by Sidestepper on Sun Jul 01, 2012 5:03 pm
I think you're drawing to strong of a dualism here. There are plenty powers and items that enable regen fighting, and just because something helps you spike doesn't also mean that it isn't also a regen tool. Anything that increases your damage per square impacts your regen fighting ability. This includes (examples are meant to be representative, not comprehensive):
Base Damage (Fine Sword, Orcs, Tuarog)
Attack Bonus (Humans, Powerups, Priest v Undead, Rogues)
Resistances (Tower Shield, Blood Shield, Monks, Bersekers)
Damage Reduction (Earthmother, Platemail, Tuarog)
Mana to Damage (Fireball, BYSEPS, PISORF, HALPMEH)
Poison
So really, there's lots of early game content that supports regen fighting (BYSEPS in particular is a glyph for people who prefer efficiency over burst power). The thing is, regen fighting is only possible when you have a huge mathematical advantage over your opponent. Ding! Fighting only requires you to be able to do slightly less than half of the monster's health in one pass, which is a very common occurrence. Regen fighting requires you to do more net damage per square than your opponent does. In the absence of resistances and magic, this boils down to having the product of your damage and level by higher than that of the monster. Since you're only regen fighting things that are higher level than you, that's not very common. At low levels, even a one level difference is huge (that means that a monster-2 heals TWICE as fast as you), and you haven't picked up as many powerups and items yet.
At higher levels, level difference starts to mean less, and you've acquired enough boons/items/conversions/powerups/magic to be operating at a power level that exceeds your nominal level. That's when regen fighting starts to become viable. Even then, I think very carefully before trying to regen fight a boss. Once I've started in on the boss, it is no longer possible to kill of any more non-popcorn monsters (I mean, I could, but that would put me hopelessly far behind and would require me to start over with the already invested resources lost). I keep a mental checklist of the highest level monsters (there are 2 9s, 3 8s, and 4 7s), and if there is enough high level experience hiding in the blackspace to enable one more ding, I will usually forgo the regen option and instead pick the map clean of resources.
More commonly, I use regen fighting to get early-ish takedowns on high level monsters, using the blackspace to load the catapult for when I find the boss.