Buffing up Regeneration

[BrandX]

9 hours ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

Hi Night! 👋

 

I like a lot of your proposals. I think pulling from the already existing and generally well-considered Sentinel Regen is a wise choice. Further, I haven't seen much in the way of disagreement in the way of adding recharge resistance to the set. It makes good sense, pumps the set up but doesn't change the way it plays for those who enjoy the reactive playstyle.

 

I think if I had to disagree with your proposal anywhere it'd be here:

 

Reconstruction can get down to about a 15 second cooldown. Having an enhanceable 25% absorb on that kind of cooldown seems far too overpowered. I can respect the idea of building in options for the power: proactive versus reactive, while also giving the set something other than MoG to slap down on before diving into a nasty pile, but this seems way too strong. Along with the rolling absorb from Integration the set would essentially lose it's reactivity in play. Wouldn't need to even to take Instant Healing. I'd suggest dropping this off Reconstruction. 

 

Okay I lied, maybe two things I disagree with:

 

I'm not sure about adding token Defense to the set. This does more than just bump Defense up a bit, it offers more slotting options (specifically for LotG, Kismet, Shield Wall, and Reactive Defenses) that will undoubtedly make the set stronger. I'm assuming this was your intent, though it wasn't stated outright. I haven't seen any of the more experienced Regen hands weigh in on this portion, but I can see my own Regen characters going through full respecs with to this change alone. Personally I'd trade this huge buff for making Instant Healing perma-able with enough recharge.

 

But like I said up front, I think you have a great proposal for improvements, and I know I'd enjoy my current Regeners even more than I already do with these changes to the set.

 

The defense works, if one looks at it as a minor but passive MoG.

[Night]

The changes aren't made to drastically change how you build a regen character, or particularly slotting. It's more to make the set more viable and just fun. I don't IO out 90% of my characters, and those changes were mostly made with SOs in mind. But when making a tight IO build such as with regen, I know any bit of defense is valuable so I added a bit to Resilience fitting in numbers with Invuln's auto defense power, to not make it overpowered or silly. Addition of the small amount of defense was mainly to help out IOing up, while being something to work alongside Combat Jumping or Hover as both also add a tiny amount of defense that might eventually help out. I imagine adding defense to Resilience would change slotting only just, with it also being the only resistance power, you'd most likely wanna 4-slot it with Unbreakable Guard for that melee and S/L defense which leaves you 2 slots for procs. Or, give up on Unbreakable Guard slotting and fill the power with procs, which would free up perhaps two or three slots to use elsewhere in the already slot-hungry build

 

I'm sure Reconstruction having a 25% absorb is not a huge problem. It's base recharge is 60 seconds. For the numbers, I looked at Bio and it's Abalative Carapace which sits at 90s recharge and provides 30% enhancable absorb. Bio also has inbuilt defense, so regen needs something to not be so easily outpaced. Pulling the absorb value back by 5% due to lower recharge should even it out while not making it useless. At capped recharge, that puts down Abalative Carapace down to 22s recharge with 30% absorb, and Reconstruction to 15s with 25%, with Abalative Carapace only taking 7 seconds longer, it still makes Bio the stronger set but lets regen fight its way up. Regen could really use those mechanics given it has no inbuilt defense outside the godmode on a really long recharge.

 

With regen, anything that can hit you will hit you, hence the recharge time resistance almost capping with my changes. When your clickies are on cooldown, a single ice blast or a web grenade can make you despair and die. Those are common in Circle and Malta, some of the main lvl 50 enemy groups.

[MTeague]

Any defense that comes without Defense Debuff Resist is to be looked at with varying degrees of distrust.

Yes, there are blasters that reach very high levels of defense and just melt face.

 

But for my /Regen, I've been happier stacking Resistances along with Recharge. 

I'll take defense where I can fit in of course. It's not like defense sucks. 

But I have to assume it will be debuffed off me in short order when I dive into a pile of Council or Malta or IDF or whatever. 

[MTeague]

Also, I'd like to see a teeensy tiny adjustment to /Regen specfically for Stalkers, to maybe put a portion of Quick Recovery that they currently do not get into their Hide, or into their Fast Healing, something.

[twozerofoxtrot]

1 hour ago, MTeague said:

But I have to assume it will be debuffed off me in short order when I dive into a pile of Council or Malta or IDF or whatever. 

 

This was my thinking with my reaction, though as I said I wasn't sure about it overall. 

 

Night brings up a great point that I completely blew past which is that the set should be balanced around SOs, since the game isn't balanced around IOs. Should it be?

 

But back to your point as well, if the set has no inherent DDR then the utility of that added defense can become very limited in certain (but common) situations. Ergo, I'd still rather cash this change in to see IH's cooldown reduced to the point it could be made permanent.

[UberGuy]

Don't overextend the meaning of "balanced around SOs".

• All powersets are designed with the founding assumption that they must work well if the player builds only with SOs or maybe common/generic IOs. A set will never be designed with the notion that it will only work reasonably (for some notion of reasonability) if shored up by IOs.
• What a powerset can do when supplemented with IOs is never ignored (though sometimes implications can be missed - our devs are human).

Sets are not necessarily balanced for equal performance with IOs attached. That's almost impossible anyway due to the non-linear behavior of stacking progressive damage resist or defense.

[twozerofoxtrot]

Thanks for your response, Night!

 

5 hours ago, Night said:

Regen could really use those mechanics given it has no inbuilt defense outside the godmode on a really long recharge.

 

So I understand your argument but there are a few things I'd like to point out:

 

1) Regen is already getting a rolling absorb as part of your changes. This, combined with the other improvements would already provide a lot of inbuilt defense and leave it without having to rely on MoG. I think we've seen this clearly with how well Regen performs on Sentinels. Given the slight stat bump it would get if ported over to melees, it would do even better.

 

2) My initial concern was not so much that it breaks the game, but rather it alters how the set is played. I'm not a Regen main, but there are people who really enjoy that reactive playstyle and I don't think it's fair to the community to pull that away. Now that we have two absorbs to play with, one being fairly robust and on a short cooldown, we've altered the approach to the set. Perhaps scaling it back a bit works? Ideally, changes to regen should reward active play more than it currently does.

 

3) Comparing Regen revamps to Bio means putting it up against what is widely considered the strongest set in the game. I think this leaves open the chance for fair criticism that we're over-tuning Regen

[MTeague]

40 minutes ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

But back to your point as well, if the set has no inherent DDR then the utility of that added defense can become very limited in certain (but common) situations. Ergo, I'd still rather cash this change in to see IH's cooldown reduced to the point it could be made permanent.

I don't know if we'll set Perma-able IH.  I mean, I wouldn't argue against that. But if it were done, they almost might as well just make it a toggle.

I mean, granted, the Homecoming Devs are not (as far I know?) the same Devs who changed it from a Toggle to a Click in the first place. 

But "move it back to a toggle" has been asked for time and time again, and not acted on.  So I don't think it's likely to happen. Be nice though.

 

What I do think is probably possible is having enough recharge to have a rotation between IH and Unleash Potential and MoG / possibly some other active-use function of a revised Revive.

[UberGuy]

Personally, I don't think +absorb as a mechanic really adds that much to Regen as a powerset.

 

The really key thing to bear in mind about absorb is that it's basically just more HP. Sure, it's usually proactive, where both healing and +regen are reactive (they replace HP after they're lost), In a steady state where you're taking damage such that your +absorb is totally gone every time you replace it and then it starts being eaten by damage again, the result is almost exactly like you were being damaged without the +absorb, but had a same sized heal.

 

The one thing I'll grant that +absorb does differently is that it shifts how much HP you have left when you need to optimally activate it. With +absorb, you'd be at max non-absorb HP, where with healing, you're at roughly half health. That sounds significant, but if you're in a place where that's a big deal, you're probably dying so fast that the extra starting HP that going into battle with the +absorb primed isn't going to change your time-to-defeat very much.

 

Frankly, I see changing integration into ticking +absorb as a nerf. Using the same "under fire" analysis as above, you can map ticking +absorb directly to a heal-over-time, but this has two problems. (1) AoTs don't normally scale with maxHP changes, so you will recover HP under fire proportionally slower when DP is up. (2) because neither damage nor AoT stream in continuous average values, you can lose the AoT equivalent to healing up HP if you tick multiple times without taking damage. Those HP are "lost" which only happens with regen or heals if you're at or near max HP. If your main HP pool was actually damaged when you ticked your +Absorb, then you're not regaining HP.

 

As mentioned in the other thread already linked. I think folks who want toggle IH back should just play WP. I'd rather see different changes to Regen to retain its current click-happy nature. And in any case, I think we view toggle IH through the rose colored glasses of pre-I4 concepts of what was challenging. Even always-on, pre-ED levels of IH isn't all that without defense or resist to cover for it. It's still HP recovery, and that just can't scale to the DPS we find ourselves facing at high-end notoriety and in the face of debuffs. The powersets who can do that without breaking a sweat are doing it by reducing incoming DPS by a factor of 40-100 or more, which lets them get by with relatively low levels of HP replacement/time.

Edited March 19, 2021 by UberGuy

[Alchemystic]

To be honest, a powerset with the ability to boost MaxHP or healing received will benefit more from Absorb than most other powersets, so I think it would be a missed opportunity to leave Absorb out of these proposed Regeneration changes.

 

[CaptainLupis]

12 minutes ago, Tyrannical said:

To be honest, a powerset with the ability to boost MaxHP or healing received will benefit more from Absorb than most other powersets, so I think it would be a missed opportunity to leave Absorb out of these proposed Regeneration changes.

 

I think some people were against absorb in regen from a thematic perspective, and they struggle to see how an absorb power fits. Personally I have more problem seeing how MoG fits the theme than an absorb does. Absorb to me would essentially just be the same as healing so fast that the damage doesn't even regester, until you start to take more damage than you can keep up with at which point the healing begins to take time (ie the regen part).

 

So I'm not adverse to it being added, as I do think it would help the set and give your regen powers time to actually work, but I wouldn't be particularly bothered were it not added either, if most were against it.

[TemporalVileTerror]

Call the Regeneration-specific Absorb "Overheal" and recolour it to a darker shade of green.

[Haijinx]

1 hour ago, CaptainLupis said:

I think some people were against absorb in regen from a thematic perspective, and they struggle to see how an absorb power fits. Personally I have more problem seeing how MoG fits the theme than an absorb does. Absorb to me would essentially just be the same as healing so fast that the damage doesn't even regester, until you start to take more damage than you can keep up with at which point the healing begins to take time (ie the regen part).

 

So I'm not adverse to it being added, as I do think it would help the set and give your regen powers time to actually work, but I wouldn't be particularly bothered were it not added either, if most were against it.

Defense was not intended to describe only the ability to dodge attacks. 

 

It also includes deflection / bouncing off.   

 

Thick layers like ice and rocks.

 

And thick skin that makes it hard score "a hit"

[CaptainLupis]

6 minutes ago, Haijinx said:

Defense was not intended to describe only the ability to dodge attacks. 

 

It also includes deflection / bouncing off.   

 

Thick layers like ice and rocks.

 

And thick skin that makes it hard score "a hit"

I'm not really sure what that has to do with what I said?

[Night]

Nobody seems to mind absorb in Sentinel Regenereration, so putting it in the base set is only gonna do good things to its survivability. Also overhealing, yeah. Moment of Glory was a strange design, but well, take what we can get and the set needs all it can get in terms of defense and resistance. It was even more 'fun' and 'thematic' back when it set your HP to 25% and didn't allow you to heal, but we don't have to look that far.

[Haijinx]

8 minutes ago, CaptainLupis said:

I'm not really sure what that has to do with what I said?

Well MOG could be a situation where you heal so fast you can't even be effectively wounded.

 

Thus resistance and defense

[CaptainLupis]

4 minutes ago, Haijinx said:

Well MOG could be a situation where you heal so fast you can't even be effectively wounded.

 

Thus resistance and defense

That's a stretch for me, but people can rationalise powers as they see fit.

[BrandX]

6 minutes ago, CaptainLupis said:

That's a stretch for me, but people can rationalise powers as they see fit.

 

I don't know.  It may be an instance of Hulk level regeneration.  

[CaptainLupis]

16 minutes ago, BrandX said:

 

I don't know.  It may be an instance of Hulk level regeneration.  

It doesn't work for me, but I don't have a problem if that's how other people equate defence with regen. I know there are many that don't agree with my take on absorb and regen either, but I see those 2 much more closely connected than defence. But it's unlikely we are going to see more defence or absorb in regen any time soon,  so we'll have plenty time to think up how to rationalise any changes in those directions should they happen!

[Haijinx]

4 minutes ago, CaptainLupis said:

That's a stretch for me, but people can rationalise powers as they see fit.

Its an old power its rationalized by those older concepts.

 

Sort of like Ice and Stone are Defense.

 

Makes less sense at this stage of the game.

[CaptainLupis]

3 hours ago, Haijinx said:

Its an old power its rationalized by those older concepts.

 

Sort of like Ice and Stone are Defense.

 

Makes less sense at this stage of the game.

No, I get the idea of the glancing blow thing with defence, which works with the concept of stone and ice, but not so much with the idea of regen for me as nothing about regen would have that affect. But that's just my take on it.

[Galaxy Brain]

5 hours ago, CaptainLupis said:

Absorb to me would essentially just be the same as healing so fast that the damage doesn't even regester, until you start to take more damage than you can keep up with at which point the healing begins to take time (ie the regen part).

 

In practice, the Instant Healing toggle for Sentinels basically provides this. If you absorb X / Sec, then you are also immune to X / Sec damage. To me this makes sense thematically as small wounds probably heal so rapidly that a regenner wont even notice. 

 

This differs from other mitigation tho in that it is a flat-rate WALL against damage. If you have say, 30 Absorb / Sec, that means every second you will prevent 30 damage from harming you. A 100 damage attack with no other mitigation = 70 damage, which is roughly like 30% resist. A 50 damage attack tho becomes 20, which is like 60% res. 30 and below? You're immune! However against BIG blows this lessens in effectiveness too.

Edited March 21, 2021 by Galaxy Brain

[Haijinx]

41 minutes ago, CaptainLupis said:

No, I get the idea of the glancing blow thing with defence, which works with the concept of stone and ice, but not so much with the idea of regen for me as nothing about regen would have that affect. But that's just my take on it.

Invincibility was about bullets bouncing off ala Superman

 

Not sure how glancing that was. 

[CaptainLupis]

12 minutes ago, Haijinx said:

Invincibility was about bullets bouncing off ala Superman

 

Not sure how glancing that was. 

And if invincibility were a purely defense based set I could maybe see where you were going with that logic. But we are dragging this way off topic here.

[Haijinx]

6 minutes ago, CaptainLupis said:

And if invincibility were a purely defense based set I could maybe see where you were going with that logic. But we are dragging this way off topic here.

Invincibility is a defense based power of the Invulnerability set.