Chaos_String

Points 1-3 will be true of any Spines/* scrapper running Quills. And point 4 would be a bigger issue if you drained the endurance of mobs faster than you depleted their hit points, but barring some very unusual circumstances, I run them out of hit points much faster than I run them out of endurance.

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For some reason, I actually find this controversy compelling, so I spent all morning repeatedly farming the BM map on +3x8 (stepping up to the difficulty at which you theorized that Lightning Field would become a problem). Some of the time, I used Quills and Lightning Field. Some of the time, I just used Quills. And some of the time I used neither.

Since inspirations lead to variable results and I wanted to eliminate that variable, I didn't use any inspirations (and because warriors don't pose much threat to my survival even at +3x8).

Here are my observations, for whatever they're worth. Take or leave them as you see fit.

1) Lightning Field promotes mob scatter.
2) Quills also promotes mob scatter.
3) Lightning Field + Quills causes very little additional scatter, as compared to just Quills.
4) It's better to run them both; they add more kill speed than the scatter subtracts.

Each group basically died to BU+TS+SB+Ripper+TS. Only bosses remained, along with whatever might have been outside the AoEs due to their initial placement. There was little need to pick off of runners or stragglers; certainly nothing that seemed excessive. Since I use both Ripper and Thow Spines in my *single-target* attack chain (both have better DPA than Impale, and endurance is obviously no object), most such stragglers were picked off by collateral damage when I killed the bosses.

Now I am convinced that Lightning Field helps more than it hurts. Whether you are or not is out of my hands. If nothing else, I boosted my own understanding of mob dynamics vs. damage auras, and made about 60 million inf along the way.

Well I don't routinely run at +4x8, just +2x8, but at that level I still don't see the problem.

I certainly wouldn't mind adding a taunt aura to Lightning Field though.

Nothing personal. The bit about a blapper being "more tougher" than a scrapper (however squishy) just reminded me of that picture.

Interesting theorycraft. In point of fact, Lightning Field doesn't cause mobs to scatter any more than they would with just Quills. I have no trouble killing everything quickly with Throw Spines, Spine Burst, and Ripper, and don't need Impale at all.

Choose whatever you like of course, but your theoretical analysis doesn't really hold up to gameplay.

As the player of a lvl 50 spines/elec, I'll echo the above poster in saying that Power Sink will solve all your endurance problems, especially when combined with Stamina and Energize. You will have no endurance problems once your build is mature.

Damage will be better than Spines/Dark and less than Spines/Fire.

Spines/elec is a very strong farming build, similar to spines/fire and spines/dark which are touted among the elite farmers. Spines/elec continues to slip under the radar with this regard, but only because it's new, not because its performance is lacking.

A lot of people don't like AoE holds because they're slow to recharge and have a very short duration.

Builds with high global recharge and Power Boost can get a lot out of the power, but for others it may be a waste of slots.

That's pretty accurate. I have two softcapped scrappers with Aid Self who can use it pretty reliably in mid-fight, but I also have a trick arrow defender with Aid Self. And even though he typically applies an autohit -16% ToHit debuff to enemies at the start of a battle and has a few points of general-purpose defense, he can't reliably use Aid Self in mid-fight; it's as likely to get him killed as it is to heal him, unless I break line of sight. Mostly it's for healing up after a fight or to provide a small degree of stun protection.

I didn't take Aid Self on either my Kat/WP scrapper or my Claws/WP brute, and honestly I don't think it's a good idea to take it.

37.5% takes a quarter of the hits 0% takes.

Very, very noticible.

Nice, I can totally imagine that working visually.

Actually I think SS hasn't been proliferated to Scrappers because, like Mace and Axe, it's a set that conceptually relies on brute strength and very little finesse. (And yes, Broadswords take a lot more finesse than axes or maces--trust me on this, I'm a certified stage combatant. ) The devs seem to view brute force without great finesse as the province of tankers and brutes.

So, if you think that SS fits scrappers "as much or more than any other powerset," then it might be a function of the fact that *you* want it proliferated.

But think about it: scrappers got fire melee and electric melee already, and IMO are likely to get the other "exotic/elemental" sets (ice melee and energy melee) next, before getting those "brute force" sets SS, WM and BA.

Then again, the community clearly wants to see SS proliferated a lot more than they do Ice Melee (lol) or Energy Melee (now that it's been nerfed). And now that CoX has some competition within its own niche, we're starting to see the community get the things that the community has asked for the longest. (Power customization, the 5th Column back, dual pistols, a new MM set...)

So time will tell. But IMO, Ice Melee and Energy Melee will be next if the devs hold true to what I perceive as their established form.

Mostly it's just a power customization thing, and a new toy.

But you know, it's yet another armor set with a damage aura, so the playstyle is similar to spines/fire or spines/dark.

It can attain slightly better overall mitigation than spines/fire (slightly better resists + sapping), spends less time self-healing than spines/fire but recovers similar hp/time, has superior inherent endurance management, and 20% more global recharge to seamlessly spam AoE attacks.

That said, it lacks Fiery Embrace and Burn, so it has less damage output, especially burst damage.

So... it's a bit like spines/fire except less squishy and less damage. Also has similar performance to spines/dark but without the endurance issues and somewhat more squishy.

I play it because it's a new combination as of i16, and I liked what I could do with both sets in power customization.

It's funny though; it slips under the radar as a farming build; you see people talking about spines/fire and spines/dark, but spines/electric is really never mentioned, even though its performance is similar to both.

Prior to power customization, I always disliked spines for much the same reason. It took a great deal of conceptual work to make the protruding spines "make sense" with a costume. Like, why isn't the costume all gnarly and tattered? I'm the sort of player who begins with a concept and min-maxes from there.

I had a spines/regen stalker who had no costume to speak of (The Boogedy Man, a form shifter--or more accurately, a manifestation of the irrational fears of his victims. His costumes are all various hideous monstrosities: a gaunt, skeletal figure with protruding spines, a reptillian fiend with protruding spines, a clown like Pennywise but with protruding spines... you get the idea.) But the spines still looked BAD. Like I can't hear you, there's a banana in my ear full retard bad.

But with power customization, some of the spines actually look *good* with costumes.

My "new" (OK, lvl 50, fully IO'd and accoladed) spines/electric scrapper is a mutant whose body is a capacitor and produces electrical fields. (Multispectral electrical fields because it's an i16 world we're living in now, kids.) His COSTUME is a genetically-engineered symbiant (think Venom) which feeds off his body's electricity to produce the spines and to sustain itself. The spines don't actually *poke through* the costume; they're *extruded from* the costume.

See?



There are spines now that are just metallic spikes; these look pretty good jutting out of a metallic body (tight/metallic for instance, also some of the "armored" textures). So you could maybe be some sort of metalman with an internal furnace...

I don't know. Anyway, my point is, spines are a lot more concept-friendly than they used to be.

Actually, that was the OP's build, hastily edited to show how it's possible to build in a focused way for strong defense to layer on top the other mitigation.

My own personal spines/elec build is a bit better in every measurable way.

To be fair, I'd predicted people would disagree with skipping Impale because it's a unique and useful power among the scrapper sets, and having played a spines/regen stalker to 50, I was highly dubious of skipping it even as I planned out my spines/elec scrapper build.

It worked a treat, though, so perhaps I can credit myself for a modicum of out-of-box thinking.

Cool, I've been "directly disputed." How exciting. Taking these objections point-by-point,

A) Let's look at the DPA (damage per second, Arcanatime) of some Spines attacks.

1) Ripper: 2.585 damage scalar / 2.376sec Arcanatime = 1.08 DPA
2) Throw Spines: 1.5445 damage scalar / 1.848sec Arcanatime = 0.83 DPA
3) Impale: 2.122 damage scalar / 2.64sec Arcanatime = 0.80 DPA
4) Lunge: 1.37 damage scalar / 1.848sec Arcanatime = 0.74 DPA

OK, so Impale is a little better than Lunge for single-target damage per second. However, with a single damage proc in each, they'd wind up being about equal. With two damage procs in each, Lunge would pull ahead.

Regardless, to say that Impale is the set's saving grace for single-target damage and that without it, one lacks "the capability to take down bosses" is absurd. Impale has terrible single-target damage just like all the other attacks in the Spines powerset. Assuming you could chain something like (Ripper > Lunge > Throw Spines > Lunge) as I can, using Impale wouldn't improve your single-target damage by very much, if at all.

B) This point is well-taken. Since I play spines/elec and have no equivalent power to Burn, I won't dispute the validity of Impale as a means of immobilizing a target within the patch. (I would think that the slows in Quills, Throw Spines and Lunge, together with the knockdown and slow in Ripper, would be enough to leverage Burn against a single target, but I can't honestly confirm this.)

C) Maybe I should have been clearer in my explanation for why I didn't take Impale. So far, all this discussion has ignored the fact that I was building for S/L/Melee defense, and the fact that the only way to slot Impale to provide a S/L/melee set bonus is to four- or six-slot the power as a slow or immobilize. Slotting it as an attack won't get you any closer to high S/L/melee defense; and anything that doesn't get you closer to this goal pushes you farther from it.

Plainly put, the power Impale requires slots to be effective, and the slots I saved by not taking an attack that I really don't need bought me quite a few percentage points of defense in set bonuses elsewhere in the build.

You may go ahead and say that skipping Impale "WILL gimp you." But I can run at +2x8 against Malta, Carnies, Rikti, Praetorians, Council, etc., and do so at blistering speed. And on several occasions I've cleared most or all of a map before realizing that my inspiration tray isn't open. Frankly, nearly 40% S/L/melee defense is a lot more valuable than the ability to immobilize a single target, shoot a runner now and then, and do a couple more points of damage per second (or a couple less, depending on how you slot Lunge).

"It WILL gimp you if you don't take it?" I beg your pardon. It assuredly will not.

You are going to be so sad when the next powerset proliferated to scrappers turns out to be Ice Melee, aren't you?

<chuckle>

I totally get that. And I'm not saying that Impale is a bad power or a wrong pick.

But it's a slow-animating single-target attack in a build that's designed to spam AoE. Therefore it is questionable. Not a bad pick, necessarily, but open to interpretation.

The OP was citing problems surviving at +1x5. So I hastily edited his build to provide it with meaningful smashing, lethal, and melee defenses, along with a few other minor improvements. And I'm confident that the revised build will handle +2x8 against most enemy groups.

Just trying to be helpful, not stoke a controversy over Impale.

I have nothing against it. It's a staple power on my spines/regen stalker, but that's a completely different sort of toon.

I've found that Throw Spines and Ripper are more than adequate to keep foes from getting away, and that the godawfully slow single-target attack that is Impale is of limited utility in an AoE monster like spines/elec (or spines/fire).

I predicted upthread that some people would disagree though, which is fine.