Ben_Arizona

Fire Breath's main advantage is being a pretty decent low-level AoE that combines with Psychic Scream and Fireball to let you output quite solid AoE combo damage earlier than most blasters can. Even if it's not in your final build, it's worth mentioning for the road there.

One thing that I've noticed with Hurricane (and with quite a few powers since then, but Hurricane first) is that while the enemy "melee preferred" AI is good at noticing when it doesn't have a path to you and switching to ranged attacks, it is very bad at determining whether the path to you is actually a good idea. Against things like Council Wolves, it seems a lot safer to be on the ground with a Hurricane going (so that they keep trying and failing to reach you) than in the air out of reach (so that they give up and start throwing rocks).

Probably not a new insight, but hey, it's what comes to mind. Also useful in AE now that melee-focused mobs get throwing knives to wreck you with.

(QR)

Regarding what constitutes control vs. debuff, I tend to think of control as being mitigating non-incremental effects. To clarify: a critter is not 20% confused or 70% asleep; it either is or is not subject to the controlling effect at any given time. By this definition, slows and -recharge, although mitigating, are not controls; they apply incrementally. KD/KU is, however, a short-duration control effect by this standard, since the creature is either standing and able to act or not standing and therefore unable to act except to try to stand up; as your mama may have informed you, there's no such thing as a little bit knocked up.

[ QUOTE ]
Fair point. I still value Build Up roughly as much as the entire /Dev secondary. Add a good melee attack and it's no contest.

[/ QUOTE ]

Oh, I won't contest that /dev is probably the weakest secondary offensively, for pretty much that reason: it doesn't have Build Up, and the offensive powers it has are too slow to make use of once the fight has started. However, I would rate it as one of the highest in terms of its defensive capabilities, and I was objecting to the claim that its defensive powers take too much setup to be useful.

[ QUOTE ]
Maybe I should have rephrased it. I'd rather die than wait for Devices to do its work.

The way I see /Dev used -and I know you use it differently- is generally like this:

[/ QUOTE ]

The way I see Empathy (and, for that matter, rad and thermal and almost every other defender set) used is generally "hammer on the heals like a madman". That doesn't mean that's how you should use the set, and doesn't mean the set is bad at what it does.

(QR)

I disagree with the claim that /dev's survivability requires long setup times. /dev does benefit from setup time, but where it benefits is offense, not survivability. Survivability in /dev, in my experience, means:

1: Caltrops. These come out fast; you can basically do it on the move. The key is that you need to be able to quickly evaluate the terrain to place them well, and you need to maneuver to leverage them during the fight.
2: Web grenade. This isn't a matter of setup time at all; you toss a webnade at something that wants to kill you and it can't come close to you. You can do this during the fight.
3: Avoidance. This is just Cloaking Device + Smoke Grenade to stroll right to your mission goal (or CD + SS, or CD + stealth IO, or SS + IO but that's not /dev-unique)

The long setup powers for /dev are the auto-turret, time bomb, and proximity mine. These are offensive, rather than defensive, powers (although you can argue that the turret is defensive by drawing aggro off you.) I am not of the "set up an entire field of mines" school of thought, but I do use them - since you don't have Build Up, when you're soloing you can lay a mine before dropping your alpha. When you're grouping even one mine is often too slow, admittedly, but when you're grouping your defensive concerns are proportionally lessened.

My usual method (with an arch/dev) is to toss out caltrops in front of me, lay _one_ mine as a pseudo-Build Up, then Rain of Arrows and proceed throwing AoEs while keeping the enemies running around on the caltrops. The AI is very bad at dealing with caltrops; as long as they have the theoretical path to you, melee-preferring enemies rarely just say 'screw it' and change to ranged attacks; they will instead waffle between "I want to run at this person" and "I want to not run on these spiky things" instead of attacking for the most part. If they make it through, hop to another position to keep them on the trops. If they step on the trip mine, then hey, bonus, but its focal purpose is for the initial build-up.

It seems to me that the basic question for Crab vs. Huntsman is simply one of considering the mutually exclusive powers.

"Do I, considering what I want to do with this build, feel that the Crab powers bring more to the table than Build Up and Surveillance?"

If what you want to do is go for as many buff/debuffs as possible on a Spider, then they do not - there are a lot of nice Crab powers, but none of them match the ST debuff of Surveillance. Most of them are powerful AoEs, but in this case you get "good enough" AoE without the Crab powers - what they bring to the table is insufficient to warrant giving up Surveillance for this character. Since Bane's AoE is not terribly good, he goes for the Wolf Spider AoEs to pick up the slack and fills out with a mix of Bane and Wolf utility powers. It is a Soldier build arrived at logically given what the player's design goals are.

Now, you can legitimately ask "is it worth using the VEAT to try to build the most buff/debuff-focused character I can?" If your personal answer to that question is no, well, that's your opinion and your taste. However, it is entirely reasonable to say that the build a player ends up with if he wants to make the Arachnos Soldier AT as buff/debuff-focused as possible with AoE fire support is a build that is generally called the "Huntsman", without reference to "lolrp" or whatever other rhetorical attacks you feel like making.

Smoke Grenade isn't useless even once you have a stealth IO + cloaking device, but it is specialized. The reduced perception range makes it much easier to pull small numbers of enemies, as far as I can tell.

Still, a short-duration placate would be quite nice on it.