Suprising Solution to Dark Armor Endurance Management

[cfarevival]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

 

If you all are aware of this, please forgive me.  I have recently discovered one of the greatest proc benefits I never knew:  Slotting a single Theft of Essence:  Chance for +Endurance into Dark Armor's Dark Regeneration.  It has a chance to proc for every single baddie surrounding you.  I have reliably filled my entire endurance bar when surrounded by many a mob.  Of course I have the standard +recovery or + endurance procs, but this one takes the cake and it is ONLY THIS EFFECTIVE ON DARK ARMOR!  Apparantly it is also effective on Bio Armor (which I have never used!)

 

I made a Dark/Dark Scrapper and threw the proc in the heal in order to try to mitigate my nightmarish endurance problem.  BOOM!  Started seeing my endurance bar fill entirely!  So I geared my toon to be high recharge (do not add recharge enhancements of any kind into Dark Regeneration), and wow!  My heal is now a 6-slotted proc bomb with -res and +endurance firing reliably!  LOVE IT!

 

Just thought I would share this discovery.  I have made two tanks with Dark Armor recently and it works on them as well (and even better since they can hold aggro!)

Edited November 26, 2021 by cfarevival

[Yomo Kimyata]

(psst, DNA Siphon is *even better*!)

[Carnifax]

(As it is in Rad Therapy, which is 1/3rd of the End Cost and has much higher innate Accuracy for some reason).

 

Honestly I tried this on a Dark Tank, along with all the usual Chance for End and +Recovery uniques and was still really struggling with Dark Armour End woes in my mid-20s. Ended up rerolling them. 

 

 

[Parabola]

Yes dark regen gets an enormous amount out of this proc. It's a well known trick, you'll probably struggle to find a dark armour build that doesn't use it.

 

I am half expecting the devs to at some point change the behaviour of this proc in line with the chance to heal procs: they can only fire once in an aoe regardless of the number of enemies but have higher return for that one activation. If they do go down this road I will be campaigning noisily for an end reduction in dark regeneration and a look at dark armour end use generally. That said, it isn't really right that a single proc makes or breaks the sustainability of a whole power set.

Edited November 26, 2021 by Parabola

[mcdoogss]

In addition for people pairing Dark Armor with Dark Melee, if you have room for it siphon life procs theft of essence pretty regularly too.  Very useful given siphon life is a very end-heavy ST attack (same end cost as midnight grasp and more than shadow maul or touch of fear).  If you have no recharge in the power at all, the +end proc makes it darn near end neutral.

Edited November 26, 2021 by mcdoogss

[cfarevival]

I cerntainly hope that they would not nerf it.  It already comes in with a built in downside:  if your endurance is low enough and you attempt to heal, you completely drain of endurance, detoggle, and then your endurance bar fills.  I would say this is problematic enough to warrant no adjustment.  I keep a few blues on me just in case I have a low endurance bar before I heal.

Edited November 26, 2021 by cfarevival

[Uun]

I tried the proc in Dark Regeneration on my Dark/Dark tank and found it really wasn't helping that much. I've currently got it in Siphon Life. Of course most of my endurance issues went away once I slotted Cardiac Alpha.

[arcane]

Surprisingly as someone who mained DA on live, I’ve never done it. But endurance problems literally don’t exist in this game anymore if you only play 44 or under once in awhile, so never had to think of it.

Edited November 26, 2021 by arcane

[Yomo Kimyata]

Honestly, I slot a Theft proc in any power that takes it.  Even single target stuff adds up over time.

[Snarky]

A Dark/Dark is hard to level.  Once 50’d there are about 12 strategies (probably more) for solving all endurance issues.  
 

The one you mentioned is very good.  At mid levels.  Because Dark Regen is not an early power.  

I prefer to slot for rech/acc and have Dark Consumption up as needed.  As an O crap i get the pay two whine endurance booster (and health booster and phase shift.  Love me some options)

at 50 you have Alphas and Destiny’s and team buffs that mostly resolve running issues and your strategies for constant end mgt become backups for when mobs/mechanics are hitting tour blue bar hard

 

have fun. But be Dark.  Very Dark

[DougGraves]

I just switched  to playing rad/dark tankers instead of dark/dark and my END problems went away.  So much more fun to level.

[Gorgar]

I frankenslot Dark Regen like this: 3 heal/end/rech from various healing sets, Theft of Essence proc, Touch of the Nictus acc/end/rech, and the last slot is either Touch of the Nictus acc/heal (for tanks and tanky brutes, want the greater acc+heal values for tanking AVs) or Theft of Essence acc/end/rech (for scrappers, stalkers, and scrappier brutes, want the better rech).  It has worked pretty well for me.

[ZorkNemesis]

Dark Regenerarion has an utterly massive base endurance cost, 33 on activation.  The proc is very helpful in offsetting that but the power absolutely needs more EndRedux slotted to make the most of it, and to be practical in the first place since DR is one of the biggest reasons Dark Armor has awful end management to begin with.  Without slotting, it needs three procs per use to be efficient which isn't a guarentee, and even then you still need enough to use it in the first place.

[Parabola]

2 hours ago, ZorkNemesis said:

Dark Regenerarion has an utterly massive base endurance cost, 33 on activation.

This is the thing. Every now and again I think about proccing out dark regen as it would be great extra damage but you really need to slot accuracy, recharge and end reduction. By the time you've done all that and put the obligatory theft proc in there isn't any room for extra mucking around. If ever there was a power I could happily 12 slot it would be this one!

 

Recently I've been using this slotting (robbed from Werner I think):

Level 8: Dark Regeneration

• (A) Fury of the Gladiator - Accuracy/Damage
• (9) Fury of the Gladiator - Accuracy/Endurance/Recharge
• (9) Fury of the Gladiator - Accuracy/Damage/End/Rech
• (11) Preventive Medicine - Heal/Endurance
• (11) Preventive Medicine - Heal/RechargeTime/Endurance
• (13) Theft of Essence - Chance for +Endurance

This gives solid enhancement including a little heal for those times you only have a single target, some resists and some kb protection.

[cfarevival]

In low levels, I have found kismet's +accuracy to be sufficient to not need to slot any accuracy in Dark Regen.  In fact, I have 0 accuracy enhancements in it and I have no problems whatsoever with accuracy.  I have been experimenting with it here lately.  I actually just put in my Scrapper's +50% crit chance proc in there and it procs very frequently.  I have almost no endurance problems whatsoever now, especially since he is a high recharge build (spiritual and ageless).  Dark Consumption may get the boot here soon, necause I don't really need it, apparantly.

 

 

[Snarky]

19 minutes ago, cfarevival said:

In low levels, I have found kismet's +accuracy to be sufficient to not need to slot any accuracy in Dark Regen.  In fact, I have 0 accuracy enhancements in it and I have no problems whatsoever with accuracy.  I have been experimenting with it here lately.  I actually just put in my Scrapper's +50% crit chance proc in there and it procs very frequently.  I have almost no endurance problems whatsoever now, especially since he is a high recharge build (spiritual and ageless).  Dark Consumption may get the boot here soon, necause I don't really need it, apparantly.

 

 

Dark Consumption has two uses in a late game build I have found. 1) an extremely powerful “o crap this mechanic has screwed my blue bar” fix, and 2) a great ghetto PBAoE damage, especially with a knockdown proc in it.  Crowd control? Works like a charm

[macskull]

(This is how this proc gets nerfed)

[Snarky]

1 hour ago, macskull said:

(This is how this proc gets nerfed)

Lol.  I literally have zero proc builds.  I slot procs when they occur naturally in set bonuses and such.  So yes, according to the infinite absurdity of the universe  this would cause the nerfing of procs

 

 

 

 

[reisma]

2 hours ago, macskull said:

(This is how this proc gets nerfed)

 

It was far more powerful before the PPM nerf to all procs.  I'm surprised people are gushing about it now, because it's a shadow of its former self.

[JnEricsonx]

Used it back in the Live days on my Spines/Dark scrapper.  I still wanted to tie a Kin to me though.  Still, Cardiac helps, but sometimes my BS/DA brute needs to pop it.

[arcane]

9 hours ago, Snarky said:

Lol.  I literally have zero proc builds.  I slot procs when they occur naturally in set bonuses and such.  So yes, according to the infinite absurdity of the universe  this would cause the nerfing of procs

 

 

 

 

This. If snark is slotting a proc it definitely needs to be nerfed into the ground, because he is highly allergic to them.

[macskull]

9 hours ago, Snarky said:

Lol.  I literally have zero proc builds.  I slot procs when they occur naturally in set bonuses and such.  So yes, according to the infinite absurdity of the universe  this would cause the nerfing of procs

Sorry. My post wasn't directed at you, just at the existence of this thread in general.

[Snarky]

49 minutes ago, macskull said:

Sorry. My post wasn't directed at you, just at the existence of this thread in general.

actually this proc (theft of essence) is working exactly as intended.  nerfing PROC builds and nerfing PROCs has everything to do with slotting every PROC possible for damage onto a build to the point that the underlying sets become unimportant and just a vehicle for game mechanics.

[arcane]

13 minutes ago, Snarky said:

actually this proc (theft of essence) is working exactly as intended.  nerfing PROC builds and nerfing PROCs has everything to do with slotting every PROC possible for damage onto a build to the point that the underlying sets become unimportant and just a vehicle for game mechanics.

Well the underlying sets are plenty important, just not for such obvious reasons. Knockback and defense debuffs or narrow melee cones slot-ability being leveraged as a DPS tool, for instance. You certainly can’t get the same mileage out of all sets, so it’s missing the point to say powersets don’t matter.

[cfarevival]

Theft of essence, which gives only a small amount of endurance per proc, is utterly useless as is in a single target power, and almost as useless in an autopower.  It barely offsets the total cost of firing a healing power multiple times to get the proc to go off.  However, in Dark Regeneration, it really shines.  If the devs want to nerf the proc because someone found some use out of a completely pointless set, then go ahead, there are other ways to mitigate endurance issues (that is not a challenge, but if talking about how awesome something is warrants the negation of it, then why have any proc at all?).  This particular one is costly because I had to build my somewhat low-damaging heal into my attack chain, which does reduce DPS.  I made the most of it by putting -res and other damaging procs into it.  I sacrificed slots in other places to do it, not because I was turning it into a proc monster, but because I needed to make up for lost DPS that I sacrificed (and did not fully recover with this method mind you) by sticking a heal in my attack chain.

 

Also, I will say this:  the utter and abysmal weakness of doing this is that if I have to face off 1v1 with a baddie, I will not be able to recover endurance very well.  I absolutely depend on mobs surrounding me to make this build work.  It works marvelously well, unless I am soloing a single baddie, then it is very difficult to keep endurance up.  That's why I have ageless, that's why I have p2w powers, etc that help offset these difficult circumstances when I know they will arrive.  In face, my damage, regen, recovery and overall survivability suffer greatly when faced off against few baddies because of the nature of Dark/Dark.

 

The point of this post was to share something with the whole community that I found to be useful.

Edited November 28, 2021 by cfarevival