Lazarillo

This is about where my Bane sat when I started doing the raids. Once I got my Barrier Invocation, I made a few changes and get her up to 40% Melee/AoE, meaning that as long as Barrier's active, she's old-school softcapped and a small purple will generally get you to the new cap. Of course, if you're planning on a different Destiny, you may want more. I can post my build later if you think it would help you.

The key until you get your shifts is to use stealth but move quickly. Take an extra second or two to re-hide but then stick with your team. Most intervening mobs will miss you in those cases. Focus on the actual items rather than the enemies around them so you don't draw a lot of aggro from any stragglers your team leaves behind.

I can't speak for all Bane Spider builds, but on the Acid/Grenade runs I'd just say to play like you would most other melee characters. The bonus is that you have stealth, so if you fall behind or die, it's pretty easy to avoid the ambushes and catch up with your team. And once you get your level shifts, you can become a one-man item-retrieval machine.

I plan to play on another server that night.

Were you browsing as a level 50? You have to set the slider to the value of the recipe you want, and Kinetic Combat caps out at 35. Slide the button down to that point and it should be available.

Note also that the slider will not have an effect on random rolls; you can only set the level for singles that you buy.

The cool part being that Vanguard seems to disagree.
But hey, you do what you gotta to get the villains on board too.

True. Instead, you teleport directly into secure military installations.

Haha! I thought that very same thing! "Helped" that the first time I saw the term used was on Virtue, which I had been told in advance was the RP server. Even better was that, in the face of such dedication, I figured I ought to take an actual "bio break" and my own up to snuff at the beginning of a mission!

Other mistakes:
~I'd never played an MMO before CoH, and didn't initially realize that there was no way to "undo" levelling choices. I remember picking Slash on my Claws Scrapper at level 2, getting frustrated with the slow attack (talking pre-i7 Slash here), and thinking "Wait, I didn't save the game, right? If I log out without saving, the change will revert..."

~The symbols on enhancements originally confused me. My very first character was a Fire/ tank, and I picked Blazing Aura as my first power. Then I got to the tutorial and was handed two damage enhancements, which had the same icon as Blazing Aura...so yeah, as a result I thought you couldn't actually slot an enhancement into a power unless the power and the enhancement had the same icon.

What, and provide your kind with a free lunch? Not Beastyle's fault you don't know how to properly plan ahead.

Purchaseable from the Incarnate powers window for 300 Empyrean Merits + 1.3 billion influence when i21 hits live.

No, you may not.

There's far more content to do at 20 than at 50.

What I did was Frankenslotted in some extra slow enhancement. With just a little, very few things are going to be escaping your field of melty death, except for stuff that has slow resistance, and the most common of those (FREAKING WARWOLVES) have Immobilize resistance too, anyway. Also, the Imps are pretty good at handling runners as well.

That said, I do still have Ring of Fire in my own build, which is helpful for bringing down fliers and is really a more efficient ranged attack than anything in /Earth.