page 3 [FOCUSED FEEDBACK] Dark Armor Adjustments

[The Curator]

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Dark Armor

 

• Quote

  Design Notes: 
  Late in last page development we increased the up-front heal in this power. During that change, we should had lowered the regen buff durations but failed at it. It was never the intention for a high recharge build to maintain max regen permanently on top of constant burst of healing at a very low endurance cost.

• Obscure Sustenance
  • Power now accepts endurance sets and enhancements.
  • No longer lists AoE/Negative types on its attack types.
  • Regeneration and recovery buff scales and durations adjusted.
    • Now provides a flat +250% enhanceable regeneration buff for 60s.
    • Now provides a flat +25% recovery buff for 60s.

• Dark Regeneration (sentinels)

  • Power now accepts accurate healing sets

[FupDup]

Glad to see the Dark Regen slotting bug fixed.

 

Sad to see Obscure Sus getting sledgehammered like this. DR is already better in finished builds, and this will only make that gap wider. At least let us slot endmod for the recovery and/or stack the effects with multiple castings. 

[Captain Powerhouse]

1 hour ago, FupDup said:

Sad to see Obscure Sus getting sledgehammered like this. DR is already better in finished builds, and this will only make that gap wider. At least let us slot endmod for the recovery and/or stack the effects with multiple castings. 

 

Missed adding that to the notes but that is right now in place. You should be able to slot end mod sets and enhancements.

[FupDup]

Confirmed that Obscure is properly allowing endmod slotting, at least on Brute. 

[Shin Magmus]

11 hours ago, Captain Powerhouse said:

 

Missed adding that to the notes but that is right now in place. You should be able to slot end mod sets and enhancements.

   Neat: I'll be respeccing out of Obscure Sustenance on my Tanker.  I don't know if you know this, although I'd hope you do because you seem to read what we talk about in Discord... 95% of people were recommending Dark Regeneration already.  Before the Obscure Sustenance nerf, the common consensus was that Dark Regen was still the better power and that Obscure was a weaker but decent alternative suitable for leveling builds or newer players.  I was one of the only good builders in that Discord still recommending and using Obscure, and you've successfully made even me no longer want to use the power.  So... good job?

[FupDup]

I come here with an offer of compromise. Well, two offers really.

 

A. Reduce the burst heal of Obscure a bit in order to preserve more regen/recovery over time. If you want burst heals you’ve got Dark Regen. 

 

B. Add more debuff resists, which keeps the theme since it already offers a bit of to-hit and regen resists. 
 

(Or combine the two, I won’t stop you…). 

Edited December 9 by FupDup

[arcane]

I don’t see myself going back to DR. I have just been putting OS on auto and the recovery boost is much appreciated even after Cardiac/Vigor. Constant click heals aren’t really needed anymore in my experience. My darks aren’t dying, at least.

[stryve]

Extending the Recovery boost for the full 60 seconds is pretty nice, and changing the fall-off to a flat rate for the full period at least simplifies figuring out how much you need at any given moment.  Allowing Endurance Enhancement is also greatly appreciated.  Obviously the flat rate is going to be lower than the maximum currently on live, and getting Recovery for the full period undoubtedly returns more total Endurance over that time at base recharge.  The same is probably true of Regen, or at least it averages out pretty close.  These changes definitely lower the incentives to push high recharge in the power, which is probably good overall.

 

The stated intent is to tone down the synergy of burst heal and high Regen, which fair enough.  The combination is quite potent, even if it doesn't instantly fill your entire health bar with a single click.  Regen takes a pretty big hit at high recharge on Beta, but getting the burst heal more often is a decent reward by itself.  

 

However, if you already have Obscure Sustenance recharging in 30 seconds or even just slightly more, which is achievable using only SOs, you see significantly less Recovery on Beta.  Even with Musculature Alpha increasing the Recovery boost from 25% to 33%, my Dark/Dark Sentinel went from 4.83%/3.83%/3.2% per second on Live to 3.59% per second on Beta.  That was pretty hard on my Blue Bar in extended fights.  

[jc57]

On 12/6/2025 at 9:38 AM, Shin Magmus said:

suitable for leveling builds or newer players

Well that fits me.  I had a Dark Melee/Dark Armor scrapper, one of my first characters on Homecoming, that I had shelved at around level 34 because the endurance management was just brutal.  Dark Armor just requires so many toggles active, and they are expensive toggles.  It just wasn't fun to play.

 

When they added the option for Obscure Sustenance, I gave it a try on a fresh build as a Dark/Dark Stalker, and was loving it!  The set kind of turned into a regen build between the healing attack in Dark Melee and the Heal plus recovery from Obscure Sustenance.  Leveling was so much more fun and fluid. 

 

I liked the set so much I even rolled up a Brute with it, though I haven't gotten very far with him.  I also planned to respec that one scrapper into the power and see if I could get him going again.  Only so much time in the day, though, so both are still "for future play."

 

I still have not made it to level 50 with any of these three, but I really don't look forward to going back to dependency on lots of blues or taking a knee every few groups.  I know I can just shelve them again and go play something else, but I was happy to see the new lease on life they were given when you added the new mutually exclusive option.

 

As Shin posted, level 50 respec builds don't tend to use it anyway so you are only hurting us newly returned players still leveling characters, not the power-gamers or farmers or whoever this was intended to curtail.

 

I guess I need to copy one over to Beta and see how bad it is, but I kinda like it the way it is now.

[Shin Magmus]

On 12/13/2025 at 12:38 AM, jc57 said:

As Shin posted, level 50 respec builds don't tend to use it anyway so you are only hurting us newly returned players still leveling characters, not the power-gamers or farmers or whoever this was intended to curtail.

 

I guess I need to copy one over to Beta and see how bad it is, but I kinda like it the way it is now.

   They just made it worse.  Open Beta newest patch has the Regen and Recovery values on Obscure Sustenance nerfed again.  Obscure Sustenance cooldown increased from 1 minute to 3 minutes.  Obscure Sustenance can now be used 1/3rd as often, meaning that the initial buff values are a super rare treat and basically worthless.  It went from 250% Flat Regen, down to with 408% Regen for only 10s, then 236% Regen for the next 20s, then only 100% Regen for the entire remaining duration of the power.  100% Regen is 0.4x the strength of the 250% Regen, which itself was already a nerf that was going to make me Respec out of the power.  I have no fucking idea what they are doing: this is incomprehensible.  Dark Regeneration is now about 11x better than Obscure Sustenance.

 

VERSION 1: Playable on Live.  This power had a 60s CD so you could refresh the strong buffs.

 

VERSION 2: The nerfs that were being discussed.

 

VERSION 3: Nerfed again for no defensible reason, with a cooldown increase to 3 minutes or 180s.

 

   You can now barely even use the power and are stuck for most of the time in the crippled version of its strength.

Edited Saturday at 11:02 AM by Shin Magmus
Images

[Shin Magmus]

   With my current build, my Dark/Claws Tanker has Obscure Sustenance to about an 18s CD: 6-slotted with Preventive Medicine.  This is my Dark/Claws Tanker, and although I have some meager opportunities for FFB procs, I don't have any.  The build has plenty of slotted Slow resistance so my Recharge rate remains pretty constant regardless of what I'm fighting and what debuffs enemies have.  The current Open Beta patch nerfs this from 18s to 54s by tripling the power's base CD.  I'm now going to get the strong portion of Obscure Sustenance for 10s, the middle portion (nerfed) for the next 20s, and then a laughably weak buff (the Endmod for example is less than 1/2 of Stamina's value) for the next 24s minimum on an endgame build.  If you're using this button to refill Endurance and you have an extremely optimized build, it can be slightly buffed comparing Version 2 to Version 3, but it is still very nerfed compared to Version 1 (Live).  However, if you are taking your Heal for Healing and looking at HP/sec, its been nerfed again.  I might even respec right now to ditch the power ahead of the patch release.

[csr]

The latest version of Obscure Sustenance has the heal at about 1/3rd previous versions, the +Reg at around 70% and the +Rec at around 2.4 times (enhanced, so it costs you slots to make it significantly better) on a high recharge build.  Compared to Live on that same high recharge build the heal is the same 1/3rd (which is maybe 2/3rds in effectiveness since the heal is often at least partially wasted), the +Rec is about the same as Live and the +Reg has been cut in about half.

 

I think this is a bit of an overcorrection on the previous nerfing of the +Rec at the cost of now going too far in cutting the Heal/+Reg (by roughly half) to get the +Rec back to Live levels.  That level of +Rec is so strong that being able to enhance it seems to be of little value to me.

[arcane]

If we could do anything to increase the long duration buff at all from this new meager amount, even if it means reducing the 10s and 20s buffs, that would be appreciated IMO. I don’t think recovery buffs are something I want to experience as just a rare treat when you have to forego Dark Regeneration for such buffs. Haven’t tested newest version yet but the new numbers look pretty sad imo.

[FupDup]

Wake up babe, new patch just dropped and Obscure just got semi-reverted (with a super long recharge now). 

 

On one hand, I generally prefer the tiered/decaying setup because it's not really used outside of Destiny powers (uniqueness) and it also has a bit more thought process involved about when you want to pop it. Restoring that aspect lets us at least have a brief spike of power for an emergency before it drops down to being a placebo, rather than being a boring static value. 

 

But the uptime of the good buffs is definitely cut down pretty hard. I understand that this was exactly the point, but again, Obscure is not competing against other healing powers like Reconstruction, it's only competing against Dark Regen and that will never change. I'm not sure how far we can push our luck here, but I think that with the 3x recharge increase, that gives us room to slightly increase the good buff uptime. I'm talking around 15/30 or so for the first/second tiers (for both regen and recovery). That would still probably leave the uptime lower than live, as our overlords desire, but it would be a little more merciful. Or maybe reduce the size of the recharge nerf to achieve the same effect from the other end, I dunno. Maybe increase the strength of the third placebo tier so the downtime feels less harsh, etc. There's a lot of ways to approach this. 

 

(I still maintain that it's not really needed at all because Dark Regen would be even more broken than Obscure if you compared it to other healing powers, but I'm in the negotiating stage of grief right now). 

[arcane]

Side comment that will probably be controversial: I would personally be willing to trade the entire instant heal component of OS for the perma portion of the buff components to be better. It has a lot of good effects, but IMO the recovery is the reason one would forego DR for it.

Edited Saturday at 05:53 PM by arcane

[FupDup]

2 minutes ago, arcane said:

Side comment that will probably be controversial: I would personally be willing to trade the entire instant heal component of OS for the perma portion of the buff components to be better. It has a lot of good effects, but IMO the recovery is the reason one would forego DR for it.

I can see that argument. My feelings on it are kind of mixed but that exchange could be interesting, and it's not like OS will ever rival DR's burst healing power anyways. 

[Shin Magmus]

This is what a "dead pick" looks like by the way.