It's just me or dark regeneration sucks?

[Herr Gutentauben]

Is there any reason to choose it over cthonic vitality?

[FreddyTheMonkey]

Aside from when you're farming darkness in low heat runs (in those runs you have a good, assured influx of darkness) I personally prefer it. I try to spawn Troves as often as possible and a good chunk of darkness is a big heal. It just fits my playstyle better because I tend to take the most damage in a handful of rooms, so I'd waste a lot of Chtonic vitaly heals and not get enough when I need them.

[cswiger]

You're going to want to complete a run with each of the various mirror options enabled, so that's one reason to pick it sometimes.

Beyond that, if you normally seek out gemstones, this option might well result in more healing than what you get from Cthonic Vitality. And you get synergy from the Brilliant Gemstones contractor upgrade.

[HypetheKomodo]

well, it can, in theory, restore a lot more health than Vitality if you get a trove and for non-bounty boss kills, if you're going for bounties you're not really hunting for Darkness all that much, especially at higher heats

also in Styx Vitality heals after every mini-encounter which is a lot, and you can't even get Darkness there at all to my knowledge (i don't recall ever seeing a Darkness reward there, anyway)

overall Vitality is guaranteed, and Regeneration forces you to take Darkness rewards which have no benefit during a run, which can be a problem unless you're just farming

[Grim]

Personally I find Regen better than Vitality. It means that Troves will often heal you back up to full health, especially if you take a Chaos boon that increases the amount of darkness. You do have to build around it a little but I find it far more helpful than Vitality in my personal experience.

[Herr Gutentauben]

Originally posted by Grim:

Personally I find Regen better than Vitality. It means that Troves will often heal you back up to full health, especially if you take a Chaos boon that increases the amount of darkness. You do have to build around it a little but I find it far more helpful than Vitality in my personal experience.

This makes a lot of sense

[cswiger]

You're going to need to get ~30K worth of darkness in total, which looks to take around 100 runs.

[KlasaSokata]

I think the important question to ask yourself is /when/ do you need the healing? Darkness is fairly easy to find in the earlier parts of the game up through until Styx, so if your worry is you won't have enough HP to defeat Theseus and Minotaur then it could be worth building towards getting more Darkness.

But if your worry is getting through Styx and having enough HP for Hades, then it is a bad choice as it is almost impossible to find Darkness in the temple. The only possibility is inside of a Charon Well and even then it's not likely, meanwhile every small room in Styx grants you the Vitality Healing.

So if you feel you need more healing for getting to the Temple than by all means Regeneration might be better for you. But if you take a lot of damage in the Temple or want to explore all 5 tunnels than you might prefer to take Vitality instead so you have enough health for Hades.

Both have merit it just depends on when you want the healing and where you need it, but you have to make your decision on that before the run starts.

[Atomsk]

Dark Regeneration > Cthonic Vitality on high heat (or any level of heat).

With dark regeneration its very easy to get full HP after bosses and unless you actively avoid purple shards dark regeneration will also heal more during the run.