Buffing up Regeneration

[CaptainLupis]

6 minutes ago, Haijinx said:

Invincibility is a defense based power of the Invulnerability set.

 

 

My apologies, I assumed you were talking about the set as I don't recall the power itself talking about bullets bouncing off like superman, where the set as a whole is often compared to him. But I've barely played invuln so I could well be wrong. Regardless it still doen't have anything to do with buffing regen, so I am leaving it there.

[UberGuy]

15 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

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.

 

It's just HP. The same rationale applies to having an extra 30 max HP and healing 30 HP/sec.

 

Comparing Absorb (or healing) to damage resistance ever is, IMO, a mistake that will wildly inflate people's understanding of Absorb's benefits.

 

Adding 20% damage resistance to 40% existing resistance drops the DPS you suffer by a third, no matter what the incoming DPS actually is. How long you can survive that is a function of your HP recovery rate, but whatever that rate was, it will now keep you alive forever at 1.5x the incoming DPS it would before. Increasing your HP/sec recovered by 1.5x instead (with Absorb, healing or  +Regen), is a huge ask, especially when it was already high.

Edited March 22, 2021 by UberGuy

[Galaxy Brain]

1 hour ago, UberGuy said:

 

It's just HP. The same rationale applies to having an extra 30 max HP and healing 30 HP/sec.

 

Comparing Absorb (or healing) to damage resistance ever is, IMO, a mistake that will wildly inflate people's understanding of Absorb's benefits.

 

Adding 20% damage resistance to 40% existing resistance drops the DPS you suffer by a third, no matter what the incoming DPS actually is. How long you can survive that is a function of your HP recovery rate, but whatever that rate was, it will now keep you alive forever at 1.5x the incoming DPS it would before. Increasing your HP/sec recovered by 1.5x instead (with Absorb, healing or  +Regen), is a huge ask, especially when it was already high.

 

The key difference is that it is another layer that is once removed from "real" HP. Anything that effects your actual HP or is based on it will not effect Absorb (it always references your base), and vice versa tho there is not much tied to absorb at the moment.

 

It also very much depends on the type of  Absorb applied. If you have an actual, *CONSTANT* absorb of say 10, then that is vastly different than 1 tick of 30 every 3 seconds, or one solid chunk of 300 every 30s. If there was a power with an actual, constant layer then it would be more equal to a layer of armor as you simply cannot be defeated by damage less than 10 even if you are at 1 HP.

 

 

 

[MTeague]

19 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

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.

 

For one single 100 damage attack, yes.

What about three incoming 100 damage attacks?

 

1st attack:   100 pts - 30 absorb = 70 damage.  "like" 30% damage resist.

2nd attack:  100 pts - no more absorb = 100 damage. 

3rd attack:   100 pts - no more absorb = 100 damage.

So you soak 270 hps.

 

Whereas if you *actually* had 30% damage resist, you'd only take 70+70+70 = 210 hp's.

That's why I can't swallow the "it's sorta like damage resist" comparision.  I mean, I get what you're saying, but it's not exactly rare for me to have multiple mobs on me.

[UberGuy]

No one has a constant absorb. That would be D&D-style damage reduction, which does not exist in CoH. To be clear, ticking absorb is not constant. Absorb is removed by damage exactly like regular HP, and absorb stops blocking damage once it's exhausted.

 

The rate at which the ticking absorb is replaced is directly analogous (though not exactly the same as) receiving heal over time. If you get 100 absorb every 4 sec, and damage is fully stripping it away before each refresh, the average effect on how long it will take your foe(s) to kill you is exactly the same as healing 100 HP every 4s, or regenerating 25 HP/sec.

 

The fact that Absorb is a separate pool is only relevant in that (a) it can be added to you when your regular HP bar is full, even if you are at your maxMaxHP, and (b) that it doesn't actually heal damage to your regular HP pool. For ticking aborb, this second point is actually a weakness compared to heal-over-tiime - HoT will eventually reset your regular HP to full if you stop taking damage for a bit, while ticking absorb never will. (HoT is a form of "sustain", where ticking absorb is not.)

Edited March 22, 2021 by UberGuy

[Galaxy Brain]

It all depends on the application of it, but in practice yes it is like more HP or HPS as it exists currently.

 

There is also the order of operations which is important in a clinch where an Absorb vs Heal comparison becomes a factor. Absorb takes away from damage dealt to you, where a Heal repairs your health after damage is applied. If you have say, 10 APS vs 10 HPS, in a situation where you see 15 damage coming in, the absorb would reduce that to 5 and you'd live whereas the 15 would hit you, and you'd die and thus not be able to heal.  The same applies to multiple tiny hits which is common especially when paired with resists, or vs a lot of DoT's. If the absorb refreshes fast enough vs the incoming hits, then you essentially took 0 HP damage which has merit over heal when it comes to near-death situations.

 

It's just that currently, Absorb is kind of all over the place with even the blaster sustains all having different refresh rates between X/0.5s to x/2s. They all have the same "APS", but the refresh rate can alter combat situations heavily based on incoming heat. To @MTeague's example, the 3 hits of 100 holds true where resist would be better. But 10 hits of 30 may be mitigated far differently. We just don't have any armor sets with rapid absorb yet to make a good comparison compared to Blasters and Sentinel Regen (which has other changes).

 

In short, Absorb is more mitigation than sustain as it helps prevent defeat more than it refreshes you between encounters, even if it is incredibly similar to Healing. (Credit to @Replacement for the comparison)

 

 

Anywho, as for the topic at hand for Regen as it stands with regards to Absorb I can see it being added as while it has incredible Sustain, it's mitigation suffers for it. Trading some HPS for equivalent APS may split the difference in key scenarios while still having relatively the same performance.

[Troo]

On 3/22/2021 at 11:45 AM, Galaxy Brain said:

Trading some HPS for equivalent APS

I may be reading it incorrectly. If so, ignore my comments here.

 

Trading.. just no.

 

If you are proposing trading some current regen rate for absorb that is a different power set. I would cease to be Regeneration. It becomes something akin to force fields for melee.

 

If adding additional absorb.. be grudgingly, I would accept it.

 

-----------------------

 

Also "flat-rate WALL against damage"

This would only be true if Regeneration had one set rate, which it doesn't. The powers don't need to be used all at once. In my experience, they are situational.

[UberGuy]

I honestly and truly don't understand why we would propose trading HP/s for AP/s.

 

That will not help the set. Literally, mechanically and mathematically, that will fail to achieve the goals.

 

The problem, simply stated, is that HP replacement is a linear counter to incoming DPS. Want to survive another 100 DPS? You need to replace an extre 100 HP/s. We cannot achieve enough HP replacement to counter the DPS that sets with high resist and defense can. And when I say we can't, I mean two things:

• The numbers we need are huge. A crowd of +3 Cimerorans, for example, can deal over 2000 DPS. (I ran a test in AE and got numbers ranging from 780/s to 2730/s from second to second. Remember, several other sets can stand in these guys and not care.
• No sane dev would actually give us anything close to those HP/s numbers, since layering team buffs or even set bonuses on them would make Regen unkillable in the vast majority of the game.

 

And that is the problem with (nearly) pure HP replacement as a survival tool. It's very binary. Either you are basically immortal or you're not, and when you're not, you can be dead very quickly. Layering a really large amount of Absorb on top of Regen does make its total bag of effective HP unusually large, but even at maxMaxHP and max Absorb, you're talking about around 4800 HP for a Scrapper or 6400 for a Brute. At 1000 DPS, a (conservative value based on foes that hit like Cimerorans but don't nearly double their DPS by debuffing your defense), and an immense HP/AP recovery of 500/s, you'd still be dead in about 9 seconds on a Scrapper or 13s for a Brute, assuming a perfectly average scenario.

 

To survive with more reasonable and modest HP replacement rates, what Regen needs is most likely more damage resistance. If we can't make the HP/s we recover high enough, we need to make the hits hurt less. The resist can't be too high (or, alternatively, too consistent) or we have to start taking away Regen's HP replacement to account for it. But it needs more than it has now.

 

Even with higher resists, if we keep them modest, we might want to tap into the Absorb mechanic simply because we may want Regen to have an even bigger bag of HP than it does now with Dull Pain (especially since it's easy to cap maxMaxHP on Scrappers and Stalkers). While Absorb is usually described as some sort of ablative covering, it's not totally inconceivable that Regen could treat its own skin and muscles this way, as long as they "grow back" easily.

[CaptainLupis]

Does anyone know the mechanic by which Field Medic in the medicine pool works? What I was thinking was a similar type of power but for regen, instead of healing.

 

I know that FM decreases your resistance to healing, but I'm not sure what the ramifications are to doing that for regen, especially where debuffs come in. What I would be hoping it does is give you a flat % boost to your current total regen, and work as a counter to -regen debuffs (which I assume adds resistance to regen). But I have no idea if that's what it would actually do in practice.

[BrandX]

For every power you take, increase the other powers by 20% effectiveness!

 

 

[Wavicle]

I like a lot of the proposals.