by Lujo on Thu Jun 21, 2012 8:22 am
Regen fighting works like this.
Every time you reval one block of unexplored space you regenerate your level worth of hit points. If you're, say, level 4, and reveal just one block you will regenerate 4 HP. You also regenerate one mana, so, in most circumstances, you get a BURNDAYRAZ every 6 blocks.
This is a bit hard to figure out by itself because one block is very rarely revealed (it's chunks of 3 most often). It's written on the health tab tooltip, but it took me ages to find that too... It's one of the main reasons people seem to take forever to get good with regen-fighting - every time they attempt it, they reveal 3 blocks and the monsters health goes up too much.
Why does the monsters health go up?
Because the monsters also regenerate their level worth of HP every time you reveal a block.
Now, If you do more damage then they regenerate, you can just reveal enough blocks to survive a hit, and with that hit, do enough damage to the monster to take away all the HP they regenerated + some more. If you have say, 50% physical reisistance, it takes you less revealed blocks to regenerate enough life to be able to survive a hit. Because the monster is only doing half damage to you.
In case of the monk, who regenerates twice his hitpoints per block and has 50% phys resistance, you only take half damage from monsters, but you also "beat" them for regeneration because you get more out of revealing a block than they do. If you're fighting a boss at lvl 10, and reveal one square, he regenerates 10 HP, and you regenerate 20 HP. And every 6 blocks, you regenerate enough mana to hit him with a Fireball, or you can hit him with PISSORF every 4 squares. Or you get extra help from HALPMEH.
That is sort of the gist of it. The reason newbies find it hard to figure out is that they can't tell from expirience when's the right time to start fighting a boss. Since fighting higher level monsters is generally harder, they seem to assume that being as close to lvl10 before fighting the boss increses their chances. It also seems unintuitive to start fighting a boss before you've taken advantage of everything on the map - if you didn't need it, why is it there? So they explore everything before even attempting. It's an inherent "if you play it intuitively, the game is hard, if you assume the game is not hard beforehand, the game turns out ot be easy" moment, simmilar how you don't need most of the stuff in the game to beat VICIOUS.
It's the same reason it takes people a while to really discover level-catapults, because they require leaving stuff behind deliberately which requires a conclusion that you don't really need all the stuff you find.
Several really nasty exploits took a long while to become public knowledge because of the underlying phenomen at work here.
I almost got pwned by Shifty Brickwork!