Hopeling

OK, so on beta currently (subject to change, etc), Sustain powers give +112.5% regen unenhanceable, and +112.5% regen enhanceable. With 95% heal enhancement, that's ~330% regeneration, which can easily enough be kept up at all times. The Sustain powers that do Absorb have different numbers, but they're also less directly comparable to Drain Psyche, so I'm going to focus on the regen Sustain powers here.

On SOs alone, Drain Psyche (slotted 3 heal, 2 rech, 1 acc) has a 72-second recharge and gives 146% regeneration per target. That means you need to hit 2 targets to get roughly the same amount of regeneration that Sustain gives, and 3 to do better. But that doesn't account for the uptime. Let's round up and say you use DP every 80 seconds, since you don't always have a nice cluster to drain right when it recharges. To regenerate the same total amount over time, you'd need 330*(80/30) = 880% regeneration from Drain Psyche. That's ~6 targets. High, although not impossible, and not much room left to hit more targets and outperform Sustain powers, averaging in the downtime. Fifty seconds of downtime is a lot, though, so surviving from the end of one Drain Psyche to the start of the next can be an issue. A Sustain power would regenerate ~70% of your health in those 50 seconds; that's a lot of damage to soak and hope that you can catch up during the duration of Drain Psyche. Under these conditions, Mental is definitely not looking so hot.

With basic frankenslotting, Drain Psyche can have 95% recharge enhancement rather than 66%. This brings its recharge down to 61.5s, the average number of targets needed to break even to ~5, and the damage you need to soak during the downtime to ~50% of your health. Still not looking very good compared to Sustain.

With frankenslotting and during Hasten, Drain Psyche recharges in 45.3s, you need 3-4 targets to break even, and you need to soak only ~20% of your health during the downtime.

And in a target-rich environment, or in short fights where the uptime doesn't matter, or as a panic button, Drain Psyche wins by a mile before adding any recharge set bonuses at all.

So, depending on the build and the situation, Drain Psyche can range somewhere from "significantly worse than Sustain" to "multiple times better than Sustain".

And of course, /Mental still has two good AoEs (including the only ranged AoE attack in any Blaster secondary) and a regen debuff. i24 /Mental is not clearly superior to everything like i23 /Mental is, and is not necessarily a great pairing for Dark/, but it's not on the bottom of any meaningful pile.

Two glasses of water?

100% means whatever the default distance is. 200% would mean twice that far.

Nothing's changed related to this in the last few months, though, as far as I know.

There are people different than me? *shock, horror*

High-recharge perma-DP builds soloing on x8 aside, 1400% regeneration part of the time is, in some ways, better at keeping you alive than 300% regeneration all of the time. Sustain powers are certainly easier to take advantage of, but not strictly superior. There is no reasonable way to look at a power that is four times stronger under the right circumstances and say "no, there's no way this can be an advantage".

Drain Psyche is a poor substitute for Sustain. But then, Sustain is a poor substitute for Drain Psyche. /MM will still be good - in fact, it will still be the best - at the things it is already the best at now. /Mental is the only Blaster secondary that is so good that it was left out of the i24 buffs because it would have to be weakened.

Is there a change that will prevent Mental from having two AoE powers and >1000% regeneration at least part of the time? No. /Mental is excellent already, and i24 won't make it any less excellent.

Will /Mental build and play differently than the other sets with standardized Sustain powers? Yes, definitely. Does that make it "bottom of the pile"? No, definitely not.

Don't mind Another_Fan. He's been on this weird kick lately where he likes to claim that the huge buffs in i24 are going to somehow make [every secondary except whichever one he's fixated on this week] trash or otherwise "doing it wrong".

Is this a good start, or should I go back to the drawing board? What have I done right/wrong?

What's puzzling is that for every player that does this as I do (and all you need is /auctionhouse and a moderate amount of inf, which is not THAT small a group of players... er, I think), there has to be dozens or even hundreds of players that look at a Righteous Rage and say "this isn't useful, I'd rather have a paltry sum of influence".

Is it a percentage? I thought it was simply when there was a single spawn (or remnant thereof) - I've seen large clusters of 10+ show before, but it never shows when all that's left is two minions on opposite ends of the map.