I can understand some of your points, but I think the benefits of one system would outweigh the other. And I really don't see much of a reason to have both systems that could ultimately be so similar.
If anyone knows how the system works on EQLive, maybe we should try to emulate that, since that is what the emulator team normally tries to shoot for. I know in games like WoW and others that I have played that have OOC Regen, they all appear to be % based as far as I can tell.
Downtime in games is probably one of the more annoying things out of anything. It has been reduced to a minimum in all modern MMOs and apparently even EQLive has it reduced now. There really is no positive side about making someone wait 20+ minutes for their mana to regen to 100%. You will notice that many custom server have CH and Regain Mana clickies on something like a 2 minute or so timer to remove the downtime from EQ. I think that makes a huge difference in the enjoyability of the game.
From what you are saying, it seems like you think that players with considerably better gear should get penalized for having that better gear. They get more downtime the better their gear is. Yes, they will regen more mana in the same amount of time as someone with lesser gear/manapool using my system, but their gear is much better, so why shouldn't they? You mentioned a scenario with a wizard that has better gear than another getting an extra kill more than the lesser geared one every now and then. Shouldn't that be how it works? Shouldn't casters with better gear be able to kill more then ones with lesser gear?
Using your system and increasing a base HP regen rate by a multiplier would mean that you are making all casters equal no matter how nice their gear is. Let say a wizard with 10k mana has 50 mana per tick from items/spells/buffs and natural regen. That means it would take them 200 ticks (20 minutes) to regen to full mana. So, if you want to get that to a reasonable timeframe, you would probably want to lower that to take 5 minutes max. So, to get 10k mana in 5 minutes you would need to have a bonus of 150 mana per tick + the 50 normal regen mentioned above to equal 200 per tick. Already, that 50 per regen from having good AAs, items, buffs is only making a minimal difference. The, factor in that a lesser wizard of the same level with 5k mana would still get at least 20 regen without even having great buffs/AAs/items to add more regen. So, even though the more powerful wizard has much better items and has spent much more time on their character, they only have a very small increase (15%) in OOC Regen per tick.
With your idea, these 10k and 5k mana wizards would both be almost equal. They would both have almost the same downtime to kill ratio. And in this case, the powerful wizard has 2X as nice gear as the other! The 10k wizard should be getting considerably more kills IMO.
The more you up that multiplier, the less important the other bonuses are from buffs/AAs/Gear in both systems. And in order to set what I would consider OOC regen, you would want it to increase HPs much faster than the base + bonuses, which means that no matter what, during non-combat the bonuses are going to be less important and not much of a factor in either system. The main point for having +bonuses for mana and regen when you have OOC Regen is for regen during fights. OOC Regen will basically take over when not in combat.
If 2 people group together, they should have the same downtime IMO. I wouldn't want one wizard with 5k mana to have to wait 2X as long for the other wizard with 10K mana that they are grouped with to get to full so they can start their next encounter. And, I wouldn't want a raid that is ready to fight to have to wait a few more minutes so their uber cleric can get to full even though everyone else is full already.
The main point of OOC Regen is to reduce downtime. There are no in combat benefits to having OOC Regen other than less time between fights. If a group is pulling steady pulls, I don't think they should have to stop for 20 minutes every few pulls so that the casters can regen. I also don't think that casters should be less useful in groups or raids than melee. By having a decent OOC Regen rate, it lets them maintain mana so they can help with every pull instead of doing a few pulls and then going AFK for 10 minutes while they regen.
As for adjusting the max level effecting OOC Regen, I think it is a very minimal issue if at all. If you really care about making sure that all levels remain the exact same regen rates and you have scaling enabled, then you can easily adjust the scale rule. But, in most cases, even custom servers aren't going to be increasing their max level by more than 5 or at most 10 at a time. If your server is jumping from level 50 max to level 100 max, then you got more issues than regen rates to worry about :P And, if they are only adding 5 levels, the difference for mid levels would be minimal and hardly noticeable. And, it isn't like you have to retune all mid level encounters because OOC Regen rates changed. It only effects out of combat, so it really doesn't matter.
You could easily write your code yourself and submit it to the server code submissions if you like. But again, I really don't see any reason to have more than 1 system for this. I imagine that most servers that would even use it would have it set so high that it wouldn't really matter how it was being done. I plan to try setting my OOC Regen rates at 10% per tick with a 50% scale, so a level 1 will regen to full in 1 minute max and a level 75 will regen to full in 2 minutes max.
Both systems would work to yield similar results. I don't see much of a point to draw out a big debate on the subject unless someone has some enlightening information that should point one way or another. My code is all done with the exception of 1 piece, so I am not going to rewrite it. I really only care to finish the code by figuring out how to check if the player is in combat or not.
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