losvce

I can has spot? I can bring either a 50 SS/Inv. Brute (Avenging Suit) or a 50 Merc/Poison (Colonel Kitchen). Your choice.

I use the Bane build as more of a WM-using stalker with several ranged attacks in order to fill out my attack chain. Here are the ranged attacks for the Bane:

Mace Beam

70 ft range (standard) and a quick recharge. It does half smashing and half energy and, both together, does about 75% of the damage of the half smashing, half toxic bash. This, with the fact (imo) that toxic is less resisted in PvE than energy, makes Bash a better choice.

Mace Beam Blast

I use this power in my bane build. It's a targetted AoE and does half smashing and half energy. Its damage is half that of Mace Beam, so consider it to be a weaker AoE version of Bash. Not very useful against single targets, but it's a nice addition when you build for crowds. Note that it does KB, so use it with caution.

Mace Beam Volley

45 degree cone, about 75% of the cone for Suppression on the crab side. It's 75% energy, 25% smashing and does KB. It has a recharge of double that of Mace Blast, which is about the same as any normal corrupter heavy ST blast. Except that it's cone. Except that the cone is somewhat large. Per target, it hits for about the same as Mace Beam Volley, so about 60% of the damage of the ST Mace Beam.

Poisonous Ray

This can be a beautiful power. It does the same damage (roughly) as Pulverize but does it all in toxic damage. Its recharge is a second slower than Mace Beam Volley, making it a second longer than twice Mace Beam. It's single target and imo it ought to do a little more than 7.5% def debuff since it's a "poisoning" power, but what are you going to do?

TL;DR

There are more ranged attacks available to Banes than there are melee attacks available to Crabs and the ranged attacks on Banes are more viable in an attack chain. On the upside, the single target powers do similar damage to the melee powers from a short distance away. On the downside, the AoE powers have to have two or three targets minimum to make up for the drop in damage potential.

Another minus is playstyle. As a bane, you're sneaking in under stealth to smack some fool upside the head with your big [censored] mace. However, noting that your pivotal powers of Crowd Control and Shatter do KB (which can then be followed up with an AoE if you position it correctly), you can form a solid attack chain that flows well imo.

I always thought of the crab melee attacks to be more like the attacks on a MM. They're cute and can get you through a tough leveling time, but you want to respec out of them eventually because you have better power choices. There are the following melee attacks for crabs:

Slice

This power does lethal damage to a ST and does the same damage as the energy damage channelgun. Lethal, being more resisted, does less damage overall.

Arm Lash

This is another lethal attack that takes about a little longer to recharge than Longfang. It does 1.5% of the damage of Suppression per target but has an arc half the size. Suppression also does energy damage, which is generally less resisted in PvE.

Frenzy

This is a half-lethal, half-energy PBAoE that's very similar to a lot of the dom short-range PBAoEs. It has a recharge and an endurance cost of roughly twice that of Arm Lash (and ~2.5 times that of Long Fang) and does a little less damage per target. But, it's PBAoE, so you're able to hit more mobs if you position yourself in a good way. It has a radius of about 8 ft, about the same as Slice.

TL;DR

All of the melee crab attacks do mainly lethal damage (except for Frenzy, which does half energy) and all of them are outmatched in damage by Long Fang. The last two are cones, but the cones are generally outmatched by that of Suppression. Frenzy is a PBAoE, though, so that might be worth looking into if you're the kind of player to jump into the middle of a frenzy and go all dominator-crazy-go-nuts on people.