Recovery path

lillyneth

Is it worth investing in high recovery?

Lately ive been toying with an idea to change my build from "regen" to "recovery" to lower the cooldowns on my skills.

Someone tried it? Is it good? How high did you get it?

suxip01111

I believe the general consensus is that once you get enough recovery to get your Astral Shield under 15 seconds, there's no point in stacking any more. The reason for this is it will take a huge amount of recovery to get it down further, all for a 1 second difference. The cooldown on Astral Shield won't drop any further past a certain point (I believe it's something like 13.5 seconds).

lillyneth

I see, i got it to something like 5,6k buffed and didnt notice much difference...

akomplished

Cool downs aren't the only reason for high recovery it's more so the Action Point Recharge % increase. Lowest you can get your astral shield to is 13.1 but that's pretty pointless. You start splitting hairs when you are at the 14.3 astral cool down.

whistlingdixie

TL;DR version
Stacking Recovery is not very useful for a DC. Stacking Action Point Gain may be useful for certain builds, but probably not. The most efficient build is to go to low Int/Cha scores and aim for 3,000 Recovery. Keep in mind, however, that stacking ANY rating beyond the critical point of its diminishing return curve is probably not very efficient.

Full Version

Recovery has no direct impact on the game mechanics. What it does is adds to two other ratings that do have a direct impact: a % bonus to Recharge Speed and Action Point Gain. Of those two things, Action Point gain works like you'd expect. If you have a +50%, then whatever AP you would have gotten, you get 50% more.

Recharge speed is the tricky one. It is not a flat reduction to your cooldown time. It works like this:

Actual Cooldown = (Base Cooldown) / (1 + Recharge Speed)

So if you have 30% Recharge speed and your power's base cooldown is 15 seconds, then your math looks like this:

15 / 1.30 = 11.54

So with our base 15s power, here's a few more example:

5% Recharge Speed = 15/1.05 = 14.29s (-.71s)
10% Recharge Speed = 15/1.1 = 13.64s (-.65s)
15% Recharge Speed = 15/1.15 = 13s (-.64s)
20% Recharge Speed = 15/1.2 = 12.5s (-.5s)
25% Recharge Speed = 15/1.25 = 12s (-.5s)
30% Recharge Speed = 15/1.3 = 11.54s (-.46s)
35% Recharge Speed = 15/1.35 = 11.1s (-.44s)
40% Recharge Speed = 15/1.4 = 10.71s (-.39s)
45% Recharge Speed = 15/1.45 = 10.35s (-.36s)
50% Recharge Speed = 15/1.5 = 10s (-.35s)
100% Recharge Speed = 15/2 = 7.5s

So if you somehow got 100% Recharge Speed, your cooldown would be halved. This is unattainable. The highest you can probably go is maybe 50% or 60% if you did a full "Recovery" build. You'd have to max out your starting stats for Recharge Speed bonus. So you can see there's a "sweet spot" for Recharge Speed. It's somewhere around 33%. I would say should aim to 30% and never exceed 35%.

Why 30%? Look at the numbers in parenthesis. That is the change to the cooldown for adding 5% more Recharge Speed. Notice how it's a great deal at low numbers, but the more Recharge Speed you add, the less it benefits you. This is the diminishing return on Recharge Speed. The amount of Recharge Speed you get from Recovery follows a similar pattern. So for cooldowns, you are actually affected by TWO diminishing returns. I could do a lot more math on this to prove the point, but I think just looking at the above chart should be clear enough.

So how much Recovery rating do you actually need? It's hard to say. At Lvl 60, I only have 12 Int and 14 Cha (Base 10 Int, 12 Cha). That's +6% Recharge Speed. Around 3k Recovery gives me +22%, for a total of 28%. Adding a campfire buff or proc of Rising Hope (almost always up) puts me at 30%. If you had less Int and Cha somehow, you might want to add more Recovery. Roughly, you'll get about +1% Recharge Speed for adding 250 Recovery above 3000.

This lets you focus your ability scores on Str, Wis, or Con depending on how you want to go. They all provide an increase with no diminishing return. Str is a flat increase Critical Chance (and in this case 100% would mean you crit every time.) Wis gives you a flat damage bonus, though I haven't tested it to see if it actually works. Con gives you a flat bonus to hit points. There is no "sweet spot" for these ability scores: the more, the better.

The one thing you do get from Recovery, Cha, and Int that's somewhat more useful is AP gain. But by maximizing it, you're only looking at around 15% more than ignoring it completely. So imagine whenever your AP meter was 85% full, you'd already have a Daily up. I don't normally recommend doing this, but if you like using Daily powers a lot and you center a playstyle and build around it, then it might make sense for you. Using Prophecy of Doom is probably a better option. (Though again, I haven't tested this myself so it may simply not work. You absolutely cannot trust claims a tooltip makes until someone has tested it.)

dullsmile

Hey thank you, I've read a few forum posts about the diminishing returns on recovery, but none were quite as concise as what you have laid out. I really appreciate this as I still have my free respec and have been contemplating a minimum recovery, dps build.

kolbe11

whistlingdixie, if could mod your post to a +5 Informative, I totally would.

Thank you!