Is Regen still worth playing?

[Haijinx]

1 minute ago, Infinitum said:

Most of my melee builds have FA on it, I like it.

[Infinitum]

Just now, Haijinx said:

[CaptTastic]

Well, just built a Mace/Regan Brute on test server and I don't know what there is not to love about it.

 

Went with Force of Will power pool, got passive S/L defence to around 33%, and perma hastened, and a passive regen of around 95hp/sec. Pretty much ALWAYS have either Instant Healing, Unleash potential, or MoG up at all times (maybe around 10-15 seconds between cycles)

 

When MoG was up: 15 secs of basically being untouchable, plus the 95hp/sec and 33% s/l defence

When Instant Healing was up: 90 secs of 200+ hp/sec, plus 33% s/l defence

When Unleash Potential was up: 60 secs of 45%+ s/l defence, 30% or so to everything else, 120hp/sec regen

 

Also got passive healing all the time from Power Transfer and Panacea procs firing to boost regen even more. Reconstruction up every 15 secs if needed (I rarely did), and the option to go with Rebirth destiny and Melee hybrid to turbo charge regen even more, and a self-rez to pop bac up if you die (which I'm sure he would, but so does everything).

 

Got to say, to answer the original question - YES, Regen is still worth playing. It won't be for everyone as it's very busy and high maintenance, but it feels no less survivable than any other set I've played to be perfectly honest.  

[Bill Z Bubba]

7 minutes ago, CaptTastic said:

Got to say, to answer the original question - YES, Regen is still worth playing. It won't be for everyone as it's very busy and high maintenance, but it feels no less survivable than any other set I've played to be perfectly honest.  

At what diff level? Doing what? Any AV fights?

[Infinitum]

11 minutes ago, CaptTastic said:

and a self-rez to pop bac up if you die

What is this die thing of which you speak?

[CaptTastic]

32 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

At what diff level? Doing what? Any AV fights?

Was +4/x8, although really that was +3 due to Alpha T3. One each against Carnies, Council, and CoT. Two AVs. Couldn't handle Inferno solo (due to the spike fire damage), but could take down Chimera (could handle his s/l attacks)

 

Although, I guess being able to routinely take down AVs solo is not really that important to me in whether or not a set is worth playing. Admittedly, I know it's important to some though. 

Edited March 6, 2021 by CaptTastic

[CaptTastic]

16 minutes ago, Infinitum said:

What is this die thing of which you speak?

It's a blaster thing. 🤣

[Snarky]

Invulnerable be like....why you stop attacking and doing all those things with your armor?  Just kill stuff.

[Infinitum]

2 hours ago, CaptTastic said:

Was +4/x8, although really that was +3 due to Alpha T3. One each against Carnies, Council, and CoT. Two AVs. Couldn't handle Inferno solo (due to the spike fire damage), but could take down Chimera (could handle his s/l attacks)

 

Although, I guess being able to routinely take down AVs solo is not really that important to me in whether or not a set is worth playing. Admittedly, I know it's important to some though. 

You don't want to see what incarnate debuffers or cimmerora will do to it then.

 

I managed to solo infernal with it and thought I had won.

 

Then I tried the ITF, and realized what prison I was in and where my rank was.

[CaptTastic]

23 minutes ago, Infinitum said:

You don't want to see what incarnate debuffers or cimmerora will do to it then.

 

I managed to solo infernal with it and thought I had won.

 

Then I tried the ITF, and realized what prison I was in and where my rank was.

Cimerorans are tough for many powersets though. Doesn't mean the powerset is weak, it means they are strong. 

 

I mean, I am not saying Regen is suddenly brilliant. That wasn't the question. Just saying that it is definitely worth playing. It's never going to be a top choice of someone who likes a more click-friendly toggle-up-and-play character, but I guess it would be boring if we all liked the same stuff. I can't stand Willpower, I find it mind-numbingly dull, but others love it. 

 

I dunno, maybe I am just old school but I still believe that while a good powerset can make a player, a good player can also make a powerset. For anyone who wants to make Regen work for them, it can and it's a powerset worth playing. For those who don't want to make Regan work, well it ever was worth playing, just like Willpower has never been worth playing for me. 

[Infinitum]

2 hours ago, CaptTastic said:

Cimerorans are tough for many powersets though. Doesn't mean the powerset is weak, it means they are strong. 

 

I mean, I am not saying Regen is suddenly brilliant. That wasn't the question. Just saying that it is definitely worth playing. It's never going to be a top choice of someone who likes a more click-friendly toggle-up-and-play character, but I guess it would be boring if we all liked the same stuff. I can't stand Willpower, I find it mind-numbingly dull, but others love it. 

 

I dunno, maybe I am just old school but I still believe that while a good powerset can make a player, a good player can also make a powerset. For anyone who wants to make Regen work for them, it can and it's a powerset worth playing. For those who don't want to make Regan work, well it ever was worth playing, just like Willpower has never been worth playing for me. 

There is a difference between tough, and borderline impossible though - for instance I can make literally every other set doable against the Cims and other debuffer types - even some of those dont measure up to my standards of survivability - but regen is subpar compared to all of the other tests I have ran on the other armor types - and ive ran them all - tested them all for viability against the most extreme odds.  While some sets come across a little to weak - even with bio I can out kill the incoming dmg - I'm not a fan of bio.

 

Sets like Invul, Dark, SR, willpower, shield, ice, EA, Ninjitsu, stone, rad, elec - all of them have a fighting chance to take on multiple spawns without too much hassle - and some of them can just ait there - not attacking and survive indefinately - even fire can be built to survive this - and its probably one of the weakest sets - but still better than regen - that just sitting there waiting for willpower to steal its lunch money again.

 

The argument was never that regen isn't usable - its just not comparable to any other armor set out there in terms of ease of usr and performance - its left in the dust.

 

I would never play one because I know better and easier exists that provides a similar function - I can pretend really good willpower is my regeneration based superhero - or even bio for that matter.

[Clave Dark 5]

Everything is still worth playing unless you're some kind of dirty Min/Max purist.  😁  Nothing is so bad that it's "unplayable."  I'm not even sure how you'd define that for a CoH power set, because they all are.

[KauaiJim]

Two of my original favorite characters from Live were a Claws/Regen Scrapper and a Katana/Regen Scrapper.  Then they took a flamethrower to it.  I no longer had any desire to play either and I parked them. 

 

Here on Homecoming I remade both characters for old times sake, but I do not play them.  Instead I remade playable (IMO) versions as Claws/Willpower and Katana/SR.  The reason I say playable is whenever any MMO nerfs one of my characters into the dust it ruins the character for me.  Nothing I ever do with it will ever be anything near what it used to be able to do.  It leaves a bad taste and the over-gimping sticks out because it no longer plays like it used to.  Had I never experienced the over-powered version, then the underpowered version might not feel quite as underpowered.  I might be able to play and enjoy it just for what it is.  

 

I would really love it if they could maybe put regen about halfway back to where it was, or even a third way back (heck I'd take a quarter way back).  Something.  Anything.  The nerf was too brutal IMO.  If Regen was an undercooked steak, the waiter came back with very well done instead of medium.  Yeah, it's edible, but it would sure taste a lot better to more folks if it weren't charred quite as crispy.

 

I do not have any specific idea on how exactly to do it, but I really think Regen could use some love.  Out of 105 characters I currently have on Homecoming only the two I mention above are Regen and this thread sure hasn't changed my mind to go roll any more.  As others have stated, Regen is still playable but why when there are so many other better options? 

 

TL;DR:  Yes Regen is still 'okay' and can even be 'pretty good' when played well.  The problem with that for me is I already have enough to 'monitor' and plenty of clicking to do without throwing Regen on top of that plus I get more from Willpower, Invulnerability, Super Reflexes, Shield Defense, the Armor sets, a T-shirt, sunblock....

 

I mean come on, if they're not going to fix Regen then they should at least finish the job and put it out of it's misery.  NERF REGEN!!!!!!!!!  IT'S STILL PLAYABLE!!!!!!!!

Edited March 6, 2021 by KauaiJim
If I told you I would have to...

[Herotu]

On 3/3/2021 at 12:07 AM, Doomguide2005 said:

I'd probably further break that into 'active' regen (i.e. click IH or Dull Pain - which is an active way of boosting both health and passive regen and then passive regen) at least when talking about Regeneration and other sets with lots of regen like Willpower.

This is what I never understood about regen. 

 

Always on character creation I think... "ooh passive regen would be cool".

 

Then I remember that it's a super-active click-oriented nightmare.

[Bill Z Bubba]

Sitting here staring at this sm/regen brute build in Mids and pondering. I'm not so much worried about the first mission of the ITF. Sure, with crappy defense and no DDR, it'll take a ton of hits but the regen, damres, -damage from darkest night and all the knock should carry it through. The second mission, however, when the squids and fluffies start laying down the -recharge, this thing is gonna fold like wet tissue. Ain't gonna help matters that even with perma-dullpain I'm sitting 600HP short of the cap. (Edit: With accolades he'll be sittin at just under 3000 HP, so that'll be a must get.) Maybe the force feedback procs in tremor and fault will help. Honestly, by the numbers, this is looking even worse than I expected.

Edited March 6, 2021 by Bill Z Bubba

[Bill Z Bubba]

6 minutes ago, Herotu said:

Then I remember that it's a super-active click-oriented nightmare.

Where Sentinel regen only has reconstruction and MoG for clicks. Well, 3 since Second Wind is a click but it's also skippable since the Sent can hit the HP cap without it.

 

That's one thing I'll give the crew from the secret private server days, the reworks of the armor sets for Sents all seem quite sound.

[Bill Z Bubba]

Wow was I wrong. Faceplanted with DP, IH and Darkest Night up on the very first pair of spawns at +1/x8.

Ok, ignore this. Soon as I started really leaning on fault and tremor everything got much better.

 

But at +4/x8? Umm, yea, it's doable long as I spam MoG and eat insps like crazy. But this is without incarnate powers. I'll get them crafted and see what's what.

 

Ok, yea. This works. As long as I lean on my knockdown, and cycle through IH, Hybrid Melee. Barrier, MoG, Void judgement for the -damage, Spiritual Alpha for the +recharge and +heal and keep DP clicked when available, I can get through these Cimerorans at max diff.

 

Or... I can just run SR, set PB on auto and go make dinner while being immortal. But Hamidon can certainly mess up my SRs and Shielders.

 

It's bad. What I'm trying to say here is that melee regen is bad. I do still really like it on my two Sents that have it, though.

Edited March 6, 2021 by Bill Z Bubba

[America's Angel]

For those confused by my last post, Sir Myshkin summed it up perfectly, below.

 

(replace "team-mate buffs" with "inspiration chaining" and you've got your How To Play High End Regens playbook):

 

On 3/5/2021 at 5:42 AM, Sir Myshkin said:

What is truly the superior build, a character that self-caps, with minimal values on healing potential and regen, or a high-performing regen/heal build that can be capped by the support of other team members? I drag along a Force Field and Sonic Resonance Defender (each with Maneuvers), and I've now got 48% Def with 55% Res to all but Psionic being applied on top of my own stats. Even without inherent debuff protection these values start to over compensate for one or two if my own defense is already 32% or higher. If I'm running a Brute for sake of the larger caps, I'm looking at 80% Defense and easily capped S/L Resistance at a minimum, possibly across the board with the correct choice of investments to diversify 35% on each. That Brute, compared to its non-Regen counter part however is packing an insane amount of healing power and at least one instant-kick "get out of jail free" card in MoG in the invent of a potential cascade failure.

 

From this perspective Regen is really the optimal team armor in the game.

 

[UberGuy]

I soloed the ITF on +4/x8 with a DB/Regen. I very much wanted to do it using no inspirations and no temp powers, but I did not engage the limitations, just in case. In the end I was forced to use yellow Inspirations to hit Romulus, and I used a Jet Pack initially during the fight with Nictus puffballs. No amplifiers, no Lucks or Robusts, no base crafted buffs, etc.

 

I only died once, thanks to two (edit: went back and read my notes from the time and it was three) hits in a row from Nictus Rom in the final fight with him after the last ambush. Probably obviously, I did not pile into the Romans, and fought just the groups I needed to.

 

The hardest part of it all was just that regular Romulus ran like a track star all the time, which brutalized my ability to maintain DPS against him. That and his high defense were the reasons I needed to resort to yellow inspirations, because otherwise it was just going to take forever to kill him.

 

I get it if people don't like playing Regen. I get that because of the limitations of activation time for powers, having to use clicks hurts DPS, though I think it's a real design failure in this game is that so much of the game requires so few clicks except to spam attacks. But anyone who says that Regen can't do stupid things beyond what anyone actually needs it to do to play CoH really well is playing it wrong.

 

Citation, at least re: number of deaths:

Edited March 6, 2021 by UberGuy
Mobile voice to text fubars, added image

[Bionic_Flea]

3 minutes ago, UberGuy said:

I soloed the ITF on +4/XI with a DB/Regen.

Yours go to 11?

 

[UberGuy]

1 minute ago, Bionic_Flea said:

Yours go to 11?

lol, fixed. That was a very strange autocorrect failure. That's what I get for posting on mobile.

[Galaxy Brain]

So, I decided to try things out with a Brute between Regen / Willpower / Bio (Efficient) as they are the three "Regenerator" sets. For this test, I ran +1/x6 on SO's, with each character also having Combat Jumping, Maneuvers, Tough and Weave (the latter two 3 slotted for res/def).

 

Rules are simple, wade into a group of Crey / Council / Cimerorans 5 times and record how long you can last. If you get to 3min, that'll be the cutoff as there is no way a fight should last longer than that.

 

 

 

So, each of these are interesting.

 

1) Regen I made sure to lead with Instant Healing as the first action when jumping into the mob. Even still, Crey and Cimerorans did not care about that even when popping Dull Pain and Reconstruction once I hit about 60-50% hp. Council were much easier for Regen to handle, but once IH dropped... so did the Brute.

 

2) Willpower held up well, but had a harder time vs Cimerorans than Regen did thanks to no "reactive" mitigation vs their burst damage. It was sort of all over the place vs Crey with some runs having hard hits come at once, and vs Council while it could usually live all the way to 3 minutes it definitely took licks and with one run it got rather unlucky.

 

3) Bio Efficient Mode combines the best parts of Regen and WP. Both with great toggle/passive mitigation and a handful of reactionary click sustains, combine that with a damage aura where after X time a good chunk of the mob is defeated and well... look at the above.

 

 

I could have used MoG on Regen each run as well, but it would likely have just added +15s each time and it is not up every fight. Hell, using IH each fight is just as if not more disingenuous as it is on an even harsher cooldown to it's T9. Especially compared to WP, Regen was only better vs 1 enemy type when running INSTANT HEALING vs a set that was not even 100% saturated with RttC....

 

 

Yes, the primary's mitigation would 100% matter... but all 3 of these sets could equally use the primary's mitigations. Yes, team buffs and inspirations / IO's would help a lot.... but all three can get buffed in those manners....

 

 

 

Edited March 6, 2021 by Galaxy Brain

[oedipus_tex]

Out of curiosity, are the tests on Regen being run against +4 enemies, or against enemies level shifted down to+3? Shifting enemies down will have you killing them ~36% quicker before debuffs are considered and taking about 35% less damage, in addition to enduring ~35% lower debuff values from -Recharge, -Endurance etc. That takes a lot of pressure off of your armor and mitigation tools.

 

I don't want to drag thefull Level Shift argument from the other thread here, but the game does a do big switcheroo on you at level 50 versus levels 1-49. Enemies become much easier than they were on the journey upward, particularly levels 35-49. Because you can email Empyreans, established players never need to spend time as a Level 50 fighting +4, where a less invested player will spend at least some time there. How does Regen handle when played in that natural +4 range and is that where the perception comes from that it is much more fragile than other armors?

[America's Angel]

33 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

Yes, team buffs and inspirations / IO's would help a lot.... but all three can get buffed in those manners....

Which benefits more from purple inspirations - an SR Brute or a Regen Brute?

[UberGuy]

49 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

Rules are simple, wade into a group of Crey / Council / Cimerorans 5 times and record how long you can last. If you get to 3min, that'll be the cutoff as there is no way a fight should last longer than that.

 

 

 

 

You should know this is set up for Regen (and to some extent WP) to fail. Regen has the weakest of the three's def/res stats. In that scenario, you must defeat enemies in order to reduce the DPS you face. By ignoring MoG, you deprive Regen of 15 seconds it could spend killing things to reduce what it's up against. By not killing anything, you demand that IH's HP recovery exceed the applied DPS and never do anything to reduce it.

 

That's not how the powerset works. Regen is about burst survival. Winning fights is about getting your foe to zero HP before they can do the same to you, and Regen can buy you enough time to do that quickly, or you lose. Measuring how long you can stand around willy-nilly ignoring your enemies has an element of pure academia about it. That's not how we actually play.

 

And of course it shows that a set with both extreme HP recovery and decent resists can stand around for a long time. (It also shows why Bio is probably going to get a nerf bat in the face eventually.)