Solo Kin/Sonic - which attacks for leveling?

So, I'm leveling a Kin/Sonic, having fun. I'm clear already on what I'm taking or not from Kin/, but I'm not totally sure on /Sonic. Shriek and Scream (the tier 1 and 2 ST blasts) are great, but Howl feels underwhelming. Is howl skippable? Which /Sonic powers are worth taking, considering both pre- and post-Fulcrum Shift?

I figure AOE damage becomes a bigger deal once you have FS, but before that, does it make sense to only take ST blasts and focus on quick kills that way?

EDIT: To be clear, this is a SOLO character. I guess I put it in the title but forgot to mention it in the post.

On a team, howl gives you a cone -res debuff that is pretty substantial -20% which means your teammates or you can whack things faster with other followup powers besides howl.

In my eyes, dealing 20 damage to one enemy versus 24 damage to a lot of enemies... I tend towards the 24, even solo. The question you need to ask yourself is: Are you running out of endurance quickly. Typically if you're spamming AoEs, that'll chug your endurance faster, otherwise as long as you hit at least 3 enemies, you're easily compensating the damage.

It's also kinda like my Archery/Sonic Corruptor. If I'm focused on a full group, I'm going to use my slower massive AoE attacks. If it's a medium group, just make sure my attacks are lined up on my AoEs and toss some ST attacks on the harder targets. If it's a small group, do my attack chain of T1, T2, T1, T4, repeat. For this, Howl could easily be the T4 of your combo and you technically need nothing else for soloing ST. However, when you consider Howl, Shockwave, and Dreadful Wail are you only strong AoE attacks for sonic, you'll want to just target the hard targets and just howl everything around them while you use Shriek/Scream on the hard one. That is, if you're survivability is good enough to ignore the minions.

for a kin/sonic, shriek and scream are required. Howl, shout, and screech are great powers. Siren's song and dreadful wail are normally open to preference, but they both have very good synergy with kinetics so you should take them if you're able. Amplify and shockwave should both be skipped without a doubt.

On a solo build, I would say howl is highly skip-able. Given that your tactic is to use siren's song to sleep a group, then draw your buffs off of them and ST blast them to death, howl just winds up giving them a wake-up call.

For a solo Kin/Sonic I would definitely skip Howl. You can always do a second build for teaming if you like.

Your best tactic for survival will be Siren's Song/Fulcrum Shift(which doesn't wake them) and then wake them up one at a time with Screech and ST blast them to death. That way you can take advantage of the fact that the rest of the mob is sleeping, and the one you're actively fighting is stunned, leaving you VERY safe.

I believe Garent says to skip Amplify because if you play it right you will be at max damage potential a lot of the time and Amplify is wasted at that point. You should already have plenty of accuracy so the to-hit buff is kind of redundant as well. I would probably skip it as well on a Kin/Sonic soloing build, you can take something else that you will get more mileage out of in it's place.

I like the aim powers on Kinetic defenders not so much for attacks as the gotta hit transfusion/transference.