Crab single target damage.

I know crabs have amazing AoE potential but our ST damage gets downplayed quite a bit. Sure, we may not have the strongest ST attacks in our primary but we've got plenty of damage in our pets and debuffs.

I've always heard a lot of these scrapper Rikti Pylon challenges but have never run one since I've only played one scrapper and she was fairly decent but nothing spectacular. I've tried to attack these before on many other characters just for giggles but faceplanted immediately. My crab, on the contrary, is my favorite character because of it's perfect combination of multiple aspects of what makes a 'good build'.

So anyway, I decided to give it a go with my crab not knowing what to really expect. To my surprise, I actually succeeded, and fairly quickly for that matter. After a couple more runs I got my time down even more. The last run I managed a 49 second run, which figures out to 639 DPS.

I proceeded to check out the Rikti pylon thread and was amazed to see that this is actually a pretty awesome time. From the looks of it, even managing 3 mins is considered pretty good. I'm thinking I can knock this time down even further when I get my T4 Lore and actually remember to use my Judgement powers.

So the next time someone tells you Crabs are crappy for ST damage, just know that this really is not the case and that they're just extremely misinformed.

Huh, that's neat to know. Might I ask how expensive your build is, recharge and stuff?

Also, I know pets are the breadwinner as far as crab ST goes, but what was your personal attack cycle like?

Crabs (and all the builds that have a lot of pets) have always produced way more st damage than most people realize. It just doesn't come in the form of a 1000 dam headsplitter, or isn't always on instant demand like bu+blaze. But for anything that doesn't get insta-gibbed it is crazy how high the damage the pet classes can produce is.

That said, I'd give some time for the new pylon times to settle in. 3:00 was very impressive pre-incarnates, but for the most part heavy damage incarnate builds can fart at it and it will drop in about 2 min.

The time you ripped off is insane though, and shows how much benefit forcemultiplying builds gain through these abilities. Well done.

Out of curiosity, why guns over crablegs? Mostly the DPA on Channelgun being so bad?

I found my Crab ST DPS to be lackluster. Sure, in I19 I could hit over 300 DPS on a rikti pylon - with pets out.

In a solo +4/x8 mission, what happens is my pets get wiped out in seconds and I'm left doing about ~130 DPS if not less than that, which is about average tanker damage.

Rikti pylons always were a terrible benchmark for anything that isn't a melee class* lacking abilities like regen debuffs, pets, location based debuffs ; the way the encounter works means you're simply going to get values that often won't compare to actual results in the real game, it's a lot of "if such and such" happens.

*and even for these ATs, there can be discrepancies. For example, having 10 targets all the time, not most of the time, all the time in AAO range? Not happening.

If you're running a +4 x8 solo mission then ST damage is probably the least of your concern. Also, Barrier works great to cover all your pets. I'm finding my pets staying alive so much longer now.

In a +4/x8 mission, ST damage is critical to me. At level 54, minions have roughly 500hp, lieutenants 1000hp and bosses 2500hp. If I just AoE, bosses will survive with more than half of their HP, and then what? Use more time on the bosses as I just did on the rest of the group? No, I'll pass. I find a good balance of ST and AoE damage to work better, at least for me.

I haven't tried Barrier on a Crab, that's a fair point. Regardless of pets living or not, lacking AoE mezzes to manipulate their AI or MM controls to directly control them means I can't rely on them doing their damage on what matters (the bosses) as long as lieutenants and minions are alive, nor can I get them to focus on one boss rather than, i.e., chase the other one who's running away and do nothing while trying to melee (spiderlings I'm looking at you). Compared to one standing still target, big difference.

For your bane, I would recommend trying out Clockwork lore. They have 0 melee attacks so they will remain stationary and continue to lob attacks from range while you go in to melee and do your thing. These guys don't die very often because of this.

Warworks lore is beastly as you may have already heard but on tougher AV fights Vicky may get smacked around by AoE. Running double maneuvers and barrier, however, you'll find her sticking around a long time.

I switch between clocks and war depending on the situation.

Gave it another go now that I have all my T4's equipped.

33.7 seconds. 1265 DPS.


I decided to use Warworks this time. The problem I was experiencing with Vicky was that she was grabbing aggro every now and then, getting all other pets AoE'd and then slowing the whole process down. This time, I waited for Pylon to divert it's attention off me and to Vicky, THEN I hit Barrier. Pylon AoE'd pets but no one took a hit.


Also, I hovered on the opposite side of my pets last time, but this time I just hovered over them so that they were all within range of leadership buffs but out of AoE range. That 30% damage buff on all pets goes a long way when they're all focus-firing on the pylon.

Do you have your build posted anywhere? Or are you one of those "my build is sacred" types?