Making a crab with no crab-pack.

Is this even possible? I mostly like the spiderlings. Does the pack only appear when you take pack-required powers like channelgun or does choosing crab make it appear no matter what?

If the former, what powers from the crab line can be taken without the pack appearing? Powers I'm interested in are aim and omega maneuver, crab spider armor, and fortification.

Thanks.

If you pick a crab spider you MUST have the backpack.

god that sucks

I believe that if you pick ANY power from the crab set, even ones that don't require a backpack animation that toon is now forever attached to the Crab backpack. That includes respecs or dual builds as well to the best of my knowledge.

Edit: beaten to it.

omg I don't have to? I thought I did. Thank you captain obvious.

This certainly does suck. The crab gets a few really cool powers you can't get with the bane, yet unlike the bane you can't avoid aesthetic annoyances in order to use them.

crab legs are stupid looking.

Pointless thread is pointless.

Quote:

Originally Posted by BackAlleyBrawler you *******!!!!

Just do what I did and build a second soldier. :3

Soldier 1: Crab
Soldier 2: Wolfspider(build1) / Bane(build2)

VEATs are really fun when you can find a good duoing partner, and I don't mind going through it again, as my Crab was really fun to level. I duoed my Crab with a friend who was a crab spider too (he ended up following my build almost exactly for same powers) before pact was introduced from 1-50 and we pretty much attempted to time our dings together. :3

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(edit) Actually, ignore all this, I just realised OP wanted Crab powers without Crab legs, haha. My post was wasted for nothing! Build yourself as a Wolfspider while picking Bane so you have no legs, and if you want overflow of pets, pick Black Scorpion for another robot spider and you can pretend your three big spiders are spiderlings.

The part that gets me is that if I dual build a bane/crab I have to have the crabs on my bane when I am using my bane build.

The reason why you always have the backpack - even if you have a Bane as a second build - has more to do with technical issues than anything else. I was part of the closed beta that introduced VEATs, and that damn crab backpack was trouble right up to (and I think even including) open beta. For the longest time, it wouldn't show up at all. Or, it would show up but only the default version would be visible, even if you picked the custom version. There were also problems with the textures and geometry, and getting the powers to work right.

In short, getting the crab backpack to work for a player character was a hell of a lot harder than getting it to work for an NPC, so much so that it necessitated making the backpack permanent. Now that power customization has BABs (and to a lesser degree, Castle) going back and re-examining how powers and animations work, maybe a solution will be found. Until that day comes, however, if you take any of the Crab Spider powers, expect to wear the pack.