A radical Regen redesign

[Naraka]

If anything, the arguments against Revive is more a testament to how easy and thus how regrettable this game's curve is. 

 

Think of a lot of other MMOs out there like FFXIV, ESO, Gw2, and handing out an instant click self rez and how useful that would be. Some of those games have such features but with big penalties tied to them and much harsher punishments for getting rezzed...

[Vanden]

1 minute ago, BrandX said:

They say that, but I find myself getting beat down before the 15 seconds.  

There is a bug where there’s a split-second before the untouchable kicks in where it’s possible for attacks to land, and the AI with its computer reflexes is occasionally able to get attacks into that window.

1 hour ago, ShardWarrior said:

In a way, it feels like "we know this set is really weak and you will die a lot, so here is a free rez" is sort of admitting the set stinks.

Well that also sort of ties back into the theme. Think of how much more likely Deadpool or Wolverine are to get bisected or impaled than Cyclops or Nightcrawler. If you’re familiar with Dragon Ball Z, compare how frequently Frieza, Cell, or Majin Buu got exploded or maimed and there’s an obvious correlation with how capable they are at healing their wounds.

[ShardWarrior]

29 minutes ago, Vanden said:

Well that also sort of ties back into the theme. Think of how much more likely Deadpool or Wolverine are to get bisected or impaled than Cyclops or Nightcrawler. If you’re familiar with Dragon Ball Z, compare how frequently Frieza, Cell, or Majin Buu got exploded or maimed and there’s an obvious correlation with how capable they are at healing their wounds.

I get it and it does work with regard to comic theme.  It just seems counter intuitive to me that the rest of the time in game you are picking powers to try your best to avoid defeat.  I never took it for my Regen scrapper back in the day. 

[aethereal]

1 hour ago, Obus Form said:

To that end, your version of Instant Healing being, for example, 5% isn't bad because when it's fully slotted it would be 10% heal on a short (5 second?) CD that is reduced to 30% of its original CD (1.5 second?) after slotting.  However, I would say the constant clicking of it is silly since people will want to it on Autocast, which will end up getting macro'd to be a toggle autocast between, for example, turning on a travel power (out of combat) and auto casting Instant Healing (in combat). I think the biggest caveat to enjoyment/hate of using a constant-click heal would be the animation and requirement or lack-there-of of standing still.  E.G. Crab Soldier's Serum heal requires you to stand still, brandish a needle, stab yourself, see the green, "aaahhhh yesss" sound, then continue.  Some heals like /Electric Armour barely interrupt attack animation chains at all.  In keeping with your playstyle of "active healing" instead of /WP passive healing, I think a short animation similar to /Electric Armor heal would fit nicely.

 

I was thinking like a 1 second animation time.  But the idea would be very sensitive to small changes in animation time, heal amount, endurance cost, and recharge time, so ultimately the answer would really be "depends on testing."

 

The idea is that it's certainly not something you want to auto-cast, all you'd be doing is instant-healing over and over again.  Your ideal case is that you can just use Reconstruction for your heals, which would be more efficient in, like, "HPA" (heal per activation time, think of it as an equivalent to DPA).  Instant Healing would be bad HPA, but good HPS, as it were.

 

Thematically, think of it as one of those times when Wolverine is getting his ass kicked all over the place, and healing up, he's not gonna die, but he's on his heels, just getting hit and healing, not counterattacking.

[Dragon Crush]

3 hours ago, Obus Form said:

@aethereal love the idea and play style!  I have some suggestions/feedback though:

 

If Super Reflexes is the ultimate version of no-resistance defense-based set, I would think Regen would be the ultimate version of a no-defense low-resistance Self Healing, +Regen, and +Max Health based set (no absorb mechanic). 

 

To that end, your version of Instant Healing being, for example, 5% isn't bad because when it's fully slotted it would be 10% heal on a short (5 second?) CD that is reduced to 30% of its original CD (1.5 second?) after slotting.  However, I would say the constant clicking of it is silly since people will want to it on Autocast, which will end up getting macro'd to be a toggle autocast between, for example, turning on a travel power (out of combat) and auto casting Instant Healing (in combat). I think the biggest caveat to enjoyment/hate of using a constant-click heal would be the animation and requirement or lack-there-of of standing still.  E.G. Crab Soldier's Serum heal requires you to stand still, brandish a needle, stab yourself, see the green, "aaahhhh yesss" sound, then continue.  Some heals like /Electric Armour barely interrupt attack animation chains at all.  In keeping with your playstyle of "active healing" instead of /WP passive healing, I think a short animation similar to /Electric Armor heal would fit nicely.

 

Given /Regen's non-existent Defense, and low amount of Resistance, what do you think about having all of /Regen's passive powers all give Max Health such that a Tank/Brute reaches 90% of their maximum achievable +Max Health after slotting?  I haven't done the math.  However, just from poking in Mid's for years, it is my understanding that no brute/tank ever comes close to reaching 100% of their maximum achievable +Max Health.  Therefore, if any /Armor Set would be the one to optimize Max Health, /Regen would fit the theme.

 

Lastly, I think the Resilience would have to give 100% immunity to -regen debuffs since a single tick of -regen would destroy this entire set.

 

I'm reasonably certain that the +max health hardcap isn't that high and any set with dull pain can perma-cap max health if they build for it and get accolades. (Just double checked mids, for scrapper +HP just takes dull pain and accolades, for tanks it also takes a few set bonuses)

 

2 hours ago, ABlueThingy said:

As a more out there idea, what if all of Regen's clicks were Rez powers while you're down?  They just revive you and trip the power's effect. DP gets you up with 15 seconds of untouchable and bonus max HP.  IH gets you up with 15sec of untouch and a huge regen boost.  Etc

 

You'd have Recon, DP, IH, and MoG. 4 build in revives.  You could toss Revive entirely and replace it with something else. Like something from the OP.

 

I dunno how effective it would sure give Regen a flavor no one could match.  You'd always have SOME kind of revive ready.  I can't see that being too overpowered, like Bill Z and Shard said no one builds for rez. 

 

It would also satisfy the part of me that gets frustrated when I die in a game and wants to stuff another quarter in so I can try that level again without restarting the whole game.  And then run back to the change counter and get more quarters because I just blew 20$ and because I WILL BEAT THIS BOSS.  (this is perhaps not a healthy urge)

 

That would be a pretty cool way of working in the idea of always being able to get up without feeling like it's taking away from not dying in the first place.

[Dragon Crush]

(accidental double post)

Edited September 29, 2020 by Dragon Crush
double posted by mistake

[Sarrate]

I feel like I over comment in Regen threads, so I didn't post in this thread when it originally popped up. However, now that it has Revived itself, my Resilience is gone and here we are.

 

Before I comment on the suggestions, I want to flesh out my view of the set and what I see as its problems, as it will permeate throughout. Regen's weaknesses are as follows:

* Unlike defense & resistance, healing and regeneration do not scale with incoming damage, it's fixed.

* Due to very limited mitigation and needing to take damage before you can healing/regen, Regen is very susceptible to burst damage. The lower a Regen's health, the more susceptible they are to this. (eg: at full, MaxHP capped health, they can eat boss attacks, at low hp, minions could do enough damage to kill a Regen).

* Dull Pain can't be relied upon as a heal, as its +MaxHP is more valuable than (more hp to soak damage, higher hp/sec regen). Instant Healing is a poor button to press when low on health because if you're already low on health, burst damage could kill you before the regen takes you out of the danger zone. That leaves Reconstruction (good) and MoG (long cooldown). For a set reliant on clicks to save it, it doesn't have that many reliable ones.

* Due to the above, it means that Regen being able to respond to damage quickly is very important. This creates friction with sets that have either longer animations (can get locked out of healing) or sets without any mitigation (would you consider playing a Fire/Regen?).

* Lastly, because it has so much active mitigation, it means it steals time that could be otherwise used for other things (damage) for very little benefit.

 

Okay, with that said...

 

On 9/23/2020 at 12:15 PM, aethereal said:

T6:  Burst of Energy (Self: +Damage, +Recovery, +Regen).  So this is a big part of my sense of this being a radical revamp of Regeneration.  Armor sets that give people access to offensive abilities are in high demand, and create an incentive for people to work around some flaws in the pure mitigation aspects of the set.  Rather than trying to make Regeneration be top tier in pure mitigation, give them a reason to come to the set besides theme.  This would be a rapid recharge (maybe 30 seconds base recharge) clicky that gives a short (10 second) bonus to damage that scales to current hitpoints (so it gives more of a bonus the lower your current hitpoints).  It wouldn't stack, just replace.  It would give some +recovery and +regen just to stay in theme, but the draw would be the +damage.

I understand where you're going with this, but I feel like this would be a trap that would get Regen characters killed. The lower their health is, the more at risk they are of getting insta-gibbed by a high damage attack. When you're low on life, you need to get out of that situation quickly. Taking the time to press a click for +damage prior to healing yourself is intentionally putting yourself at risk.

On 9/23/2020 at 12:15 PM, aethereal said:

T7:  Instant Healing (Self:  Heal).  The other part of why this is a radical redesign, and why everyone will hate this proposal.  My idea is the exact opposite of the "make it a toggle!" calls.  Instant Healing in this mode would be potentially huge amounts of mitigation at the cost of constantly clicking.  It would be lower base heal than Reconstruction, maybe as low as 5%, but spammable.  Maybe literally spammable, like with 0 cooldown, or maybe just a very short cooldown, like 4 seconds.  The idea is that if you want, you can sit there and do nothing but click Instant Healing, and it would be very hard to overcome the mitigation that this provides, but it's at the cost of you, you know, doing things.  This gives you, with Burst of Energy, a playstyle that is hopefully like, "Let my health dip, fire Burst of Energy, try to damage my way out of this, oh shit shit stab instant healing a bunch of times to hopefully get out of trouble!"  A lot of risk/reward management tools, basically.

This is the big one I wanted to comment on. Again, I understand where you're coming from, but I think it's misguided. One of Regen's faults right now is the fact it eats up a lot of animation time for the lack luster survivability it already provides. Swapping out a 90s duration click for something spammable feels like a step in the opposite direction.

 

Furthermore, the healing you're suggesting isn't even that great. Let's take Instant Healing as it is now, 200% enhancable regen and 600% unenhancable regen for 90 seconds. Since regen scales linearly, we can compute how much health it would regenerate over 90 seconds.

 

Unslotted:

800% / 240 = 3.333% hp/sec

3.333% hp/sec * 90 sec = 300% hp

 

Slotted:

1000% / 240 = 4.167% hp/sec

4.167% hp/sec * 90 sec = 375% hp,

 

HP Capped (using Scrapper numbers, just multiply the above by the appropriate cap)

Unslotted: 6% hp / sec OR 540% base hp bars

Slotted: 7.5% hp / sec OR 675% base hp bars

 

I scaled everything to base HP because regen, unlike healing, scales with MaxHP. The higher your max hp, the more hp/sec you regenerate. Even at its worst (unslotted, no max hp), IH would be equivalent to spamming your proposed, and slotted IH once every 3 seconds (assuming a 1s activation). At worst (IH slotted, at the Scrapper HP cap) it would require you to use 75% of your active time just healing for a full 90 seconds (so 60s out of 90s).

 

Additionally, it would be a weak "oh crap button" (not that IH is particularly strong as it is) because it would take a while to propel you out of the danger zone of where you could be insta-gibbed. To be most effectively, it should be used proactively to keep your hp high so you don't drop as low.

 

Finally, a spammable, 0 cooldown power would probably be less effective than you'd like because of power queuing and the internal server ticks (aka: the source of Arcanatime). Just because a power has 0 cooldown doesn't mean you'd be able activate it the very next server tick. It might take an additional tick for the server to activate, lowering its throughput. (This is speculation, but a valid concern, I think.)

 

So I'm absolutely not a fan of the power, as described. It would be more effective as basically a modified version of Hibernate or "combat Rest" (+regen only, cannot attack, can move, no max duration, low cooldown).

 

On 9/23/2020 at 12:28 PM, aethereal said:

If you want heal + absorb, go Bio.  It's a great set, it covers this schtick well.  I avoided absorb for the same reason that I doubled down on clicky powers instead of passive ones -- give Regen a unique identity.

I feel like this is a misguided view. Super Reflexes shtick is defense, why'd it get scaling resists? Why did Elec have Conserve Power changed to Energize (heal/regen)? It's supposed to be about resistance!

 

It's because leaning to heavily in any one area makes a set brittle. It's why newer sets tend to be more layered compared to their closest analogues (Shield vs SR, Willpower vs Regen, etc).

 

I feel Regen needs a way to mitigate damage, in one form or another, and I don't see why I can't be done without giving up its flavor. There is no reason why +Absorb cannot be Regen themed and there are any number of ways to add it (large absorbs existing clicks, smaller absorbs into toggles/passives, potentially stacking, etc). Shoot, modify Reconstruction so that it gives +resist to all instead of just toxic (could be strong and short, or long and milder, maybe it stacks, maybe it doesn't) and say that the newly healed wound is still regenerating and isn't as easily damaged. Or heck, if you really want to be crazy, give it a very short duration (5s?) intangible that you could attack through like Carnie Illusionists.

 

To address the time spend clicking things, maybe all clicks give a +dmg buff of varying power/duration.

 

To address issues with Regen being gibbed while animation locked, you could perhaps make some of the clicks usable while using another power (this might not be supported by the engine).

 

There are a lot of ways to grow the set that still feels like regen without being completely focused on a single mechanic.

 

I feel like I'm absolutely dumping on your idea, and I'm sorry about that. I'm not trying to be a jerk, I just have - uhmm - a lot of thoughts and a strong opinion on the matter. I also tried to flesh out my thoughts as much as I could so that at least you understand why I disagree with your idea.

 

On 9/23/2020 at 1:24 PM, Vanden said:

There's two reasons I always advocate for Revive to be the T1.

I see your T1 Revive and raise you Fast Healing giving two powers (Fast Healing and Revive), kind of like other powers that work that way (Kheldian Forms, Swap Ammo, etc).

 

Another thought, instead of Revive bringing you back from the dead, it is a passive cheat death that prevents you from dying with a longish cooldown. (Again, I don't know if it's possible by the engine, but it's how I'd imagine Presence/Unrelenting works, though I've never tested it myself.)

 

 

(Aside: I'm so glad I copied and pasted this into Notepad. Forum just tried to eat it. Not this time, buddy! 😠)

[aethereal]

13 hours ago, Sarrate said:

I understand where you're going with this, but I feel like this would be a trap that would get Regen characters killed. The lower their health is, the more at risk they are of getting insta-gibbed by a high damage attack. When you're low on life, you need to get out of that situation quickly. Taking the time to press a click for +damage prior to healing yourself is intentionally putting yourself at risk.

 

You can, I think, make this work in detail.  It doesn't have to be something where you need to go deep in the red to get good use out of it.  Imagine it's a 30% damage boost plus 1% per percent of life you are below 60%.  Use it at 40% life, 50% damage boost.

 

Quote

This is the big one I wanted to comment on. Again, I understand where you're coming from, but I think it's misguided. One of Regen's faults right now is the fact it eats up a lot of animation time for the lack luster survivability it already provides. Swapping out a 90s duration click for something spammable feels like a step in the opposite direction.

 

Furthermore, the healing you're suggesting isn't even that great. Let's take Instant Healing as it is now, 200% enhancable regen and 600% unenhancable regen for 90 seconds. Since regen scales linearly, we can compute how much health it would regenerate over 90 seconds.

 

Unslotted:

800% / 240 = 3.333% hp/sec

3.333% hp/sec * 90 sec = 300% hp

 

Slotted:

1000% / 240 = 4.167% hp/sec

4.167% hp/sec * 90 sec = 375% hp,

 

HP Capped (using Scrapper numbers, just multiply the above by the appropriate cap)

Unslotted: 6% hp / sec OR 540% base hp bars

Slotted: 7.5% hp / sec OR 675% base hp bars

 

I scaled everything to base HP because regen, unlike healing, scales with MaxHP.

 

Heals can scale with maxHP if they're coded to (some are, some aren't).

 

And of course, even if current IH were 3x stronger that would certainly make it stronger when it's there.  But the complaint about IH is not that it's a weak power when it's active, it's that a lot of the time, when you need it, it's not there, it's on cooldown.  The virtue of my proposed version of IH is it's always there when you need it.  You aren't going to spend time using my version of IH when you're at max hp, and you aren't going to be at 20% health and look and say, "Oh shit, it's on cooldown."  This is essentially the same thing we'd get from turning IH into a toggle, but with more ability to tune cost and reward -- because your point that heals/regen as a mechanic have a thresholding problem is well-taken.  One of the issues with IH as a toggle is that it's going to be hard to get the values right.  A little too good and your character is unkillable, a little too bad and the set remains weak.  With my version of IH, there's more flex.  It's more okay if a character is "unkillable" if they also can't do much because they're pounding IH for all their animation time -- we can make it more powerful because it comes with a built-in tradeoff.

 

Now, might it be "right" at 7% heal instead of 5% heal?  Sure.  That's what testing would be for.  But if it's a little too weak (or a little too strong) in terms of basic numeric power, then you could increase the heal or decrease the animation time slightly.  That kind of thing is only really discoverable through playtesting.

 

Quote

I feel like this is a misguided view. Super Reflexes shtick is defense, why'd it get scaling resists? Why did Elec have Conserve Power changed to Energize (heal/regen)? It's supposed to be about resistance!

 

It's because leaning to heavily in any one area makes a set brittle. It's why newer sets tend to be more layered compared to their closest analogues (Shield vs SR, Willpower vs Regen, etc).

 

People who want a set that mixes healing, regen, and absorb have bio available.  It's right there.  It's a great armor set.  I'm not arguing against heal + absorb, I'm arguing that we already have heal + absorb.

 

Regen needs to differentiate from bio and willpower, hybrid sets that are significantly stronger than it is.  If there were a form of mitigation to hybridize with that weren't well-represented in the other armor sets, I'd be fine with hybrizing with that form of mitigation.

Edited September 30, 2020 by aethereal
Removed a pointless objection, expanded on IH.

[Slithershot]

What if, instead of a normal revive.... Regen's revive became automatic. Like Romulus. 

 

i.e. You get creamed in the face and drop (as regen often does).... but your toggles don't turn off. A timer starts counting down... 5....4.....3.....2.....1..... boom, you revive with full health and mana and all of your toggles still going. No debt. Cooldown of 1 minute. If you die inside of that minute, you actually die.

 

Now regen has a unique power that fits the set thematically. 

 

You're welcome. 

Edited October 1, 2020 by Pizzamurai

[aethereal]

2 minutes ago, Pizzamurai said:

What if, instead of a normal revive.... Regen's revive became automatic. Like Romulus. 

 

i.e. You get creamed in the face and drop (as regen often does).... but your toggles don't turn off. A timer starts counting down... 5....4.....3.....2.....1..... boom, you revive with full health and mana and all of your toggles still going. No debt. Cooldown of 1 minute. If you die inside of that minute, you actually die.

 

Now regen has a unique power that fits the set thematically. 

 

You're welcome. 

This doesn't seem a lot better than the current power?

 

I mean, it's neat and all, but you have 15 seconds of invulnerability to turn your toggles back on, debt isn't that big a deal, and it seems better to choose whether or not to use the power than have it be automatic?

[Slithershot]

One other idea. Rather than changing anything about regen, why not give them a high resistance to defense debuff and resistance debuff? Highest in the game, why not. It fits thematically that their regeneration should be able to outpace anything placed against them. That way, the small amounts of defense and resistance you can muster as regen become that much more powerful. 

[aethereal]

1 minute ago, Pizzamurai said:

One other idea. Rather than changing anything about regen, why not give them a high resistance to defense debuff and resistance debuff? Highest in the game, why not. It fits thematically that their regeneration should be able to outpace anything placed against them. That way, the small amounts of defense and resistance you can muster as regen become that much more powerful. 

Resistance resists resist debuffs, so it's impossible under current mechanics to have high resistance debuffs resistance without also having high resistance.

 

It doesn't seem thematic to me that regen has high DDR, and as a mechanic it sounds either useless or exploitable with very little space between.

[Slithershot]

1 minute ago, aethereal said:

Resistance resists resist debuffs, so it's impossible under current mechanics to have high resistance debuffs resistance without also having high resistance.

 

It doesn't seem thematic to me that regen has high DDR, and as a mechanic it sounds either useless or exploitable with very little space between.

You're super quick to shoot down ideas for someone trying to help a set be less trash 🙂

[Sarrate]

23 hours ago, aethereal said:

You can, I think, make this work in detail.  It doesn't have to be something where you need to go deep in the red to get good use out of it.  Imagine it's a 30% damage boost plus 1% per percent of life you are below 60%.  Use it at 40% life, 50% damage boost.

You could make it more rewarding to use when you're not in the best condition, sure. My argument is that its mechanics are counter productive to how Regen operates. It would work far better for a set that has more preventative mitigation and could survive at lower health for longer periods of time. (You could pair it with MoG, but that has a long enough cooldown that you couldn't leverage it all the time.)

 

23 hours ago, aethereal said:

Heals can scale with maxHP if they're coded to (some are, some aren't).

Fair. Given that pretty much player heals I can think of (discounting things like Unstoppable's full heal before the crash) are based off base hp, I just figured that's how the heal would work.

 

23 hours ago, aethereal said:

And of course, even if current IH were 3x stronger that would certainly make it stronger when it's there.

Also a fair point. The idea of having to spend more time spamming heals and not attacking doesn't sound like an enjoyable playstyle.

 

23 hours ago, aethereal said:

This is essentially the same thing we'd get from turning IH into a toggle, but with more ability to tune cost and reward -- because your point that heals/regen as a mechanic have a thresholding problem is well-taken.  One of the issues with IH as a toggle is that it's going to be hard to get the values right.  A little too good and your character is unkillable, a little too bad and the set remains weak.  With my version of IH, there's more flex.  It's more okay if a character is "unkillable" if they also can't do much because they're pounding IH for all their animation time -- we can make it more powerful because it comes with a built-in tradeoff.

 

Now, might it be "right" at 7% heal instead of 5% heal?  Sure.  That's what testing would be for.  But if it's a little too weak (or a little too strong) in terms of basic numeric power, then you could increase the heal or decrease the animation time slightly.  That kind of thing is only really discoverable through playtesting.

I understand that you're basically trying to balance throughput to activation time. If you tune it too weakly, then it's not going to be worth the time trying to cast it / by the time you cast the heal, you're already taken damage and are behind on the curve. If you tune it too high, then you still run into the immortality dilemma, except it could be asking the player "if you want to win this fight, you have to stop clicking this button, when you do, though, you die."

 

There is still a maximum throughput it can sustain, and even when near infinite, you can still be killed. I was watching a couple older videos I made fighting against even-level Brutes in the Storm Palace on my BS/Regen. There were times where lost 50%+ of my health in seconds. If I was at lower health I would've been instantly gibbed. (Something that happened to me more than once before I succeeded.) It doesn't matter how high your regen is, or how fast you can heal, if you can't absorb the damage first, your face is going to meet the floor.

 

On 9/29/2020 at 7:29 PM, aethereal said:

People who want a set that mixes healing, regen, and absorb have bio available.  It's right there.  It's a great armor set.  I'm not arguing against heal + absorb, I'm arguing that we already have heal + absorb.

 

Regen needs to differentiate from bio and willpower, hybrid sets that are significantly stronger than it is.  If there were a form of mitigation to hybridize with that weren't well-represented in the other armor sets, I'd be fine with hybrizing with that form of mitigation.

I still don't understand your viewpoint. Is there a threshold where a set has a lock on a certain mechanic or combination of mechanics? If so, what is it?

 

From what I can tell, Bio has resistance, defense, regen, recovery, heals, absorbs, stances, scalable buffs, damage aura, resistance debuffs, regen debuffs, and damage debuffs. I mean, what doesn't Bio Armor have? I could even argue that its res/def split is similar to WP (s/l res, elemental defense).

 

Or what about Electric Armor vs Radiation Armor? Talk about sets that are similar. Both are resistance based, both have higher energy resistance than the others, both have a click heal, both have additional regen. Even with those similarities, they play differently due to Elec's damage aura, end drain, and endurance recovery compared to Rad's absorb, +recharge, and non-crashing T9 (not to mention Ground Zero, which I haven't tried, yet).

 

Simply adding Absorb in no way would step on Bio's toes - especially if it was done in a different way (like smaller, stacking absorbs from toggles/passives, or some other mechanism).

[Galaxy Brain]

13 hours ago, aethereal said:

Regen needs to differentiate from bio and willpower, hybrid sets that are significantly stronger than it is.  If there were a form of mitigation to hybridize with that weren't well-represented in the other armor sets, I'd be fine with hybrizing with that form of mitigation.

Welp, Absorb is WAY rarer than pretty much every other mitigation available so I think that'd be a good place to start. We pretty much have the  following mitigation strats:

 

• Resistance 
• Defense 
  • Elusiveness is also a thing, but is really only in PvP. It counters Acc directly unlike how Def counters ToHit
• +HP
  • This is actually kind of rare, and either in small amounts or big enough to pretty much cap you but on a long cooldown
• Self Heal
• +Regen
• Absorb over Time
  • Like blaster sustains or sentinel regen, where you have a constantly refreshing amount
• "Chunk" Absorb
  • Like in /Rad or /Bio, where you can gain a very big amount temporarily
• -Damage/-ToHit/-Recharge
  • All of these debuffs are pretty much mirrors of Res/Def, or at least slow down incoming damage considerably
  • Affected by purple patch tho so these generally lose out to self-buffs to the reverse stats
• Crowd Control (vs enemies, and Mez protection for yourself of course)
  • Cant hurt you if they cant use powers
• Offense!
  • Dead enemies can't hurt you! Any powers that boost your offense can in turn increase survival.
• Movement
  • Much more niche due to how the game works, but simply being out of range / out of an area = you don't get hit
• Untouchable
  • The absolute rarest, and usually with the drawback of being unable to affect others (Phase) or simply inability to act (actual Invulnerability), this is a mechanic that could actually be used more in small doses...

I think that's comprehensive.... and everything highlighted in Green is what we currently see in /Regen. I don't really count defense because MoG just goes so overboard and is up so little that I wouldn't peg it as something Regen provides.

 

Anywho, the issue with Regen's kit is that it has most all of it's eggs in a basket that does not scale to the eggs you place in it with how it's regen/heals work. Either you have enough regen + self healing to simply never die, or you get overwhelmed near instantly with little in-between. You have a few tools to circumvent burst damage, but with caveats in that they eat into your action economy or have to be used pre-emptively. Or, in the worst case you go down and while at least you can get back up (with Untouchable), you still lost in a sense and you need to reset yourself. I don't think any additional mitigation types would make much sense aside from Absorb + more Untouchable tho.

 

For Absorb, I think a refreshing absorb amount would make sense like we see on Sentinels. Better yet, the new hybrid version they got where it constantly stacks up to a total higher number if left alone. The design space here is that a refreshing absorb is essentially equal to a regeneration rate where X dps cannot truly harm you. If you regenerate 10 hp/second, it takes 10 or more DPS to actually begin hurting you, which would be the same as having a refreshing absorb equal to 10 absorb/sec. What is different though is that the Absorb shield also takes away from damage bigger than itself. Lets say 20 DPS is coming in. Vs 10 hps regen, you'll still be taking the full 20dps right to your health, it just takes 2x as long to bring you down. Vs 10 aps, it's the same deal EXCEPT you are technically taking 10dps as the absorb negates a portion directly. Put together in tandem and the absorb layer actually increases the potency of your healing factor to further ignore small stuff (strength of healing bits non withstanding to accommodate) while having something that also helps cushion bigger blows. Taking a note from the Preventative Medicine Proc, what if Revive gave a similar effect where you get a large amount of absorb automatically for having the power if you dip to 1/3 hp?

 

As for Untouchable, this is actually the theme behind MoG currently. You pop that power and functionally become untouchable (except psy lol) and allow you to freely heal without incoming DPS reducing your health. What if each click in regen gave a brief untouchable window as well? Imagine reconstruction having ~2s of untouchable status to allow you to heal up uninterrupted (how often have you clicked Reconstruction only to eat more hits as it went off?). If MoG was watered down in values, lasting much longer with a fraction of the current Res/Def but the first 10 seconds were Untouchable? 

 

Other ideas to toss at the wall are of course Scaling regen (less health, more healing) which I'm shocked isn't in there after /Rad Armor had it, or even something like +Healing or -Heal Resist on yourself if you have a certain power active to boost all your self heals / heals applied to you.

 

 

IMO, Regen has an amazing strength on paper in that it does not have any Damage-Type holes.... but it pays for that for being equally vulnerable to all and mechanically weak to BIG hits very fast. Giving players more tools to ignore "flesh wounds" and instead monitor for big hits and use *effective tools* to actively mitigate big hits would be a huge plus.

[ABlueThingy]

Since they have a mechanic that allows a passive to scale based on your health, why not do that for an absorb mechanic.  Like, have Fast Healing give an absorb shield if your health is already full.  So Regen can functionally surpass the HP cap.  Or while IH is going if your HP is at 100% it starts building up an absorb shield.  That way you can use it preemptively.