that mission with a level up to 9. I'm going to keep going through much of the Skulls arc, then probably jump ahead to 20. ------------- Initial thoughts: I've only taken two regen powers at this point, Fast Healing and Reconstruction. As usual, Reconstruction unslotted (or now I have one DO green enhancment) and with no global recharge feels awkward, but that's just the nature of CoH -- you can't really have a click power feel good at lowbie levels of recharge without being overpowered at 50 levels of recharge. Taking just two armor powers in the first 10 levels is also not unusual for me at least -- gotta actually have some attacks -- but I will say that Regen's powers made that easy. Honestly, I barely took Fast Healing. The lowbie set of powers in Regen are super, super uninspiring, and feel like they are (still) a holdover from the early game. Like, having Fast Healing and Quick Recovery I'm sure felt good in a world in which Health was at level 14 and Stamina was 20 and you had to burn one of your precious lowbie power slots on hurdle or whatever, but in the modern game it's like, "Do these things even do anything?" Reconstruction eventually is a good solid power, but as a lowbie it's underwhelming as previously mentioned. I'd honestly like to see Quick Recovery replaced with something better. It's just a bad power in today's game. A click endurance power would almost certainly be better. But if it's going to have to stay, maybe it could switch positions with Ailment Resistance? Getting some max hp buff in the early game would be welcome. It also continues to feel bad that Reconstruction is such a mediocre self-heal, outclassed by lots of other click heals in lots of other armor sets. Just like, giving it some kind of cute effect to make it stand out from other click heals would be nice for the Regen experience, even if it wasn't super impactful. Obviously all of this is not the biggest deal in the world -- these levels fly by and many players literally won't even experience them, either just get power-leveled in some way or another or do easy content like DFB past this point.

I think that Second Wind should exist in the old Dull Pain slot (ie, the T4 power), not the old Revive slot (the T8). Being able to stand yourself back up after death is an iconic Regeneration thing to do! And it's more useful early in your career than late. Having another reactive heal is also useful early.

With build 2, does Seeds now proc like an 8s recharge power?

Does it in fact do this? @macskull earlier asserted that the overcap mechanic scales down punchvoke in the same way it scales down damage. I'm not honestly sure how that plays out in practice. What does "punchvoke * 0.58^2" or ^3 cash out to in terms of keeping aggro? It'd be interesting to hear reports on the holistic experience of tanking in a group with these changes: do people notice a difference in aggro control?

Well, tanker proc rates in AoE powers are going down, right?

No. The max damage bonus you can get is capped, you don't get additional damage if you extend the range.

The challenge settings are in the game, it's not like it's something that players thought up totally separately of anything. And, again, if we're going to take a coldly rational look at all this, you can make billions of inf in hours marketing and buy any of the rewards that you'd get from any other mode (besides badges, I suppose, but if you want to get into 'the only real players are the ones who have every badge,' go for it). As soon as you aren't doing that, you're talking about how you like to play, not "what the game rewards." Which is great! People should want to play the game! Like, seriously, this is a very un-challenging 20 year old game. Nobody gives a shit about anyone's e-penis here. If you want to try to parlay "I'm so great at a video game" into... anything... other than personal satisfaction, then go play Mobile Legends or League of Legends or whatever.

But characters built for that fight fail at other challenges. Like none of these "all offense" builds can do the kinds of things that people considered hard challenges a few years ago. Go solo an all-the-optional-challenges-turned-on +4/x8 ITF with it. If you can do Omega K'ong and you can't solo an ITF, and another build can't do Omega K'ong and can solo an ITF, let me suggest that these are just... different build goals. There's no ranking to them. (There is easy content. Clearly either build could do fine in say an 8-person PI radios team.) Nothing wrong with caring about the Omega K'ong fight to the exclusion of all else. But these are just divergent build goals, and the idea that one if inherently the "right goal" and others aren't. The "build lots of mitigation" approach comes from a time when solo content was about the only challenging content in the game. Now they've built team challenging content, which is great and everything, and which rewards very different builds. But it's boring to go to these threads with, "Well, different builds do different things," so instead people try to pretend that their goals are the only ones that matter. If we really want to be very mechanical about this, the thing in the game that gives the greatest rewards is marketing. The thing in the game that gives the second best rewards is farming. If you're doing something other than those, you're doing it because your personal tastes are that that thing is more fun than a different style of play.

Boring subtext of this thread: "People differ in what they consider 'hard content' to be."

Well, specifically you were suggesting that Savage Strike might be a better place than either Maiming Slash or Vicious Slash. But Savage Strike is almost certainly inferior to Maiming Slash. You're only looking at half of the story. Yes, getting enough window to launch two attacks is important, but so is maximizing the number of procs -- like, trivially, if you have half as many times that the window activates, then even if you're getting two attacks compared to one, you don't come out ahead. Maximizing the number of procs means using the attack on cooldown. If it's sitting fully recharged, you're wasting proc opportunities. In an environment in which you'll probably have north of 200% recharge, that means that Savage Strike recharges in 0.83 seconds and Maiming Slash recharges in 1.67 seconds. That means that in general you'll have a lot of time sitting around with those powers off recharge. Does that fully compensate for the reduced window that you'd get from putting the proc in Vicious Strike, and the fact that a your harder-hitting attack would definitionally not be in the proc window? Well... I don't know. It depends on what else is in your attack chain, and exactly how much recharge you have, etc. There's no one generic answer. I think that Maiming Slash is plausibly the best place for the ATO2 in many Savage builds. I think Vicious Slash might be a good place in others, especially if you're using Hemorrhage and en epic snipe, so Vicious Slash is only your third heaviest hitter. I think that a downside of Savage is that it doesn't have a super great place for the ATO2 where you're just like, "Oh yeah that's obviously the right spot for it" (largely because Hemorrhage is underwhelming).

Vicious Slash has a cast arcanatime of 1.848 seconds, there's no reason to imagine that following a successful proc of Critical Strikes in Maiming Slash, you couldn't Vicious Slash then do whatever other attack you're running (Hemorrhage if you run it, or like an epic snipe or whatever) within the window. It shouldn't even be hard. In contrast, if you put it in Savage Strike and then activate two attacks afterward, you're probably cutting your effective proc rate by 50% (in addition to lowering your overall DPS by very heavily using a low-DPA attack).

Savage Strike is a pretty low-DPA filler attack, and its 2.5 second base recharge time means that it probably won't be able to be used on cooldown. I think this more-than-counteracts its 0.4 second advantage in animation-time-after-effect. Honestly, the 5 second base recharge time of Maiming Slash is also pretty easy to exceed (especially on a set that gets a large native global recharge bonus), and it might be a good idea to go to Vicious Slash instead.

It's clearly the case that the devs are reacting to the overly homogenous environment of high defense by adding more things that lower the utility of defense. It kinda blows my mind that their most-high-profile attempt to do so resulted in an even more homogeneous environment of rolling Barrier usage and that people don't call that out as a problem with the basic concept.

You will take approximately 9% more damage than if you had 45% defense (assuming that you are facing opponents with no +to-hit and your defense is not debuffed).

All Savage powers crit. Shield Charge doesn't crit. The ATO1 can be anywhere; it's a global effect. For max dps, you'd probably mule it in an unused power since it doesn't contribute damage or other desired attributes to the power it's slotted in. The ATO2 is probably best in either vicious slash or maiming slash if you want to use it for sustained DPS.

With respect to routine use of inspirations, it's also just, like... not a lot of fun to commit to all that inspiration management, for me. If you want to keep inspirations of very particular types (probably orange/purple, maybe breakfrees, maybe red) constantly available, it's clearly possible. People do it. But you need to fill your inspiration tray initially, then as you use inspirations keep it clear enough to get drops of your favored types and either combine or delete inspirations to make space continuously. That's just not gameplay I enjoy. In the same way that some people hate hate hate clicky armor sets or demand taunt auras on their melee characters, I think it's just not a ton of fun to spend my time and attention on that management. I tried it recently with a blaster and breakfrees plus some defense insps, and it just wasn't enjoyable. No shade on people who like that. But consider it as a style-of-play thing.

This might be good advice for the OP as a newbie, but be aware that the -to-hit from Dark eventually becomes largely redundant on a dedicated defense set, as you hit softcap without needing to rely on Dark. That said, if you're at a point in your play where you aren't going deep on set bonuses, the synergy is real.

Sorry, you are of course correct, I turned the 9 into a 6 when looking at the number and transcribing it. The odds of 100 misses in a row are even astronomically smaller if any of those attacks were at a higher hit chance than 5%. The calculation of them being at a heterogeneous hit chance gets very complicated, but just to be clear, the odds of 100 misses in a row at 6% miss chance are 0.2%, so if there are some number of 6%s and some number of 5%s in the mix, then the odds are between 0.59% and 0.2%. This is all in a kind of insane world in which someone actually makes 100 attacks against you: I don't think that basically any enemy in the game attacks more than one time every two seconds for a long streak of attacks, so we're talking like more than three minutes of continuous battling -- plausible if you're say a tank fighting an AV solo, but almost no other situation. This is true, but makes the streak breaker even less relevant.