Build Help - Staff/Regen

[Erhmahgerdd]

Hi All, I'm just getting back into the game after seeing the exciting license news.  I'm leveling a Staff/Regen brute and was looking to get some build advice.  Does anyone have a sample build guide for these sets?  Any recommendations on powers to get/skip?  What are common ancillary powers worth getting?  Thanks for the help!

[Gobbledygook]

I've never had staff on a toon, but I did build a pretty sturdy Regen brute with help from @Spaghetti Betty and @Sir Myshkin

I myself haven't been around for some time though, so I'm unsure if they are or not.

 

 

[Spaghetti Betty]

Wow! I'm the absolute worst person to try and teach someone with coherent thoughts! I'll give it a go anyway!

 

Staff Fighting

 

I happen to enjoy Staff Fighting a lot! While it's not winning any DPS races, it's certainly a more functional set than others kinetic melee, and presents a ton of interesting slotting opportunities! If you're just looking at hard numbers performance, then a lot of Staff powers would be deemed skippable. But really all that means is you should just use what you see fit! Personally, I skip Mercurial Blow, Innocuous Strikes, and Sky Splitter. I skip the T1 for T1 reasons, Innocuous Strikes because there's just something about the animation time I don't like (but I should mention that on Tanks it's worth taking despite the clunky animation), and Sky Splitter for the same reason! It's sooo slooow. What this leaves me with is a rotation of Guarded Spin -> Precise Strike -> Serpent's Reach. This is a pretty spammable chain with built in AoE that you can continue until the end of time, or at least until the Boss's HP is gone. Save Perfection stacks, as the buffs are great, or cash them on Eye of the Storm for big AoE!

 

Regeneration

 

Regen is a controversial beast that hinges a lot of its performance on the driver's skill. I personally think it's one of the strongest armors a Brute has access to! Of course, the nature of the beast means that YMMV. Pretty much everything in the set is a required pick, but I will skip Fast Healing in a heartbeat if I need another pick. Some builds can also forgo Quick Recovery if their recovery is good. But I'll tell you one thing: I never skip Revive! Rezzing yourself is an important option select!

 

As far as Pool picks go, anything that provides extra recharge and burst mitigation will be great tools for Regen. By "burst mitigation," I mean things like Unleash Potential, Unrelenting, Rune of Protection, etc. Juggling these with your other tools like Instant Healing and Moment of Glory is how you live! For me personally, I like to choose the more consistent route of building RES and leveraging Rune of Protection so I know exactly how much damage is incoming. More on that later!

 

Some other quick notes would be that Slow Resistance is the #1 most important kind of protection you'll need. Since Regen functions on clicks, you can't function if they never come back! This is a no brainer. And another thing to remember is that Regen's greatest strength is its ability to soak up team buffs like stains on an expensive T shirt!

 

As far as a sample build goes, all I can offer is how I would build a Staff/Regen and my thought processes behind it. Woosh!

 

Brute (Staff Fighting - Regeneration).mbd

 

Staff is definitely one of the better pairings for Regen. Since it has some KD present, leveraging Force Feedback procs means we can keep our recharge healthy as we fight and not have to lose out on any other important set bonuses trying to chase global recharge! I was also pretty close to softcapping Melee DEF, but not having it is mostly inconsequential, as DEF is usually the first thing to go in a fight. -DEF is so prevalent, that it might just rival Slow in popularity! Both are present starting at level 1. Let's just build RES instead and consider the 39% DEF as a happy accident!

 

To that extent, the strategy I use for keeping my RES high is to mix Rune of Protection and Instant Healing and juggle the uptime of that with Melee Core Hybrid. Here's what my RES and Regen look like with that going!

 

With Rune + IH

 

With Melee Core Embodiment (10 targets)

 

Not too shabby! There's about 30 seconds of downtime between these 2 activations, and you can fill that with things like Barrier Core, Moment of Glory, or inspirations!

 

This strategy is how I use my Regen Brute to take on some of the toughest stuff the game has to offer!

 

Of course, not everyone is gonna love this approach and it definitely requires a lot of handiwork to run. There are plenty of other players that have massively different directions when it comes to tuning up a Regen.

 

Hope this helps!

[Nemu]

The only protection you need, you will find in the Church of SPIN.

 

SPIN, and be rewarded my child.

SPIN, and you will be invincible 

SPIN, and be blessed by everlasting glory

 

I will add some context later after I finish SPINNING.

[choupa]

Hi all, 

 

I start my journey with a Staff/Regen brute and will give the SPIN build a try. I'm currently level 10 with a very limited playtime but i will try to get this toon to 50. 

It's been a while since I roamed these streets... 🙃

 

If you could give any advice regarding this toon, it'll be greatly apreciated !

Edited January 31 by choupa

[SeraphimKensai]

I have taken both sets to 50 multiple times, albeit not together.

 

I am a big fan of building towards 100% slow resistance, because a lot of your survivability is based on clicks and your recharge speed. Using tools like Rune, Melee Core, and Demonic to cycle your resistance up is a great idea on regen Brutes. The added resistance pairs well with resilience and MoG to help ensure that you survive alpha strikes.

 

Regen can even pair well with the rebirth destiny for more Regen goodness. I'd suggest testing core and radial on the test server to evaluate your maximum HPS that you regen.

 

 

Staff as Hetty said isn't going to win you a blue ribbon for DPS, that said it leverages knockdown, and can have a decent melee defense from guarded spin (even though it only lasts 10 seconds, it doesn't require stacks of perfection to get the bonus). Sky splitter when having a 3 stack of perfection and using form of the body can give you a decent resistance buff for 15 seconds, but in order to maintain that, you'll be locked in to saving stacks to use sky splitter at 3 stacks, so it's less reliable.

 

Through slotting you might be able to get great regen, with pretty good resistance that Betty showed, while res capping slow resistance and getting a decent pad of melee defense just as a by product of slotting, using guarded spin, the +def res IOs, and weave/maneuvers.

 

You wouldn't have any def debuff resistance, but you'd have a strong layered approach behind it with resistance and regen that it would probably be pretty effective in practice.

 

 

[Nemu]

12 hours ago, choupa said:

Hi all, 

 

I start my journey with a Staff/Regen brute and will give the SPIN build a try. I'm currently level 10 with a very limited playtime but i will try to get this toon to 50. 

It's been a while since I roamed these streets... 🙃

 

If you could give any advice regarding this toon, it'll be greatly apreciated !

I stopped spinning after 6 days to post a response to you. That goes to show you the powah of SPIN.

 

First of all, the spin build is kind of a silly build that ended up working pretty ok. If you are into min/max it's probably not the way to go, but if you are all about having fun with unconventional build ideas then it's a very functional build.

 

Following up with what SeraphimKensai said, the key pieces critical to regen survival are slow resistance and recharge, defense is nice but you definitely want to balance stacking defense/resists with getting enough recharge and high slow resists to make sure your clicks are available as often as possible. The idea behind spin is to have another layer of mitigation behind defense, healing, knockdowns from staff. Whirlwind is a pretty bad power by conventional wisdom, but I see it as another knockdown aura for the build that can also trigger force feedback procs. It drains end very fast so you need good recovery and there's synergy between quick recovery and Form of the soul proc with skysplitter. I chose not to pursue stacking resists because that cuts into my goal of stacking more recharge. My approach is not everyone's cup of tea obviously, some people will swear by stacking defense and resists. I just think you give up too much offensively chasing both those goals. You don't earn xp by just surviving, you get xp from killing stuff, and dead things don't fight back, so there is a balance.

 

I would not recommend getting whirlwind until you get forms and sky splitter if you do a lot of teaming that puts you in the thick of 10+ mobs, because whirlwind will drain end per mob hit and that can quickly tank your endurance if you don't have to recovery tools to deal with it. Treat this build as a blaster with more HP and mez protection, standing still all the time is not the best idea and you'll need to move around a bit to change Mob AI to buy you time. There is this concept called jousting, I provided some instructions here:
 

 

But you don't have to be as dramatic as jumping 10 feet away with melee ATs. You can do it at a micro-level by moving right as you hit your attack, your momentum will carry you a few feet from the mob while you animate and a lot of time that means your target will switch AI to chase and get close to you to execute their melee attack. This buys you time to react to stuff.

 

Over time you'll get a feel of proactive vs reactive mitigation, that applies especially to moment of glory and instant healing and to a slightly lesser degree dull pain, if you wait until you health is real low then you can die before those clicks finish animating,

 

General advice for any AT - While you are leveling up and still using regular SOs and such, luck inspirations are god mode. Monitor your defenses by going to powers - combat attributes, I recommend melee, range and aoe. If you anticipate trouble pop lucks until you hit 45% defense to give you 60 or more seconds of god mode. Convert inspirations you don't need into lucks during downtime.

 

Good luck, if you have any other questions you can email me in game @Nemu