PFF vs. Regen

[Xev]

Anyone happen to have experience with both of these slotted defense passives for comparison purposes?

I wanted to take Regen but it's working out that Personal Force Field would be handier due to I want Force Shield and to get it I have to squeeze it in early in the build and the only way to do that is to swap my defense passives..

The only other thing I would take from Force would be the energy unlock - because I have to, to make things work. I like the look of Force Shield, would like the energy boost (and I happen to have Ego as a SS) and it fits into a kinda theme I have going.

I don't want anything from Supernatural but Regen if I go that route and I have no probs to find a place in the lineup for it to go.

My impressions so far are that most people prefer Regen for survival vs. PFF. And that's what I'm after is the survival bit. Thought I'd check in here for some thoughts..


As a side note..
An interesting option if I go Supernatural would be to take the DoT that is also a HoT and take no block enhancer - but, this seems bad due to turtling seems to be a good thing to be able to do if I am Regen - and energy management may be difficult with this build. Plus, I think the heal scales with PRE, which I will have little of.

[JaguarX]

yeah I worked with both of these. Both are good IMO.

Now survival wise between my regen toons and PFF toons seems about even over all. If ya want survival with leat amount of companion powers as possible so you can pick other things, Regen wins. You can get regen and boost it with other stats an no more worry.

PFF, it's best to get the shield heal sometimes to match regen base survival. Many of my PFF toons don't even remember what it's like to lose any actual HP anymore.


While regen is by definition under the super natural category, it is one of those powers that can fit just about any theme and even if no other super natural power is taken, it opens up pretty early levels like it's companion resurgence. But Regen can go well too with Bountiful Chi with or without dodge.

PFF is very good and takes well to defense or dodge and const. It's like another extra set of hp. By the time the shield is done with, you still have an entire bar of hp to go.  Many of my PFF toons out perform and take hits better (Gravitar testing) than the regen one. What put many of my Regen toons, burst damage at death or near the PFF  may simply lose most of it's shield which can quickly be regenerated with the shield heal and keep on fighting.


In short pick either one and survival wont be an issue mostly. Regen is a tad easier to work with as it works well alone. While shield pff business don't pick up until you get the inertial shield power then from there it starts to get even and or exceed survival of regen. Especially in later levels.


And if one is not a constitution maven, then shield seems to suffer more in the survival category than regen it seems.

Rememebr this is my personal experience with both. I'm also the type of person that don't spam TGM, use most of my powers, don't build glass cannons, and don't flee the pvp fight bubble and have some toons that pay no mind to dodge gear sooooo....yeah.

[Xev]

In short pick either one and survival wont be an issue mostly. Regen is a tad easier to work with as it works well alone. While shield pff business don't pick up until you get the inertial shield power then from there it starts to get even and or exceed survival of regen. Especially in later levels.

This might be the deal breaker for me. I have room for, at max, 5 Force powers. The energy builder, block enhancer, the slotted passive, Field Surge and IDF.

For the same 5 slots I could get the energy builder from Supernatural, Regen, the HoT/DoT (maintain - Devour Essence, that I can also add Crippling Strikes Challenge to...) & I get Force Shield + any Active Defense to use when Regen needs a boost.

Your post is very interesting. All the stuff I've googled until now says how not good PFF is compared to.... everything else, when it comes to Defense passives. I want to like PFF because I like damage shields. The bubbles (look) & block from Force is cool too.

[LaughingAlex]

There are alternatives to having the "right" energy builder, PFF and regen both actually benefit very heavily from builds emphasizing high recharge and active defenses, particularly masterful dodge and unbreakable.  Unbreakable is more powerful then the numbers say, it restores itself each and every hit, most of the time it'll last it's full 15 seconds with ease.  This causes it to actually be more effective then masterful dodge, but taking masterful dodge to can work.  Higher recharge can cut down the shared cooldown that using one of them would impose on the other, cutting on downtime significantly and greatly helping the two passives.

[Xev]

Looking through the passives again as I re-roll for the 100th time and I'm looking at this:

Higher recharge can cut down the shared cooldown that using one of them would impose on the other, cutting on downtime significantly and greatly helping the two passives.

And scratching my head?

How does recharge affect cooldown? I thought recharge (int/gear) just affected the recharge of the power - not cooldowns?

[General Idiot]

Intelligence or cooldown reduction from gear will affect both the power's normal cooldown and the shared cooldown it places on other powers. So normally an active offense or defense power will have a 90 second cooldown and place a shared 30 second cooldown on other such powers when you activate it. With cooldown reduction, both those numbers go down. On one character I managed to get the shared cooldown low enough that I can have 6 or so seconds of double stacked active offenses.

[Xev]

Wow!

My guy only has 130 int at this point and is only lvl 20 but still, I didn't notice this effect on the shared cooldown on two Active Defenses that I just tried out. I was mainly testing out that Int Spec that lets you reduce cooldown time with an energy builder, tho..

Have to look again. That's cool news.

PFF is good stuff btw! It's like the defensive version of Regen due to how they react to block. I'm maybe going to squeeze it in.

[General Idiot]

Yeah, it gets really noticable at higher levels once you have significant amounts of cooldown reduction on gear. I don't know about that intelligence spec though, never tried it myself.

[Xev]

The Int tree recharge reduction spec is kinda cool. I can see uses for it. Every 6 seconds it takes a dwindling number of seconds away on whatever's on cooldown/recharge as long as your energy builder is firing off at the time. I thought it was the only thing in the game that would reduce cooldowns but am glad to see I'm wrong.

I Dunno if I would trade the goodies in some of the other trees for it. There are some other helpful things in Int to make it worthwhile. Like the thing that makes Con give 30% more hps if it isn't a SS. There is the thing that boosts secondary superstats by 20% that I wonder if it would boost critical chance on a dex secondary. That would help to make the Int tree compete better with the Dex tree.

[LaughingAlex]

I don't use the int spec anymore, but I could see it being useful on the build I have, if only though, I'd lost my defense bonus from being ego primary.  But I've 12 second cooldown times for the shared cooldowns on my active defenses.  On my PFF toon this makes it very easy to keep my shields up very high, and my high constitution also serves me well in the events my shields go down or get bypassed.  In total my PFF toon has roughly 17000 health points between the PFF and the high constitution in tank role.

In a severely protracted fight the shield will still slowly dwindle, so I usually have field surge ready when the shields get low, and evasive maneuvers.  But i worry about the future, because my dodging even with evasive maneuvers, due to the patch coming up, will only get up to about 47% dodging, which isn't quite enough in the field surge moments(when the shields are low that using field surge is more desirable than masterful dodge, and unbreakable is recharging.)

[Xev]

I see one problem right off. You have way too many HPs.

I've opted for a sleeker 3k while running in Hybrid mode w/Bulwark from the Protector Tree and a fast wide cone main attack w/Challenging Strikes to help make sure I get hit as much as possible.

It's an odd plan. Usually people wonder where I'm running to in Alerts, with my 3k. Eventually when I don't die a healer may start healing me "oh, that's a Tank", I can hear them thinking. I imagine the load is lighter than normal for them as they are tapping their maintain/charge heals in-between double checking everyone's hps to see if something's broken.

Still only lvl 22 w/trash gear and haven't decided on a couple of powers yet but I seem to be rolling again..

>>

Oh yeah, I went with Invul. For now.

[JaguarX]

I see one problem right off. You have way too many HPs.

I've opted for a sleeker 3k while running in Hybrid mode w/Bulwark from the Protector Tree and a fast wide cone main attack w/Challenging Strikes to help make sure I get hit as much as possible.

It's an odd plan. Usually people wonder where I'm running to in Alerts, with my 3k. Eventually when I don't die a healer may start healing me "oh, that's a Tank", I can hear them thinking. I imagine the load is lighter than normal for them as they are tapping their maintain/charge heals in-between double checking everyone's hps to see if something's broken.

Still only lvl 22 w/trash gear and haven't decided on a couple of powers yet but I seem to be rolling again..

>>

Oh yeah, I went with Invul. For now.

Invul is a good choice too. I don't have any survival problems with any of mine. Especially with Strength primary Superstat.

[Xev]

One thing about the Freeform system that is so good is that I can be ... whatever. As long as I spend those G's/pay for Retcons. I started out as an Inferno+ and now I'm a Tank lab experiment.

Was just thinking about how to reroll a *healer* at 40 before coming here hehe. So easy to get distracted... Glad I used a kinda generic name - Kosmoz. Who knows what he'll end up being at this point.

I've had such a hard time settling on SS's. They are almost like power selections to me in magnitude of importance and the ones I want usually don't fit what the game wants me to do with them when it comes self-buff time. Am starting to get a grip on it tho.

Str is a good primary SS. So is Con and Dex, depending.

I went int/dex/str as a tank running in hybrid so I feel a lil bit like a rebel at this point. So far so good. Decent dps, agro, and I generally stay alive & have 2 Active Defenses on fast refreshes and a block enhancer yet to get, among other things yet undecided.

[JaguarX]

One thing about the Freeform system that is so good is that I can be ... whatever. As long as I spend those G's/pay for Retcons. I started out as an Inferno+ and now I'm a Tank lab experiment.

Was just thinking about how to reroll a *healer* at 40 before coming here hehe. So easy to get distracted... Glad I used a kinda generic name - Kosmoz. Who knows what he'll end up being at this point.

I've had such a hard time settling on SS's. They are almost like power selections to me in magnitude of importance and the ones I want usually don't fit what the game wants me to do with them when it comes self-buff time. Am starting to get a grip on it tho.

Str is a good primary SS. So is Con and Dex, depending.

I went int/dex/str as a tank running in hybrid so I feel a lil bit like a rebel at this point. So far so good. Decent dps, agro, and I generally stay alive & have 2 Active Defenses on fast refreshes and a block enhancer yet to get, among other things yet undecided.

So basically a tank that can smack people. Good stuff.

ANd I know the feeling of decidedness. On my latest toon I went from level 6-19 before finally deciding what powers I wanted and then from level 21-31 before deciding again what I wanted and even when I decided many times respecced out of powers (have plenty of Gs so I respect on the whim and barely notice the Gs missing) because while powerful and useful didn't fit with the concept.


Thisone is currently at level 32. mostly darkness powers with a couple of sword powers in there Regen for defense. Con/str/rec. with endurance on the side. I cant think of anything close to compare it to in COX. In fact the original concept was conceived in 2009 and tried broadsword/dark brute then later tried it again as broadsword/regen brute. Neither times did it work well with what I was trying to build. Freeform is wonderful thing aint it.


Then I have other toons that was impossible to create to the concept I had in mind in COX. Like the third toon I created, which is the daughter of the toon I'm currently playing. And I'm constantly buying slots to try new stuff. I don't know what is FoTM or the go to thing, I just build. In a way I don't want to know. Although after building a dual pistol toon, found out 2GM was FOTM, although that is probably the least used power in it's power set.

I made a dex toon. At first I was a bit cautious of it due do to bad experience with crit chance or lack of crit chances in COX, but hell, Dex is fun as hell for heavy hitting toons.

[Xev]

I made a dex toon. At first I was a bit cautious of it due do to bad experience with crit chance or lack of crit chances in COX, but hell, Dex is fun as hell for heavy hitting toons.

Once you go Dex it's hard to go back! I can be a recharge junkie so Int is hard to pass up atm too. If I get this build working well enough I might switch to Unstoppable.

[LaughingAlex]

Once you go Dex it's hard to go back! I can be a recharge junkie so Int is hard to pass up atm too. If I get this build working well enough I might switch to Unstoppable.

If you do melee it's actually far easier to go to constitution from ANY other primary superstat, you'll just spend all day being knocked around with ABSOLUTELY NO COUNTER TO IT WHATSOEVER SINCE BLOCK DOES NOT ALWAYS WORK ANYMORE!

Unless strength is one of your superstats without con primary your just a pinball as a melee and alot of knock-back attacks do not actually apply resistance properly, viper is a huge violator of that rule(viper power armors can indefinently knock you if you have no strength, in fact, with you having no chance to do anything whatsoever, yes, it's happened to me and it drove me nuts).

I can recommend other primary super stats for ranged if your not using strength, but I just cannot recommend going melee without some stat giving you knock resistance because you'll just spend to much time being knocked.

[JaguarX]

If you do melee it's actually far easier to go to constitution from ANY other primary superstat, you'll just spend all day being knocked around with ABSOLUTELY NO COUNTER TO IT WHATSOEVER SINCE BLOCK DOES NOT ALWAYS WORK ANYMORE!

Unless strength is one of your superstats without con primary your just a pinball as a melee and alot of knock-back attacks do not actually apply resistance properly, viper is a huge violator of that rule(viper power armors can indefinently knock you if you have no strength, in fact, with you having no chance to do anything whatsoever, yes, it's happened to me and it drove me nuts).

I can recommend other primary super stats for ranged if your not using strength, but I just cannot recommend going melee without some stat giving you knock resistance because you'll just spend to much time being knocked.

Yeah?

I have const. toons strength, well all except int. and presence. Didn't notice much difference in knockback frequency. Usually a block when they charge up usually does the trick for me. Wait until that last second to block, the damage is mitigated but not the knockback. Strange though but knockback haven't bee much of an issue for me, and probably why I haven't built specifically around it yet.

But it's good to know it can happen and when it does, I know what to get and focus on to see if it helps.

Yeah I stopped depending on that resistance thing a while ago. Manimals are also violators to that rule. Never been bounced to death. That has to suck. Although got stuck in an object or two a couple of times but usually got back out of it within a minute so. I just learned to not have my back to objects when fighting things that can knockback. One time I got knocked back and stuck inside an object but the enemy died from bleed. That was annoying, although funny looking.

But hopefully they fix that knock back system soon (the block thing and the supposed resistance build up that work like clock work for the enemy but rarely for the player.

[LaughingAlex]

Well the way resistance works, is that the first knockback will always generally knock you, or at least move you if you have high resistance.  It's then SUPPOSED to apply 1 stack of "knockback resistance", that scales very strongly with your usual resistance to knockback.  Now, if you get knocked a second time your supposed to be knocked for less, and automatically gain a second knock resistance which reduces it further, the third knock is the last in a chain you are supposed to see any effect, even with low knock resistance this is supposed to be minor.

After that your supposed to have knockback IMMUNITY for ten seconds, before it resets.  Alot of mobs though, outright ignore that, viper especially.

At the same time knockback resistance is supposed to be applied from block rating, ie 200 resistance for normal blocking, 250/300/360 for rank 1/2/3 block powers respectively.  But that doesn't apply UNLESS you had held it down for the whole time the knockback attack was charging.  The whole time its charging you have to be holding block, see a problem?  No one can typically do that for a large number of reasons, even though you resist the damage, the knock still knocks you.  It used to be if you blocked, didn't matter if it was a hold or knock you were not gonna be affected by a status effect, but they've since nerfed that somewhere along the line.  It's one of the changes that really irritates me.

[Arcana]

Did they ever fix (or rather, "address") block stacking with PFF?  I really should patch my client and test for myself, since I have that lifetime sub and all, but I don't have the same sort of time to test mechanics I used to.

Honestly I'm so out of it on current CO gameplay I should probably just roll a new alt and start from scratch.

[Xev]

Yeah I definitely had to grab Strength as a SS to have any hope of tanking. Otherwise the pinballing is just a lil too intense and makes for a mostly useless tank seeing as how there is.. so.. much.. KB in CO. I'm running with 220% kb resist atm and I still get knocked across the street unrarely.

That's interesting about how block and the stacking resist are supposed to work. I'd read about the stacking resist thing but I didn't catch the 10 second immune.

Int/Dex/Str, Baby! That's what my new guy ended up as. I'm feeling rebel. int/dex/str seemed rare when I was looking at other builds.  His power list is from outer space too. It all seems to work and to this point he has turned out to be about as satisfying a toon as I ever made in any game.

You'd think he'd be paper with his 5600ish hps but I think I accidently soloed all the bosses (sorry, team!) in Grab! (the custom alert, not 'a' Grab) with him this morning and there is nooooo way I could do that with any of my other guys who have full (as it gets for me) gear.

Gravitar beats me tho.. I still need gear and some Gravi practice with him but as-is I can't get through a Gravi without dying at least once. I took on AO'whatsits with him due to I gave him Skarn's and I thought Skarn's would take AO down but we didn't have the dps to get him down much more than half on the 1 attempt I've made. Due to he never seemed to drop his Ice Form, I couldn't tell that I was taking down Freon's defense with Skarn's either as far as that goes.

I'm definitely going to try Unstoppable/Melee Role and switching his trees around as soon as I can afford it. To at least see the difference. I think his build, powerswise, would work pretty good for dps, too, with those changes. Otherwise he's just about solid for except gear.

[Xev]

Ok so I ran Grab! again this morning and can expand on that blurb about it from earlier, now.

What happened was I was doing my morning caffeine over a Grab! and the first thing that happens when we walk in the door is that the cutscene starts. So, half awake, I assume I landed in a Brazilian death squad team and did my thing to blend in - I ran up the stairs and back to the balcony where all the nameds are.

I start wailing away, trying to gather up a crowd, doing my thing, half awake, and then I start to realize that no one is there but me and no one seems to be coming, either. Next thing I know I'm de-virginating my new Nimbus and Supernatural and popping anything else to keep alive.

No one ever showed up, and after the big balcony fight there were still a number of mobs left to take care of before we could exit, so I went and joined the rest to finish up.

Afterwards, I couldn't remember if the cutscene was supposed to be at the first of Grab! or further in. I can't remember seeing any names when I was fighting, either, due to it was kinda intense and I was kinda not awake.

That's why I said I "think" I soloed all the Grab! bosses by accident.

Just to clear that up..

Somewhat.

I still dunno why the cutscene triggered on entrance.