which is better crab or bane?

I am building my first arachnos soldier and i want to know the strengths and weaknesses of both. Any thoughts on the subject would be helpful.

Try both, you got two builds on that toon and that means you can have one build a crab and the other one can be a bane build.

Yes but if one of your two builds is a Crab, then your Bane will have the crab legs too and you cannot get rid of it. Well, not that I know of at least. Here's to hoping I19 fixes it.

Uh oh, this question again. In the past, this question has led to many back and forth arguments with very minimal resolution. In the end, you will leave this thread with the diplomatic answer of "both are good so try them both out."

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The answer is crab.

I like Banes but... after 19 goes live an u can choose 3 more powers i may give the crab a second day in court . i think that SoA's will benifit the most from inherent fitness 3 more power selections FTW

It really depends on how you play. If you prefer Range AoEs, Crab. If you like to be up close on the action and more Stalker-y vibe, Bane.

However, I do believe that Crabs are more survivable. You can kite, and later on down the line you get both a resistance toggle as well as a self heal.

That being said, Banes are also crazy fun once you've IO'd their defenses to soft-cap and have Crowd Control. That thing has such a wide arc it's insane.

Personally, I think what I did was the best way to go: Level the toon up at a crab till you hit 50, then create an IO build for both types for diversity. Unfortunately, that means that no matter what, you'll have to look at those legs. Hopefully they'll have a fix for that soon.

I like the Bane myself. Heck, I like the first build you get better than the Crab (the Wolf Spider gun wielding soldier). That's mainly because I like the cosmetics of the Bane as well as the lack of backpack legs (ugh).

After I get my main toon to level 50 I'll make another SoA and it will keep the gun when I get my level 25 respec. I'll get the armor upgrades though. On both of them I'm going to get 'call reinforcements' soon.

THIS TOON IS NOW A HERO!

A Crab is kind of like a Brute combined with a Corruptor, a Bane is kind of like a Brute combined with a Stalker. The Bane will do more damage and have stealth, while the Crab will have more AoE damage and be more resilient.

You tend to have less range with a Bane, but you do have the option to pick up the machine gun (plus the mace fires blasts) and most people just don't get much mileage out of the Crab melee attacks. (I personally love them, but I have a pure guncrab build that probably has the better damage)

Ultimately, I think it comes down to the question of whether you want stealth or not. That's really the only capability that you can't build a Crab to share with a Bane. And of course with the stealth comes a somewhat different strategy for damage, since it makes your melee attacks do more damage.

Apples to Oranges...

If you like shooty, go Crab

If you like hitty, go Bane

It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets

... Hit it ...

Crab strengths:

• Is an Arachnos soldier (comes with awesome gun/leadership skills)
• can reach tank level resilience (depending on build)
• mixed between your crab+gun, more aoE attacks than single, making you capable of destroying large mobs of squishy foes with ease.
• capable of bringing quite a few pets to the table
• strong heal that also increases HP

• Not that good at melee
• high endurance costs if you grab all the AoE's they can have
• medium single target damage
• lack of reliable burst damage

• Is an Arachnos soldier (comes with awesome gun/leadership skills)
• Strong melee abilities
• strong stealth abilities
• good burst damage
• capable of two strong debuffs, toxic in some attacks

• starts out pretty squishy
• lack of healing or resistance makes defense failure dangerous
• a bit more limited pet/AoE options

In general game-play, Crab is easier to be "effective" but Bane has way better ST-damage and burst damage. If you like Stalker-kind of gameplay, then you may find Bane better.

Bane is like a superior version of Stalker in PvE IMO. You don't have that "massive" Assassin Strike damage (I don't think it's that massive considering the setup time and interruption) but what you have in return is great resistance debuffs, team buffs and even decent pets to help out.

Crab is like a tank-ish Blaster with excellent AoE and one very good resistance debuff in Venom.

thank you for your imput i belive that I will take the two diferent builds.

I mostly solo and the bane wins hands down, no contest! I've got both builds, they are both good for certain things, but the bane is gettin sets first for sure! Heavy teaming, I would say crab.

And yes, I sure hope they fix it so my bane doesn't have those useless arms on him!

QR

Huntsman > Crab > Bane

They're all great builds, really. With all 3 builds you can grab a good amount of -res, lots of leadership toggles, and great offensive output.

What really makes crab stand out for me though is survivability. You can softcap all 3 builds but with crab you can build a good amount of resistance with Fortitude (with Tough, I'm sitting at around 50RES across the board/high mez protect) and a significant HP boost with Serum (2100+ HP with Perma-Serum). Spiderlings also provide an additional layer of offensive output and damage mitigation.

Having high defense is great, and all 3 builds can achieve that, but when your defense fails, you WILL get hit hard without any resistances. With a lower amount of HP, a few hard hits (AVs) and you're done.

Last night, I solo'd the Holtz/Honoree mission in the new Incarnate unlock arc with my hoverguncrab. Holtz and Honoree were spawned as AVs and I was able to deal with them without too much trouble. I took a decent amount of hard hits, but my RES and +HP kept me in the fight. Without them (Hunts/Bane) I probably would've faceplanted.

Once again, they're all great builds and you'll feel powerful with all 3, but crab's additional layers of durability makes it the clear winner for me.

I have to say crab for the aoe damage. Once you get Defenses soft capped you can solo +1 +8 missions and get some nice rewards or do some AE ticket missions.

Then you can use your second build for a bane when needed.

Gotta agree with Mr_Fallstar on this one. I played all three on my 50 SoA, Huntsman, Bane, Crab. Bane was great. Really reliable, played like a tough stalker with pets. Crab was ok, great on a team since I could mow down the minions and Lts with aoe damage but something just didnt feel right about it. I didnt mind the legs so much, I was running with the Suppresion, heavy burst, frag grenade, bile spray, venom grenade AoE set up but it just didnt feel fun. Then there was huntsman. Purposely didnt take any travel powers for theme, grabbed all the soldier leadership buffs and the full leadership pool. When I was playing it, it just felt awesome. I guess its a theme thing that I am on a team full of these super powered freaks and then theres me. Just some dude with a submachine gun and entirely too much training holding my own right next to them. The team buffs really help out quite a bit and currently I am just running on SOs and am capped out to ranged defense and around 33% to the other positions. Cant wait to get the IO sets into him to really see how much he shines. Got a solid attack chain with just the gun and grenades and still have room for call reinforcements.

Something that I've noticed in pretty much all hunts vs crab debates is the leadership issue. In most cases, I hear that hunts is better because of all the leadership toggles you can stack. I don't see how this is relevant considering that you can do the same on a crab. The counter-argument I normally hear is that crab is so invested in grabbing so many AoEs that they don't have room for leadership. This really isn't a powerset issue but moreso a build issue. As a crab, it seems silly to grab every AoE possible because with high enough recharge you can chain through 3 of them.

On my crab, my chain is Venom Grenade > Heavy Burst (achiles proc'd) > Suppression (also achilles proc'd)> Heavy Burst again. All of this while running 8 toggles. It's essentially the same playstyle as a traditional Huntsman but with the defensive benefits of a Crab.

In the end though, the hunts vs crab debates boils down to the backpack. If you don't mind the pack, you'll be awesome as a crab. If you hate the pack, go huntsman and you'll still be pretty okay in the long run.

I'm in an SG of all Spiders (most of them Huntsmen) and their reasoning for not going crab is essentially the backpack/theme.



Edit: While I do feel that overall crab has more potential than huntsman, I'd much rather team with a huntsman than another crab. Reason being, is that most huntsman know that stacking leadership is one of their strong points while MANY crabs I run across skip them in order to grab every single AoE available to them. So in then end, I'd prefer my teammate to have Assault/Maneuvers rather than silliness like Omega Maneuver/Frenzy.

The 'Huntsman' is a bit of a misnomer, as it's traditionally a bane that goes with the arachnos soldier pool/training and gadgets rather than focusing on the mace-centric bane playstyle. The trick here is that you can just as easily be a crab that does the same. All in all, I'd say the most effective soldiers never forget their starting pools. Some of the best powers are in there.