QOL: Undo the Regen Nerf

[Captain Yesterday]

Regen sucks. Period.

I have watched countless PI team Regen tanks eat mud 1-10 times during an actual adventure.

That's a terrible thing to be exposed to after hours of playing.

Thank God for the AE.

 

I used to play regen scrapper back when live first opened, and quit after the nerf.

Even when regen was at it's best, you could still faceplant 25% of the time if you get in over your head. That's acutally alot of deaths for a scrapper or tanker.

 

But the regen tanks/brures I see running around now. Well, you don't see them. Because they quit.

I have personally seen 2 Regen tanks announce during their many faceplants on a PI radio team, that they are rerolling their character.

 

Counterpoint: what is the pint of regen, that doesn't regen?

 

Counterpoint 2: is the formula of Defense CAp + Damage mitigation the ONLY things that is allowed to survive?

 

What about Super Refexes/Defense based Mitigation without the auto-hit?

What about Regen with little to no defense or mitigation that just lives through it all?

 

Without those functional differences, we are all forces to play the same game at high levels and in the end, no matter how we build.

 

Edited December 7, 2019 by Captain Yesterday

[HelenCarnate]

No you saw 0 regen tanks defeated in regular play.  The reason you see none now is because regen is not an option for Tankers.

[Haijinx]

For Tankers Regen might be pretty strong on IOs, due to the better Def and Res values, plus all the Resist in the ATO

[aethereal]

Also, come on, balance changes aren't QOL.

[Redlynne]

"The Derp is STRONG in this one ..."

[Saiyajinzoningen]

um go willpower? lol

[ShardWarrior]

9 hours ago, Captain Yesterday said:

Even when regen was at it's best, you could still faceplant 25% of the time if you get in over your head.

This was quite true.  I would be all for turning IH back into a toggle.  Regen is much, much, much too clicky a set for a melee class now IMO. 

 

P.S.  Thread title should be "Undo the Regen Nerfs (plural)" there were quite a lot of them lol.

Edited December 7, 2019 by ShardWarrior

[Troo]

11 hours ago, Captain Yesterday said:

I have personally seen 2 Regen tanks

No you haven't. You may (if you wish) want to edit much of your post.

 

Opinions are important and we're all entitled to them. Presenting opinions as facts may tend to run into resistance.

 

Regen is great for some ATs and not so great for others. I personally don't see a problem with that. I would totally try and create a Regen Tank build if I could..

[Galaxy Brain]

I really think the sentinel regen would be better for all /regens

[kelika2]

In todays CoH you would still get your shit pushed in with toggle IH.  With incarnate stuff you can still get to the regen cap "by yourself" and i still die from time to time.  Even one of my regen scrappers I went full blown Regen bonuses frankenslotting and another with as much +def i can squeeze in still had alpha strike problems.  And yes, every single one of my regens takes revive.  "QoL" in regens case would to be spreading out little bonuses everywhere:

 

Fast Healing: x2 or x3 base regen

Reconstruction: keeping initial heal, but adding a heal over time like Time/nature heals

Dull Pain: Adding resist to all (5-10%), unenhanceable

Integ: x2 or x3 base regen

IH: shave off a few minutes from its recharge time, keeps it from being perma but still no gigantic gap time

MoG: adding regen

[srmalloy]

11 hours ago, ShardWarrior said:

This was quite true.  I would be all for turning IH back into a toggle.  Regen is much, much, much too clicky a set for a melee class now IMO.

The problem with Regen is, in my opinion, a matter of perception. In a really tough fight, the Def and Res powersets come out seriously injured and need to rest; the Regen character is at 100% health. This is because Regen heals the damage that the character takes over and over and over again until it's gone -- fast enough to keep the character alive at the start of the fight, when all the enemies are attacking, but at the end of the fight, even if all the surviving enemies hit every time, they're doing less damage than the character's regen rate.

 

A character whose protection is mainly Res-based is resistant to a big alpha, but they're going to get nickle-and-dimed over time, each hit building up damage taken. A character relying on Def-based protection is vulnerable to the lucky hit; they'll avoid most damage by not being hit, but take damage in big chunks when a hit does land. Both of these will graph out as a more-or-less steady decline in HP as a fight goes on. Regen, on the other hand, nose-dives precipitously at the start of a fight, their regen rate unable to keep up with the incoming damage until they thin the pack, cutting the incoming damage first to slow their HP decline, and then to pull ahead of the incoming damage. Once they're outhealing the incoming damage, they are effectively unkillable, and will be at or close to 100% HP at the end of the fight. But people don't see that the Regen character is down at 25% HP or less a minute into the fight; they just see them jump into a huge spawn, and come out looking untouched.

 

IF you break apart the powerset healing from the character's base healing, Def- and Res- based defenses get one shot at incoming damage -- Def tries to make the attack miss completely, and Res tries to reduce the amount that did it. Regen, on the other hand, chips away at the incoming damage over and over and over again; it's an advantage the other types of defenses don't get. An idea I had back well before shutdown was that Instant Healing was misdefined as a power. Instead of just being a big crank to your healing rate, it should literally be instant healing -- you take damage from an attack, then after a second or two, an enhanceable fraction of that damage 'instantly' heals back. This essentially makes all incoming damage act similarly to the way Spectral Wounds does -- you take all the damage from the attack, and if you're still alive when the illusion fades, part of it disappears. This would let Instant Healing be returned to being a toggle, and because it applies once against each incoming attack, it can be balanced against Def- and Res-based defenses. And at that point, its End cost could be reduced to something similar to the other defenses, instead of the huge end cost of the original toggle, or the intermittently-available click power it was turned into after the devs saw that people were willing to build Regen characters around being able to support the End cost of the IH toggle running continuously.

[Redlynne]

1 hour ago, srmalloy said:

An idea I had back well before shutdown was that Instant Healing was misdefined as a power. Instead of just being a big crank to your healing rate, it should literally be instant healing -- you take damage from an attack, then after a second or two, an enhanceable fraction of that damage 'instantly' heals back. This essentially makes all incoming damage act similarly to the way Spectral Wounds does -- you take all the damage from the attack, and if you're still alive when the illusion fades, part of it disappears. This would let Instant Healing be returned to being a toggle, and because it applies once against each incoming attack, it can be balanced against Def- and Res-based defenses. And at that point, its End cost could be reduced to something similar to the other defenses, instead of the huge end cost of the original toggle, or the intermittently-available click power it was turned into after the devs saw that people were willing to build Regen characters around being able to support the End cost of the IH toggle running continuously.

Easiest way to achieve that would be to convert Spirit Ward from the Sorcery pool and make it "do its thing" either as an always on Toggle of Absorb ... or as a Click power that can have a high uptime (perma not necessary, but 50-85% uptime is fine) on a short enough recharge cycle that Regeneration as a powerset uses it to "get past the alpha strike" for each mob grouping.

[biostem]

What would be interesting is if regen sort of had a "play possum" type of effect - basically, instead of actually needing to be defeated then self-rezzing, what if, below a certain threshold, enemies would basically mistake you as being "dead", turn to leave/fight other characters, and allow you to gain your second wind/heroic resolve - basically how many comics/anime depict a character as defeated, only to suddenly come back into the fight, (never having been actually defeated).

 

Alternatively, lower the cooldown on dull pain, reduce it's total duration, but give it a huge absorb for a short while, to reflect you truly being (temporarily) immune to damage.

[ShardWarrior]

3 hours ago, srmalloy said:

In a really tough fight, the Def and Res powersets come out seriously injured and need to rest; the Regen character is at 100% health.

Regen being better than DEF/Res sets is a matter of perception too.  My experience is my DEF/RES characters are far and away superior to Regen.  You don't constantly need to worry about clicking something to heal yourself and hoping that you're not stuck in an animation.  It's only saving grace IMO is QR, which you can get with WP too, so not much reason to take Regen anymore. 

[biostem]

1 hour ago, ShardWarrior said:

Regen being better than DEF/Res sets is a matter of perception too.  My experience is my DEF/RES characters are far and away superior to Regen.  You don't constantly need to worry about clicking something to heal yourself and hoping that you're not stuck in an animation.  It's only saving grace IMO is QR, which you can get with WP too, so not much reason to take Regen anymore. 

It all goes with regen's "all or nothing" functionality;  As long as you have 1 hp at the end of a fight, you'll heal back to full in pretty short order.  The problem is whether your pool of HP is sufficient to survive multiple enemies wailing on you, since you have very few ways in which to dull the impact of those hits.  IIRC, resilience didn't originally have nearly as much damage resist as it does now, either.

[srmalloy]

Regen isn't 'better' than either Def- or Res-based sets; that it was seen as superior is due, I believe, to Regen characters finishing battles at 100% health. But I remember with a Katana/Regen scrapper, back before the rework to Regen, learning to judge where the line was between running out of HP faster than I ran out of enemies and being able to get on top of the incoming damage. You don't learn that judgement, or misjudge the incoming damage rate, and you're kissing pavement. It took some work to be able to keep Instant Healing running, but that was part of virtually every Regen build; the rework, filling the set with click regeneration, took away the 'fire and forget' aspect that the set had (which Willpower took over). A Regen character will typically go down in the first quarter of a fight, and a typical team's healing doesn't contribute much to their survival, because it's usually not a significant addittion to their own healing rate. For a Def- or Res-based powerset, damage is coming in slow enough that healing will cover enough of the incoming damage to keep those characters standing. I did some stochastic analysis of the three types of powersets when it was still the old powerset, and Regen was much more vulnerable to increased incoming damage or increased time-to-defeat. Interestingly, it also proved what has become an axiom for builds -- you need a mix of regen, defense, and resistance for maximum survivability. It didn't take a lot of defense and resistance to significantly improve a Regen character, but as you point out, Regen didn't have many options in that regard.

Edited December 9, 2019 by srmalloy

[srmalloy]

22 hours ago, Redlynne said:

Easiest way to achieve that would be to convert Spirit Ward from the Sorcery pool and make it "do its thing" either as an always on Toggle of Absorb ... or as a Click power that can have a high uptime (perma not necessary, but 50-85% uptime is fine) on a short enough recharge cycle that Regeneration as a powerset uses it to "get past the alpha strike" for each mob grouping.

You're missing the point -- the change wouldn't change Regen's vulnerability to a big alpha. You still have to survive the hit for Instant Healing to kick in and remove part of that hit. Taking the damage off the front before it affects the character, would require a much more sweeping rebalance to the other powers.

[Llewellyn Blackwell]

Regen is a one size fits all kind of 2ndary. It doesnt exactly have a big gap weakness like other scrapper 2ndary. Sure a few foes have healing debuffs but its not widespread. Regen like every other power has an optimal partner, average partners, and a bad partner.

 

Regen doesnt really need help because regen since launch to now is one of the most powerful partners in AV solo killing scrapper builds. Be it dark, kat/BS, or claws all have very good reasons to be paired with regen, and will make a god killer scrapper.

 

For those not fond of current regen, who wish it was more toggle heavy, there are many toggle 2ndarys out there. regen is well loved by players like myself that want the active/reactive nature of a regen. It partners better then most sets with a heavy global recharge set focus. Which compliments both regens powers, and lets a scrapper use its strongest attacks in a tight little loop at end game.

[ShardWarrior]

13 hours ago, srmalloy said:

Regen isn't 'better' than either Def- or Res-based sets; that it was seen as superior is due, I believe, to Regen characters finishing battles at 100% health.

My SR/Nin/SD etc. scrappers, tanks, stalkers all finish most every battle at 100% health. 

[Dragon Crush]

One thing I think regen could definitely use would be more debuff protection, and think it should specifically have good deal of -regen and -rech protection (some -recovery/-endurance protection would also be nice). Defense sets all get a good bit of -def protection, resists resist resist-debuffs (if you have 50% S/L resist, get hit with a -50% resist debuff, it will only be half as effective on your S/L resist, reducing it down to 25%), but regen only gets a tiny 25.9% -regen resistance and no -rech resistance to help keep click healing.

[0th Power]

Wonder if making moment of glory a little more useful would help out regeneration?  Either cut the recharge or lengthen the power would make it more than an "oh shhhhhh" power.

[Heraclea]

I made a regen scrapper on Homecoming, knowing full well what I was getting into.  The character plays like a dream when exemped, but basically has no role to play in endgame content.  Unlike most of my melees, I did not trouble myself with taking either the Fighting pool or Maneuvers.  On this character they'd be lipstick on a pig.  Basically a melee blaster.

 

The character has one role in my roster: to farms lower level TFs for merits and money.  Plays like a dream on Synapse.  Anything much higher than Manticore and there'll be trouble.  Has some of her incarnates unlocked, but no role in incarnate raids.

 

FWIW Regen MoG is one of the better tier 9s in the game with no crash.  But it isn't up often enough to make any character as tough as they need to be in high level content.   And it isn't available soon enough to make a difference in the levels where the character still sorta works.  I have scrappers that can take an alpha; this isn't one of them.  Unusually for a non-stalker melee, she's a stealther.  Has no aggro aura; couldn't use it anyways. 

 

[Llewellyn Blackwell]

7 hours ago, Heraclea said:

I made a regen scrapper on Homecoming, knowing full well what I was getting into.  The character plays like a dream when exemped, but basically has no role to play in endgame content.  Unlike most of my melees, I did not trouble myself with taking either the Fighting pool or Maneuvers.  On this character they'd be lipstick on a pig.  Basically a melee blaster.

 

The character has one role in my roster: to farms lower level TFs for merits and money.  Plays like a dream on Synapse.  Anything much higher than Manticore and there'll be trouble.  Has some of her incarnates unlocked, but no role in incarnate raids.

 

FWIW Regen MoG is one of the better tier 9s in the game with no crash.  But it isn't up often enough to make any character as tough as they need to be in high level content.   And it isn't available soon enough to make a difference in the levels where the character still sorta works.  I have scrappers that can take an alpha; this isn't one of them.  Unusually for a non-stalker melee, she's a stealther.  Has no aggro aura; couldn't use it anyways. 

 

I just feel so bad for you. I had to teacha  few regen scraps just how wrong they are about it just as you are. Im truly not trying to be cobative nor insulting though it may seem otherwise but I beseech ye to take the time to read what Ill explain here and hopefully awaken your regens to their godly power.

 

A regen character should focus exclusively on global recharge set bonuses. They are so click heavy any other set bonus theme like resistance or soft defense is utterly wasted.  Regen like every set has optimal partners. The most prominent being dark melee. Maybe you didnt follow the old forums much but the two single most amazing feats of one on many AV killing ever shown using AE where a dark/sr, anda  dark regen build. Each fully capable of defeating more then 10 AVs at once.

 

Regen needs little to thrive, give it a wee bit of breathing room and few foes can bring one down, and even if they should a skilled regen user will be able to self res and use MoG to give them the time to re establish control of the fight or fall back and make a new plan as needed. Dark melee does this through to hit debuffs, the single sword sets do this through parry buffing up melee and lethal def enough many enemies become unable to land a hit on them. Because of the heavy focus on global recharge your attack chain will consist of your two end attacks and parry on a set like BS.

 

But really truly dark regen is easily among the top end scrapper builds one can make. There is no AV they cant easily solo defeat. I can recall one friend I taught this too back on live who said after a shadow shard TF something to the effect of, Ive never run a shadow shard tf without hesitating against all the debuffing enemies, not until this toon that you helped me respec from a coward to a dark demon that fears nothing. he eventually retired that dark regen because he said it literally made the game too easy no matter the challenge, and made all other possible toons feel too weak by comparison so he had become addicted to it and could only make other toons by swearing off it completely.

 

So I say this truly not trying to be rude, antagonistic, nor with any insult. If you think regen unfit for lvl 50 play, and incarnate content, that is entirely on you and your ability to build and play a character. Because I swear to you by all I hold dear, regen is a top teir 2ndary, and likely was the true king until dethroned by the OP bio armor.

 

 

[Replacement]

Ok first let's get this out of the way:

Regen does suck and you all know it.  If it's awesome in 3% of the game's scenarios and just frustrating the rest of the time, it's bad and needs fixed.

Also QOL is not balance.

 

Ok, now for the actual reason I'm here.

On 12/7/2019 at 11:30 AM, Troo said:

No you haven't. You may (if you wish) want to edit much of your post.

 

Opinions are important and we're all entitled to them. Presenting opinions as facts may tend to run into resistance.

 

Regen is great for some ATs and not so great for others. I personally don't see a problem with that. I would totally try and create a Regen Tank build if I could..

Wrong-o.

 

Tank != Tanker.

[boggo2300]

14 minutes ago, Replacement said:

Ok first let's get this out of the way:

Regen does suck and you all know it.  If it's awesome in 3% of the game's scenarios and just frustrating the rest of the time, it's bad and needs fixed.

Also QOL is not balance.

 

Ok, now for the actual reason I'm here.

Wrong-o.

 

Tank != Tanker.

OH! cool

so Blast != Blaster

Scrap != Scrapper

Fender != Defender

 

etc don't double down on it, it makes you look worse