Regen and an epic'ed out build

[Koopak]

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

In theory yes, in actually game play, that's not been my experience.   As Kopak points out, /Regen's real issue is spike damage and a human's ability to react to it..  On large teams, you're exposed to larger amounts of spike damage.  Especially at higher levels when running +4.    Because you can't run at Max HPs the entire time, and because you will have moments where you are not getting mitigation buffs from teammates, /Regen is more prone to spike death than most other sets. 

That's if you are in a team without support. Stormwalker was reacting to my comment about how support, outside buffs, greatly enhance the set's potential. This solve the damage spike issue by simply giving you the resistance and defense to eat it and not care, raising your Effective Health. I'll also note that while running lvl 40 without a full IO build you will struggle to perma Dull Pain, you still can get very close. The requirements are about 265% total +recharge between hasten and IOs to perma it. a low bar given 95 of that can come from a pair of recharge IOs at 50 and you can get msot of THAT with appropriate level SOs. You wont perma but you can get close, and especially with support buffs.

 

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

I disagree.  The entire point of debuffs are to debuff those things which cannot resist it.   It's nonsensical to create a debuff and then give everyone resistance to it.   It's like arguing /SR should have +DEF to Psi.  

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

Exactly.  And the lack of protection against debuffs is intentional.   So if you also make /Regen more survivable against spikes, then you're essentially making it overpowered.

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

I think Kopak may have suggested it already, but the line between /Regen being better and /Regen being OP is thin and grey.   If the developers want /Regen to be able to compete with /Shield or /Rad, or even /SR,  on 4x8 solo, then they're going to have to solve the spike damage issue and good luck doing that without either turning it into WP, or making it OP on everything else.

Gonna try to address all three quotes here. Firstly I wouldn't dare to assume the weakness to debuffs is intentional, frankly debuffs seem overlooked by the live devs in a lot of situations regularly throwing things way out of alignment. Perhaps it was but the main reason id suggest focusing on debuff resistance as it is kind of a lame thing to deal with, and more importantly you can give regen debuff resistance without drastically effecting its overall performance, just patching the spots where damage spikes come out of nowhere and you don't have tools because of stacked debuffs which are only monitorable via the powers menu which as a non standard UI component and numbers heavy is very unfriendly to more casual players.

Again this would be a 'test and see' thing not a 'we need this or riot' thing.

As for how to really truly solve the damage spike issue, well I think debuff resistance handles it gracefully by reducing the frequency of stat crashes and reducing overhead for the player, but if you want to solve it in a direct fashion the set needs a way to raise its Effective Health without raising its Effective Regeneration. Its EfR (Effective Regeneration) is top notch, second only to two sets and those in specific modes (Granit Stone and Defensive Bio), but its EfH (Effective Health) is well bellow most of its competitors.

This could take a number of shapes, from allowing Regen to bypass the health cap but get less regen% to adding an Absorb of some kind, perhaps excess healing becomes a barrier, to a stagger mechanic that causes a hit of say 1k to be applied in 250 damage chunks over the next couple seconds. Whatever it is, that's how you'd solve it. The issue is that might be to drastic, which is again why I focus on debuff resistance as a starting point. It lowers the skill floor while keeping the skill ceiling about the same, and doesn't drastically impact its overall performance.
 

 

2 hours ago, Stormwalker said:

Of course, one could argue that certain other sets with really difficult endurance problems funnel you into the Body pool for Conserve Power and/or Physical Perfection

Off topic but ill fight anyone who says you need Physical Perfection in a build for endurance. Conserve Power is pretty baller though.

 

[Blackjoy]

 

 

2 hours ago, Koopak said:

That's if you are in a team without support. Stormwalker was reacting to my comment about how support, outside buffs, greatly enhance the set's potential. This solve the damage spike issue by simply giving you the resistance and defense to eat it and not care, raising your Effective Health

But as I said, in actual game play, the exposure to massively increased damage spikes counters the benefit of average team support.   Support isn't always up 100% of the time.  Worse, players in good support teams start to think they are invincible and start trying to soloing multiple 4x8 spawns and then suddenly face plant because the bubbles wore off.  High +DEF or +RES sets are generally way more survivable because even when support drops, they aren't hit by spikes as badly and that leaves time for Support to provide corrective mitigation.   My point is a repeat of something you said in another thread, or possibly this one: /Regen's mitigation on paper, is way better than it is in play.

 

2 hours ago, Koopak said:

This solve the damage spike issue by simply giving you the resistance and defense to eat it and not care, raising your Effective Health

It depends on the context as to who gets more benefit.  Running against Incarnate mobs, the soft cap isn't the cap.   The IDF group that I stress test against has bosses who hit me at like a 20-30% clip when I'm at the cap.  So Bubbles or Flash Arrow is doing a helluva lot more for me than a /regen.   I do agree that  /Regen can normally benefit more from Support than say +DEF (because the +DEF cap is so easy to hit).  I do not know how many +RES based secondaries are running around at the +RES cap, but if they are 5-15% below it, stacking +RES on them is probably far more effective.   

 

2 hours ago, Koopak said:

Firstly I wouldn't dare to assume the weakness to debuffs is intentional, frankly debuffs seem overlooked by the live devs in a lot of situations regularly throwing things way out of alignment.

I mean, you can make that assertion, but I am not seeing anything that convinces me its true.  I do know for a fact that on Live they monitored population statistics.  I think it's unequivocal that they knew defense debuff can cause cascade failure.  We know this because they added DDR to /SR...a ton of it.  Not adding it to /Regen is, by default, intentional.   And it's not like DDB is a death sentence.  It must means you have to be a lot more cautious around mobs that have it.  You have to pull or kite or take them on in smaller chunks or like Malta and sappers, prioritize the ones that are debuffing you.  

 

2 hours ago, Koopak said:

and more importantly you can give regen debuff resistance without drastically effecting its overall performance,

I don't think so.  I don't think the devs that kind of precision.   There is no closed-form solution on any of this.    So you'd have to pick a metric and then stats on that.  Is that lvl 20, 30, 40, 50?  How are you going to normalize that?  I also think the problem is that you're solving a problem that isn't necessarily a problem, but a feature.   At lvl 50, loaded up on incarnates and pool powers is so far off the bell curve of where the game was intended to be balanced, I am hard pressed to think the devs are paying attention.  

 

2 hours ago, Koopak said:

Just patching the spots where damage spikes come out of nowhere and you don't have tools because of stacked debuffs which are only monitorable via the powers menu which as a non standard UI component and numbers heavy is very unfriendly to more casual players.

But I would argue that more "casual" players aren't operating in these extremes.   And if you're talking about Sappers and what not, that's always been the downside of Regen.   You see those guys, you kill them first, and you hit IH and you know that even with no Endurance, you have mitigation.   I've done SBB with my /Regen and sure, the Tsoo slow me down to a snails pace, but it isn't a death sentence.    Unlike the Psi monkeys who blast through /SR's resistance and their toxic gas blows past both the +DEF and the +RES and when the blasters use Build Up and also blow past +DEF.

 

2 hours ago, Koopak said:

As for how to really truly solve the damage spike issue, well I think debuff resistance handles it gracefully by reducing the frequency of stat crashes and reducing overhead for the player

I would really like to see the number of mobs that cause -DEF.   I haven't felt DDB has been a problem at all on an of my scrappers   No more than -RES (which I seem to definitely feel is a problem for my /SR...goldbrickers always seem to work me).  The only place where I see DDB raise it's head is ITF and I think it gets blown out of proportion as a result.  Contrast that with psi and toxic, which seems to be everywhere.

 

I will also point out that naked, /regen is probably better at dealing with spikes than any other set besides /Invul  (maybe Rad?).   Again, the problem is that much of this discussion is strictly focused on what happens at 50, where the vast majrority of mitigation is happening off-AT.  

 

The point being, /Regen doesn't really have a spike problem as designed.  No scrapper was intended to be able to solo ITF at 4x8.  But some can do it more easily (or should I say more cheaply?) than others and suddenly it becomes a balance issue.  

 

I am very much in agreement with your overall perspective.  /Regen is still a very capable and high performance set, at least through lvl 40.   I don't really care what happens at lvl 50 because you can't balance that and if you did, it would require that you address all the off-AT mitigation and Set IOs that are really the culprit....and they aren't going to do that.

 

 

Edited June 29, 2022 by Blackjoy

[Koopak]

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

But as I said, in actual game play, the exposure to massively increased damage spikes counters the benefit of average team support.

 

Admittedly I solo +4x8 content semi regularly so that's going to skew my view on this bit.

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

I mean, you can make that assertion, but I am not seeing anything that convinces me its true.  I do know for a fact that on Live they monitored population statistics.  I think it's unequivocal that they knew defense debuff can cause cascade failure.  We know this because they added DDR to /SR...a ton of it.  Not adding it to /Regen is, by default, intentional.

That added DDR to /SR only after SR had become known as near useless due to it. They may have had the tools to monitor it but my personal impression of balancing decisions by Cryptic and Paragon after were reactionary rather than proactive analysis. This is reinforced by how long it took for /SR to get said DDR. /Regen lacking debuff resists is only intentional 'by default' if you ascribe significant intent to the application of debuffs. Not to disparage the live devs, but I just don't think that was a priority to them, and I don't hold it against them.
 

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

And it's not like DDB is a death sentence.  It must means you have to be a lot more cautious around mobs that have it.  You have to pull or kite or take them on in smaller chunks or like Malta and sappers, prioritize the ones that are debuffing you.  

To a point, some groups or enemies just have debuffs on everything that are scaled to ridiculous degrees.

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

 So you'd have to pick a metric and then stats on that.  Is that lvl 20, 30, 40, 50?  How are you going to normalize that?

The math here doen't matter, debuffs and debuff resists don't scale with level and have a relative impact. If you assume you want to keep the experience at each level range about the same, adding debuff resist only matters in which power, and thus what level it becomes available at.

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

At lvl 50, loaded up on incarnates and pool powers is so far off the bell curve of where the game was intended to be balanced

 

And yet this is the only place where debuffs can be reliably countered by any methods other than kiting on a melee AT, which I'm not adverse to, but it shouldn't be necessary to the degree it sometimes is. Debuffs are actually disproportionately worse to deal with at sub 45, you just generally don't see as many, meanwhile at 50 you are piginholes into Ageless Radial to give yourself the ability to not be flatlined by a bad rotation of luck and massive debuff stack even when using MoG.

Again this isn't to say you cant handle it, just that the effort is more than other armor sets, either because they have debuff resistance or because they have defenses that soft counter debuffs. Regen it going to be hit more than any defense set, meaning not only does it not have defense debuff resist, it will take all debuffs more often. Regen has less resistance than resistance sets and thus cannot resist -resistance as effectively. At least one of these weaknesses is not present in most other armor sets, and for some neither is.
 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

But I would argue that more "casual" players aren't operating in these extremes.

The 'extreme' here is agro on 7-14 +2-4, Arachnos, Cimerons, IDF, Tsoo, Banished Pantheon, and so on. Casual players face this all the time.
 

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

I've done SBB with my /Regen and sure, the Tsoo slow me down to a snails pace, but it isn't a death sentence.    Unlike the Psi monkeys who blast through /SR's resistance and their toxic gas blows past both the +DEF and the +RES and when the blasters use Build Up and also blow past +DEF.

I've not said any of this was insurmountable, just that its one of if not the biggest threat to Regen's survival and one of the key ways it feels weak to so many players.

If we want to use an appeal to authority and arguments on anecdotal performance. I ran the entire DA arc on +4x8 solo and only lowered the diff for AVs because when they bumped to lvl 54+3 I cant out dps their regen. Trust me I'm WELL aware of how to survive the hell that is Ancients of Sorrow. Doesn't mean that should be a skill set expected of everyone, or even half that. Something like 1/3 of my SG mates regularly miss cooldown rotations, we aren't talking about a community of extreme raiders here.
 

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

I would really like to see the number of mobs that cause -DEF.   I haven't felt DDB has been a problem at all on an of my scrappers   No more than -RES (which I seem to definitely feel is a problem for my /SR...goldbrickers always seem to work me).  The only place where I see DDB raise it's head is ITF and I think it gets blown out of proportion as a result.  Contrast that with psi and toxic, which seems to be everywhere.

If you have defense cap defense debuff will struggle to build up, regarding a build with about 25% +defense, i have eaten more than -50% defense debuff in: ITS, Aeon TF, Arachnos groups, Carnivals mask stacking, and probably one or two things slipping my mind.

I'm so used to having to track my debuffs that i have all of my monitor slots used in my UI and still pop open the overall combat stats window on certain content, and have Ageless Radial hotkeyed.
 

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

I will also point out that naked, /regen is probably better at dealing with spikes than any other set besides /Invul  (maybe Rad?).   Again, the problem is that much of this discussion is strictly focused on what happens at 50, where the vast majrority of mitigation is happening off-AT.  

 

The point being, /Regen doesn't really have a spike problem as designed.  

Yes, but actually no (meme)

Regen has tools that allow it to trivialize any damage spike assuming it is not debuffed to hell, namely MoG and Dull Pain. Let me make this very clear, Instant Healing, Fast Healing, and Integration do almost NOTHING to keep you from being killed inside 2-3 seconds. If you use the small calculator to the side of my main regeneration calculator and compare any idle standing set to Regen you will find that your Effective Health without MoG is terrible (if memory serves its about 1/2 that of a radiation build), and you can and will get smacked down HARD by a damage spike if you dont have it or another tool lined up. 

As long as we are claiming to know the intentions of the original developers, I would point out Regeneration has a self revive and the only other armors with self rezes are notorious for being weaker or having similar problems. It seems reasonable to assume the self rez is a concession to this weakness, one overlooked when later content added death limits.

 

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

No scrapper was intended to be able to solo ITF at 4x8.  But some can do it more easily (or should I say more cheaply?) than others and suddenly it becomes a balance issue.  

 

I am very much in agreement with your overall perspective.  /Regen is still a very capable and high performance set, at least through lvl 40.   I don't really care what happens at lvl 50 because you can't balance that and if you did, it would require that you address all the off-AT mitigation and Set IOs that are really the culprit....and they aren't going to do that.

If theres a relative difference between two sets then eys one can argue there is a balance issue. The question is whether or not its significant. I would say the real issue is not the balance of Regeneration, but its inaccessibility to more casual players. I think that should be improved some.

If you dont care what happens at 50 then yeah you aren't going to have about 90% of the issues iv outlined because the game is... i don't want to say easier prior to 50+ because that's not right but the difficulty curve is more in line with a more linear growth of power. You don't see that whack debuffs, the attacks that hit for well over 1.5k damage before resistance.

Unrelated but if you feel that balancing lvl 50 characters is impossible you must think the HC devs are on a fools errand because thats been their primary project for the last year in preperation of developing more endgame content. This isn't speculation its in their own public announcements here on the forum. Either way we are not going to agree one ounce on that point.

Edited June 29, 2022 by Koopak

[Blackjoy]

4 hours ago, Koopak said:

The 'extreme' here is agro on 7-14 +2-4, Arachnos, Cimerons, IDF, Tsoo, Banished Pantheon, and so on. Casual players face this all the time.

The stuff people are complaining about crops up when you're doing 4x8 solo or trying to run 801.x solo,, or trying to solo AV's.  That isn't in the wheelhouse of casual players.   +4 IDF and ITF kill all kinds of scrappers and even tanks.   I saw a  /WP tank die several times on a 4x8 ITF.   I seriously doubt  ITF, Tin/Pex, and LRSF are the standard for what scrappers should be doing solo.  

 

4 hours ago, Koopak said:

you must think the HC devs are on a fools errand because thats been their primary project for the last year in preperation of developing more endgame content. This isn't speculation its in their own public announcements here on the forum. Either way we are not going to agree one ounce on that point.

Let's be more accurate.  They aren't trying to "balance" things, they are explicitly trying to get things into a range of performance.  They know it's impossible to achieve any kind of exact balance and they haven't even given us the metric or how many sigmas they are shooting for.    What they are doing is looking to see if incarnate powers and screwing up non-incarnate content (which it is) and if  pools powers are having asymmetric benefits (which they do).    What they'll do about the latter remains to be seen.  As to the former,  It's most likely they'll just create some code that shuts off Incarnate powers/benefits for inappropriate content.    They also seem to suggest that more sets are underperforming., but they didn't say that was in regard to scrappers, so I wouldn't hold your breath.

 

4 hours ago, Koopak said:

To a point, some groups or enemies just have debuffs on everything that are scaled to ridiculous degrees.

That may be, but what percentage of the content is this?  Psychologically, people are going to ignore all the encounters that they cruised through and focus on the ones they lost.  This will tend to skew people's perceptions around the difficulty or inadequacy of their scrapper based on a small subset of encounters.  

 

4 hours ago, Koopak said:

As long as we are claiming to know the intentions of the original developers, I would point out Regeneration has a self revive and the only other armors with self rezes are notorious for being weaker or having similar problems. It seems reasonable to assume the self rez is a concession to this weakness, one overlooked when later content added death limits.

If I'm not mistaken, /WP also has a rez.   I wouldn't count it as one of the weaker sets.    I interpret the rez as an acknowledgment by the Live developers that /Regen required more skill to play.   As we've both acknowledged, there's a difference between good on paper and good in practice.   Managing Recon, DP, and MoG is not trivial in the face of damage spikes that can kill you in 2-3 seconds.  And more to the point, I think the devs recognized that if /Regen doesn't have DP and MoG up....you cannot survive the spike.   

 

4 hours ago, Koopak said:

I would say the real issue is not the balance of Regeneration, but its inaccessibility to more casual players. I think that should be improved some.

Yes, but actually no 😉   I think /Regen is one of the rare sets that actually rewards system mastery.  As you and I both acknowledge, it performs better as you perform better.   I think it would be a mistake to make /regen more idiot proof.   For me /Regen is fun specifically because of the style of play it demands.   I think there is a tremendous amount of replay value in a secondary that takes some actually learning to master.   Granted, I don't always want to work that hard, but sometimes I really enjoy the change of pace compared to /SR, /WP, /Shield.  

 

The other reason I say no, is because I think to fix that problem, you'd either have to make it OP on the casual stuff once someone got skilled, or you'd have to convert a bunch of the click mitigation to toggles or Autos and substantially change the game play.   But...I could be wrong.  Maybe there is something they could do to solve your problem without altering /Regen's median performance.   I personally don't think the devs have that kind of precision because it would require tweaking and analysis.  Over time, they might accomplish it, but I don't think they have that kind of time.

 

4 hours ago, Koopak said:

I've not said any of this was insurmountable, just that its one of if not the biggest threat to Regen's survival and one of the key ways it feels weak to so many players.

Sure.   I can absolutely agree when you play /Regen, your experience of either getting hit by -speed, -endo, and being alpha'd can create that perception.   However, when you play /regen, and survive, you go into every fight with full health and full stamina.   For me, going from /SR and /WP to /Regen was like a holiday.   But some players are going to overlook what they've gained and focus on what they've lost.  I originally was bragging to a friend how awesome /WP was, but then when I went and replayed /Regen, I felt the set was even better if I was willing to put in the work and be accepting of failure on occasion.  

 

4 hours ago, Koopak said:

If you dont care what happens at 50

It's not that I don't care, it's that we don't have a baseline for 50, so it's pointless to talk about what the expectation should be.  We aren't comparing apples to apples.  If the developers come out and talk about what that baseline is and the parameters under which it should be achieved, then it makes sense to talk about what is or what is not happening.  If I am a developer, I'm an order of magnitude more concerned about a person's experience leveling up, because if it isn't fun, they'll never get to to 50 (ignoring farmers).

 

 

Edited June 29, 2022 by Blackjoy

[Troo]

Kudos.
Good stuff.

Many well articulated posts. @Koopak @Zepp @Stormwalker @Blackjoy and others.

[SomeGuy]

Reading about people defending regen is like hearing someone defend the *insert thing here*.

 

 

*more than fair point.

Edited June 29, 2022 by SomeGuy

[arcane]

15 minutes ago, SomeGuy said:

Reading about people defending regen is like hearing someone defend the US GOP.

Garbage party for sure homie, but at least they’re not guilty of bringing up US politics in the Scrapper forum. 

[Bill Z Bubba]

Yea....

 

Regen lovers aren't evil. Misguided and sad, sure...

[ScarySai]

Thing with regen is this: It's advocates vastly overstate it's "potential", while it's detractors just kind of shit on it unconstructively.

 

If you want the set buffed, someone comes out of the woodwork to tell you how the set is good if you spam four insps, rune of power while rotating shadow meld and mog every fight - that it's "actually the best set under these hyperspecific circumstances if we ignore that other sets can do this too." If you wanted to make the temp argument, I'd counter by saying energy and bio get way more from that with much less work.

 

I'd personally like to see some + recharge , along with some debuff protection that at least matches what rad is rocking. You'd probably have to do different things for both scrapper and brute versions to get a good fix.

Edited June 29, 2022 by ScarySai

[arcane]

13 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

How the set is good if you spam four insps

Fun fact: explaining what I mean by “*MODEST* inspiration usage” and then having someone else on the forum accurately represent my claim…. Has never happened before in history.

 

While you’re musing about what’s helpful and what’s not… put hyperbole down in general.

 

There is a world of difference between popping one purple or one green in a tough spot every few minutes in a completely sustainable and reliable way, …. and spamming multiple inspirations so much so that you have to purchase inspirations or email chain them. Anti-inspers that won’t acknowledge the difference won’t make any progress with me.

 

Also keep in mind there are regen buffs that have been proposed that I have consistently advocated for and have zero problem with. Debuff resistances at the top of the list.

Edited June 29, 2022 by arcane

[ScarySai]

9 minutes ago, arcane said:

Fun fact: explaining what I mean by “*MODEST* inspiration usage” and then having someone else on the forum accurately represent my claim…. Has never happened before in history.

 

While you’re musing about what’s helpful and what’s not… put hyperbole down in general.

 

I'm actually not talking about you or anyone here specifically, I'm ripping on someone I know on discord, mostly - lol.

 

Chill.

Edited June 29, 2022 by ScarySai

[Koopak]

14 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

The stuff people are complaining about crops up when you're doing 4x8 solo or trying to run 801.x solo,, or trying to solo AV's.

14 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

It's not that I don't care, it's that we don't have a baseline for 50

 

I don't represent others, so whatever they are arguing is not my argument, please do not mix them. I defined what I considered the kinds of situations that cause the issue and it is not this. I also don't expect Regen to solo +4x8 ITFs or AVs, even though it absolutely can. When I make my comparisons its meant to be relative to other armor sets. If you believe EVERYONE should be nerfed? Or that there should be more content that isn't solo able by a Scrapper? Totally understand, but that has nothing to do with Regen specifically. If you believe that there needs to be some kind of publicly mandated standard handed down by the devs to have such a discussion, then we fundamentally disagree.

 

 

14 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

That may be, but what percentage of the content is this?  Psychologically, people are going to ignore all the encounters that they cruised through and focus on the ones they lost.  This will tend to skew people's perceptions around the difficulty or inadequacy of their scrapper based on a small subset of encounters.  

Do we want to discuss it in the context of each piece of content as equal or do you want to weigh it based on what content is done the most? Is that even a relevant discussion? I understand if you are trying to make sure any discussion is well framed but at some point you are asking for so much specific and hard to quantify information about things that are, relatively intuitive for most people, that it feels more like moving the goal posts.

Which I'm not accusing you of, it is just frustrating to repeatedly have to address the question of "but is that actually common enough to matter". If I didn't feel it was, and you didn't feel it wasn't, we wouldn't be having a debate. So now, if we want to continue this we have to start hashing out very specific terms and definitions that we can agree on point by point from the ground up.

 

 

1 hour ago, ScarySai said:

Thing with regen is this: It's advocates vastly overstate it's "potential", while it's detractors just kind of shit on it unconstructively.

This is painfully true, even if you personally feel I fall on one side or the other. The set, mathematically, CAN be, the third most durable in the game naked, and much more when factoring in outside buffs. But that's not how it plays in the hands of the average player. I believe there should be some effort to resolve that so that the set is accessible and doesn't feel garbage to many of its detractors (cant please everyone i know) without reducing its potential and room for personal performance.

 

[Stormwalker]

2 hours ago, ScarySai said:

Thing with regen is this: It's advocates vastly overstate it's "potential", while it's detractors just kind of shit on it unconstructively.

 

 

I don't know that it's defenders so much overstate it's potential - in a team environment with the right teammates to boost it in certain ways, it's potential is astronomical, and even solo it's potential in terms of "if everything works absolutely right" is very possibly the best of all the Scrapper secondaries.

 

The problem with Regen is that said potential is unattainable, at least in solo play.   Unless you're fighting enemies that don't debuff at all.  It's an impossible ideal.

 

Regen debuff resistance would go a long way toward making a larger percentage of that theoretical maximum performance attainable, which is why I'm of the mind that it should be added to the set, without ANY other changes, and then the set's performance should be re-evaluated.

 

To put it in other terms, with regen debuff resistance, I think both Regen's skill ceiling (the highest performance a truly skilled player can attain from the set) AND its skill floor (the performance an unskilled player will attain from the set) will both be improved.  The highly skilled player will have one less variable to juggle in intense situations, making it easier to manage the other variables they do still have to deal with... and the unskilled player will have what probably feels to them like a fatal Achilles' heel removed from the set.

Edited June 29, 2022 by Stormwalker

[ScarySai]

5 minutes ago, Stormwalker said:

Regen debuff resistance would go a long way toward making a larger percentage of that theoretical maximum performance attainable, which is why I'm of the mind that it should be added to the set, without ANY other changes, and then the set's performance should be re-evaluated.

 

I would give it slow and end-drain protection too, but yeah, one of those things to start small on.

 

It was said earlier, but the thing with regen debuffs is the ones that are potent are loaded to like 1000% (Jack really had it out for you guys) or something, so just regen debuff protection by itself won't be a lot, unless they grant regen total immunity to it.

 

Which I wouldn't necessarily be against, but yaknow. I try not to invite debate with my suggestions, keep them agreeable.

Edited June 29, 2022 by ScarySai

[Stormwalker]

12 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

 

I would give it slow and end-drain protection too, but yeah, one of those things to start small on.

 

It was said earlier, but the thing with regen debuffs is the ones that are potent are loaded to like 1000% (Jack really had it out for you guys) or something, so just regen debuff protection by itself won't be a lot, unless they grant regen total immunity to it.

 

Which I wouldn't necessarily be against, but yaknow.

 

I was thinking 95%, like /SR's DDR, but honestly I wouldn't be opposed to it getting 100% -regen resistance, either.  It's Regen's hat, it should be good at it.

 

Also, the idea that an attack can shut down someone's entire secondary (which is a bit of an exaggeration because of Reconstruction, Dull Pain, Resilience and MoG, but it's really not that much of an exaggeration when you talk about some of those enormous regen debuffs) is just kind of ridiculous.  That should never happen.

 

Also, I thought Geko was the regen-hater. Am I remembering wrong?

Edited June 29, 2022 by Stormwalker

[ScarySai]

It just makes sense to me. Bio has tons of layers to fall back on if any one element fails, willpower is kinda the same but less modern, Rad has resist out the ass, absorb and infinite endurance, essentially. Regen comparatively has a very weak base to build off of: Either your heals/regen are enough to outlive whatever is hitting you, or you die. There's not really many layers to it, it has some resist but not really a lot. It has no defense baseline so it's kind of harder to build for it, scrappers have lower health and no taunt aura, so runners are a constant problem and all your heals scale worse by default.

 

I'd be totally fine with it being a little overpowered post-buff, really. It requires a lot more attention to play properly than almost any other set, and you're pretty much rewarded by getting your ass handed to you via bad dice rolls, among other frustrations. Skillful play should be rewarded, regen is a set that requires more attention than most for little to show for it.

Edited June 29, 2022 by ScarySai

[Stormwalker]

12 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

It just makes sense to me. Bio has tons of layers to fall back on if any one element fails, willpower is kinda the same but less modern, Rad has resist out the ass, absorb and infinite endurance, essentially. Regen comparatively has a very weak base to build off of: Either your heals/regen are enough to outlive whatever is hitting you, or you die. There's not really many layers to it, it has some resist but not really a lot. It has no defense baseline so it's kind of harder to build for it, scrappers have lower health and no taunt aura, so runners are a constant problem and all your heals scale worse by default.

 

I'd be totally fine with it being a little overpowered post-buff, really. It requires a lot more attention to play properly than almost any other set, and you're pretty much rewarded by getting your ass handed to you via bad dice rolls, among other frustrations. Skillful play should be rewarded, regen is a set that requires more attention than most for little to show for it.

 

The tricky part is making the high performance that Regen seems like it should have when you run the numbers more attainable without making it completely, ludicrously OP in a team setting with defense and resistance buffs both in play.  The defense-based guys don't get that much benefit from defense buffs in team play because they're already soft-capped.  The resistance-based guys get limited benefit from resist buffs in team play (they're probably hard-capped to S/L at least already).  The Regenner benefits from both, and if you have enough of both, can become nigh invincible.  So buffing the set too much could trivialize some team content.

 

Hence "small tweak here, small tweak there" until it's right.

 

Though, I realize that this isn't so much a risk for a Scrapper.  Oh, sure, the Scrapper may be immortal, but he doesn't have a taunt aura, so his ability to trivialize team content is limited to his ability to hold aggro.  For a Brute, on the other hand...

Edited June 29, 2022 by Stormwalker

[Blackjoy]

2 hours ago, Koopak said:

When I make my comparisons its meant to be relative to other armor sets.

Then let me apologize in advance if you already identified this, but other armor sets under what conditions? At what level?  XP/Hour?  Teamed, solo?  Generalizations aren't helpful in a discussion about fixing specific things a small amount.    I just got done playing /regen to 41 after playing /WP and /SR to 50 and I am not experiencing any difficulties with debuffs.   Yes, they hit, but as you said, none of it is insurmountable.   So I am not understanding what the issue is. 

 

Now, at 4x8 50 in ITF, sure, there's a lot of DDB.  So much in fact that last night I took my capped /SR, sat in a the middle of a spawn with two Praefectus Contarum, or whatever they are called, and watched my /SR suffer from cascade failure of defense.  The bosses went from 8.87% chance to hit with to 32% chance to hit before i died.  It took a while for them to get it started, but once the first one hit and the the second one hit....the cascade failure was in full effect and the hits came on like monsoon in and I was dead in like 15 seconds.  I tried it again and died before they got past 12% chance to hit.

2 hours ago, Koopak said:

If you believe EVERYONE should be nerfed? Or that there should be more content that isn't solo able by a Scrapper?

What I believe isn't really relevant in this discussion.  What matters is what do the devs believe?   They aren't going to balance something that isn't in the scope of what they believe should be balanced.  Or put another way, I haven't seen anyone provide any insight of what the devs think that range of performance should be at lvl 50 with everything in play.  

 

2 hours ago, Koopak said:

If you believe that there needs to be some kind of publicly mandated standard handed down by the devs to have such a discussion, then we fundamentally disagree.

Let's not resort to hyperbole.   You can talk about anything you want.  But if we are outside the scope of where the devs are looking to tune the system, then it's academic.  

 

 

2 hours ago, Koopak said:

Do we want to discuss it in the context of each piece of content as equal or do you want to weigh it based on what content is done the most?

If you've got facts about either, I'm interested to hear them.  But earlier someone insisted that you play more at 50 than you do at 1-49 and for me that's not true.  Once my characters get to 50, the game isn't nearly as much fun.  I prefer leveling characters up and seeing how they perform.  I don't know what % of people prefer to play at 50, but I can tell you that if you are going to grow the game, you have to continue to attract new players and they don't start at 50.    So the idea that what happens at 50 should outweigh what happens from 1-49 is not something I am going to agree with.

 

 

2 hours ago, Koopak said:

I understand if you are trying to make sure any discussion is well framed but at some point you are asking for so much specific and hard to quantify information about things that are, relatively intuitive for most people, that it feels more like moving the goal posts.

I find this to be an odd statement.  After years of time on Live and a few months here, what is abundantly clear is that everyone talks about their experience as if it is the metric for what is true about the sets.  But nobody is talking about the game in the same context.   Which is why these discussion tend to be unproductive, we aren't comparing apples to apples.  If we were, we could agree on what is and what is not happening.   To wit, you and I have a very similar understanding of the nature of /regen, but we have very different game experiences.  

 

 

2 hours ago, Koopak said:

"but is that actually common enough to matter". If I didn't feel it was, and you didn't feel it wasn't, we wouldn't be having a debate.

 

But that's a question that has to be overcome, regardless of who is asking it.  The devs have limited time and they probably aren't going to work on a problem that is affecting .1% of the player base.  Very similar to my /SR debate, people insist that /SR is within the range of performance.   I say it's not.  But we aren't talking about the same thing.  And I know that if the devs are going to modify /SR, the answer to that question has to be an emphatic "Yes!" not a tepid one, and /SR has to be sub-standard where they are actually going to measure it.  If we talk about /SR with pool powers, incarnates, and set IOs, it's absolutely not underperforming...but that isn't because of /SR.

 

2 hours ago, Koopak said:

I believe there should be some effort to resolve that so that the set is accessible and doesn't feel garbage to many of its detractors (cant please everyone i know) without reducing its potential and room for personal performance.

I can agree definitely understand your desire to see /Regen modified so it's easier to leverage. I have similar feelings about making /SR have a far better quality of life.   What interest me is understanding how the devs determine if that's needed and how to do it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 30, 2022 by Blackjoy

[Bill Z Bubba]

17 minutes ago, Blackjoy said:

If we talk about /SR with pool powers, incarnates, and set IOs, it's absolutely not underperforming...but that isn't because of /SR.

 

But this is precisely how people in this thread are talking about regen. They specifically state it's on par with the other armors with “*MODEST* inspiration usage” while ignoring where other armors retain superiority with the same moderate inspiration usage. They speak of cycling between MoG and Rune and Shadow Meld while ignoring that other sets accomplish the same tasks with none of those.

I have ZERO issues with comparing the sets in a complete void (no outside powers in use) and with SOs. It's a data point and a good one.
I've no problems comparing sets with pool powers. If the fighting pool is allowed, it's allowed for all sets. If CJ is allowed, it's allowed for all sets. If leadership is allowed, it's allowed for all sets.

 

This is how to test. This is how to get data.

 

Run the numbers with the set itself and nothing else, the set +X, the set +Y and Z and Alpha, etc, etc. You add something to EVERY armor equally and then after you're all done rerunning those numbers, you find your averages and present the findings.

[Stormwalker]

1 hour ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

But this is precisely how people in this thread are talking about regen. They specifically state it's on par with the other armors with “*MODEST* inspiration usage” while ignoring where other armors retain superiority with the same moderate inspiration usage. They speak of cycling between MoG and Rune and Shadow Meld while ignoring that other sets accomplish the same tasks with none of those.

 

In fairness, if the other sets benefited from using something like Shadow Meld the way that Regen does, you would see people doing it with those sets.  But they don't.  It's a solution to a specific problem that Regen has (alpha mitigation) which is a direct result of the way the set works (by healing damage rather than mitigating it).  And at some point the developers even realized this, which is why they changed MoG to work the way it does now.  The problem is that MoG is not available a large enough portion of the time to truly solve the problem, so we lean on powers like Shadow Meld to fill the gap.

 

That said, something I am seeing here is this:  Every set has problems.  Every set has challenges it has to overcome.  Every set also has challenges it doesn't have to overcome.

 

And here is part of the problem.  Regen has all the potential?  But it also has all the problems.  Except one: Regen doesn't have endurance problems.  But other than that?  Every problem faced by other sets is a problem faced by Regen.

 

Defense debuff?  This one's a problem for most sets (/SR is the notable exception), but less so for resist-based sets as their primary mitigation remains active.  /Regen has this problem, even though it has no inherent defense, because any reasonable /Regen build is going to include defense from outside the powerset (and /Regen by design needs every bit of mitigation it can get to survive the alpha).

 

Resistance debuff?  Defense sets don't so much care about this (they do care about it some, but it's not really crippling, especially since most of the debuff attacks will miss).  /Regen does.  It has a bit of inherent resistance--the only mitigation it gets natively--and since your mitigation from /Regen is very limited, you definitely want all of it.  Besides, what Regenner doesn't take Tough?  It's pretty much mandatory.

 

Slow?  Some sets can pretty much ignore this (/SR) and others are largely unaffected by it (/WP).  Some other sets have real problems with it.  It's completely devastating to /Regen, though, due to affecting Reconstruction's recharge time, not to mention other essential clicks both inside and outside the set.

 

Recovery debuff?  Defense sets are rarely hit by these (except for Carnies) and so don't have too much trouble.  Resist sets have problems here.  Regen?  You wouldn't think Regen with its crazy recovery would have problems with this, but because of the magnitude of a lot of recovery debuffs, it does.

 

Regeneration debuff?  This one hurts everybody a little bit, but it is absolute death on a Regen because nobody depends on their Regeneration the way a Regen does, and on top of that, the magnitude of many Regen debuffs is so great that in some cases a single attack can completely shut down even a Regenner's crazy amounts of regen.

 

I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of things because I'm writing this off the top of my head, but the point is this:

 

Regeneration is Murphy's Armor.  Anything that can go wrong, will.  And you have to be prepared for and take measures against all of it.

 

On my /SR, what do I worry about?  Autohits, stacked to-hit buffs, and attacks with no positional component.  Everything else I take in stride.

 

On my /EA, what do I worry about?  Carnies, mostly (psi and negative with strong debuffs).  Also autohits and strong to-hit buffs.

 

On my /Inv, what do I worry about?  Resistance debuff and psi.   Recovery debuff.  That's pretty much it (though I might be forgetting some things, I haven't played an /Inv at 50 in a long time).

 

On my /WP what do I worry about?  A little bit of everything, but the only thing that really scares me by itself is a Sapper that I didn't see in time.  You can take away any one aspect of my defense and I am just fine and can cruise along on the other layers until I have eliminated the source of the problem.  If things get really hairy, I pop Strength of Will to bridge the gap.

 

On a /Regen, what do I worry about?  Freakin' everything.  Regen is that tiny precision-engineered machine that is a work of art when everything is running but is in danger of breaking down if a grain of sand gets in one of its tiny gears.  And this is in addition to Regen's unique problem that nobody else has - because it has so little inherent mitigation, it has problems with spike damage in a way no other set does.

 

Why does /Regen need regen debuff resistance?  So that it can have one thing it doesn't have to fear.  And so that it can always count on the thing it does best to be there when it's needed.  With that, /Regen becomes just like every other set.  It has a strong core that it can always depend on, and it has problems it has to prepare for.  Possibly still more problems than most other sets, but that's where the skill component comes in.

 

That's just my 2 cents, YMMV.

 

Edited June 30, 2022 by Stormwalker

[Koopak]

1 hour ago, Blackjoy said:

 I just got done playing /regen to 41 after playing /WP and /SR to 50 and I am not experiencing any difficulties with debuffs.

1 hour ago, Blackjoy said:

I don't know what % of people prefer to play at 50, but I can tell you that if you are going to grow the game, you have to continue to attract new players and they don't start at 50.    So the idea that what happens at 50 should outweigh what happens from 1-49 is not something I am going to agree with.

 

No, I imagine you did not run into any difficulties at level 41 or level 50 on one set with an extremely high defense debuff resist and another with both mixed defense methods (resist, defense, and regeneration) and moderate debuff resists to everything except -end/-recovery. As I said, debuffs are uncommon and of modest magnitude throughout most of the leveling experience. This is because debuffs are, in many ways, the club used to bat down high end builds in end game content. If you can give an example of how debuff resistance added to regen would somehow make it behave notably different in low level content, you will have an argument here.

If your primary concern is the 1-50 level grind, that's all well and good but none of what I'm suggesting has significant impact on that. Regen is great while leveling, well, past level 17, that climb to your mez protection is rough. We can tweak 1-50 scaling till we are blue in the face, powers are very much capable of being scaled along the path to solve any problems that would come up, and again I chose debuffs resistance partly because of its low impact on anything but the content where Regen falls abnormally short.

 

1 hour ago, Blackjoy said:

The bosses went from 8.87% chance to hit with to 32% chance to hit before i died.  It took a while for them to get it started, but once the first one hit and the the second one hit....the cascade failure was in full effect and the hits came on like monsoon in and I was dead in like 15 seconds.  I tried it again and died before they got past 12% chance to hit.

ITF is one example where Regen collapses, but only one. I'd KILL for 15 seconds of survival against the first defense smack without having to rely on my survival tools or kiting. 70-80% chance to be hit is the norm in there for a Regener. DDR might not be the right answer, i know its not on brand, as the set has no +defense powers, and i have no problem with any one debuff remaining nightmareish. As I said, ITF is but one example, there are many.
 

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

What matters is what do the devs believe?   They aren't going to balance something that isn't in the scope of what they believe should be balanced.  Or put another way, I haven't seen anyone provide any insight of what the devs think that range of performance should be at lvl 50 with everything in play.  

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

You can talk about anything you want.  But if we are outside the scope of where the devs are looking to tune the system, then it's academic.

You say i can 'talk about anything i want' but that doesn't hold much water when your counter argument is 'but what do the devs want?'. Yer gonna have to ask them dude, I'm just a shitter on the Scrapper forum who spends an unhealthy amount of time optimizing the regen set. We CAN operate under the assumption that the average performance of armors ARE within scope, because if they aren't then when the great armor pass comes they will all be moved and, generally, will probably remain in their same relative position to each other, probably.

If we cant? Then your counter point here amounts to "we don't know what the devs want so we cant speculate" which is not an argument but a shutdown of the discussion. 

 

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

If you've got facts about either, I'm interested to hear them.  But earlier someone insisted that you play more at 50 than you do at 1-49 and for me that's not true.  Once my characters get to 50, the game isn't nearly as much fun.  I prefer leveling characters up and seeing how they perform.

I'd need to dig to pull up some of data that was shared in the past regarding this however I'd highlight that when the community was asked to vote on what the devs should focus on a couple years ago, new endgame content won out hard. Anecdotally however, I rarely see people put down a character before vetlevel 25, most atleast get to around 50 where they get T4 incarnates. Given the xp scale of Vetlevels, and the common rate at which people get farmed to 50 id argue that yeah that anecdote, how ever little a data point it is, does point toward the claim people spend more time at 50.

Honestly I find the people who actively enjoy the 1-50 leveling experience to be in the minority, but thats again anecdote, ill have to get back to you after digging up the data points.
 

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

But that's a question that has to be overcome, regardless of who is asking it.  The devs have limited time and they probably aren't going to work on a problem that is affecting .1% of the player base.

I mean its entirely likely this very logic is why the live devs left balance in the state it is. After all each balance issue only effects a small portion of the player base, a potion that shrinks every month because of said problem. Add on the pressures the live devs had to actually make money and yeah. And again just because an issue might be small does not make it unworthy of discussion. This kind of thinking locks things in place and keeps old aches and pains around even when they may be very easy to fix.


 

 

2 hours ago, Blackjoy said:

 If we talk about /SR with pool powers, incarnates, and set IOs, it's absolutely not underperforming...but that isn't because of /SR

 

see below

 

1 hour ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

They speak of cycling between MoG and Rune and Shadow Meld while ignoring that other sets accomplish the same tasks with none of those.

 

1 hour ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

I've no problems comparing sets with pool powers. If the fighting pool is allowed, it's allowed for all sets. If CJ is allowed, it's allowed for all sets. If leadership is allowed, it's allowed for all sets.

I feel as if you generalize such to include myself. If that is not the case then ignore me here. If it is, then I want to highlight that every single time I have brought up outside benefits of inspirations, pool powers, temp powers, and party buffs, i have specifically stated that Regeneration benefits MORE from these than other armors. I am happy to run the math here to prove this point.

Powersets must be considered in full context, naked can give you a basis, but it isn't at all accurate to how the game is played. If a set does poorly naked, its worth looking at how it does with a few pool powers and comparing that performance growth relative to other 'strong' sets.

[Koopak]

18 minutes ago, Stormwalker said:

On a /Regen, what do I worry about?  Freakin' everything.  Regen is that tiny precision-engineered machine that is a work of art when everything is running but is in danger of breaking down if a grain of sand gets in one of its tiny gears.  And this is in addition to Regen's unique problem that nobody else has - because it has so little inherent mitigation, it has problems with spike damage in a way no other set does.

Well said

[ScarySai]

This topic is funny, because I made a regen character as a goof pretty much right before finding it.

 

Stay tuned for how that progresses.

 

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 hour ago, Stormwalker said:

In fairness, if the other sets benefited from using something like Shadow Meld the way that Regen does, you would see people doing it with those sets.  But they don't.  It's a solution to a specific problem that Regen has (alpha mitigation) which is a direct result of the way the set works (by healing damage rather than mitigating it).  And at some point the developers even realized this, which is why they changed MoG to work the way it does now.  The problem is that MoG is not available a large enough portion of the time to truly solve the problem, so we lean on powers like Shadow Meld to fill the gap.

 

I have it (meaning shadow meld) on my nrg/bio scrapper. Want to really tell me it's not benefiting from it?

 

1 hour ago, Stormwalker said:

That said, something I am seeing here is this:  Every set has problems.  Every set has challenges it has to overcome.  Every set also has challenges it doesn't have to overcome.

 

And some sets have more problems to overcome than others while still under-performing the others. Kinda the point of the entire argument.

 

1 hour ago, Stormwalker said:

On a /Regen, what do I worry about?  Freakin' everything.

 

Well said.

 

1 hour ago, Koopak said:

I feel as if you generalize such to include myself. If that is not the case then ignore me here. If it is, then I want to highlight that every single time I have brought up outside benefits of inspirations, pool powers, temp powers, and party buffs, i have specifically stated that Regeneration benefits MORE from these than other armors. I am happy to run the math here to prove this point.

 

Please do. Run the math. You'll see that caps matter and getting closer to said caps matters even more.

 

I just got off a Posi 1 with my Bestest Bruter, a fire/regen brute at around level 25, exemplared down to whatever Posi 1 is. It was a complete shitshow and I was eating every farkin insp that dropped. Regen is a crap set. Full stop.

Edited June 30, 2022 by Bill Z Bubba

[Stormwalker]

11 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

I have it (meaning shadow meld) on my nrg/bio scrapper. Want to really tell me it's not benefiting from it?

 

 

I know crap all about /Bio, so obviously I wouldn't begin to try to make that argument.  I can only speak for the sets I've played.

 

Also, there's a difference between saying "no other sets benefit from Shadow Meld" and saying "No other sets benefit from Shadow Meld to the degree that Regen does", which is what I was getting at.  To clarify, when I respec'd my Katana/Regen on Live into Shadow Meld, that was a transformative change.  The character felt vastly stronger after that respec,  I'm not accustomed to pool (even Epic/Patron pool) powers having that kind of impact on a build.

Edited June 30, 2022 by Stormwalker