For just a low budget, crabs are probably going to give you the smoothest arachnos ride. They feature decent defense, with good resistance and intermittent healing for what gets through. It's very tough and forgiving, so much so that you can off-tank at times. Throw in a selection of ranged damage, melee damage, pets, and a huge variety of aoe, and you can make them work a good many different ways. That said, I've personally found the ranged is better without melee, especially the ranged AoE. The pets are well worth it as well.
As to doms vs. spiders- choose your poison. Spiders rely more on passive toggles for protection, with mostly damage as their main concern. Their role is to be there and blow stuff up. Doms rely on active controls for survival, so they require more thought. That said, you will have more predictable survival with control than on a defense based AT like spiders.
Spiders: toggle up, shoot stuff.
Doms: Find highest threat, lock down if possible. Use AoE control, kill things before they break free. If AoE control is unavailable, focus fire on easiest to eliminate targets, locking down others.
Fortunata is my choice. It's Control and Armor. You can build to be almost as effective as a controller, or almost as effective as an SR Scrapper, or anywhere in-between.
Doms have twice as much control. With all the control they pack, armor is almost moot. So I'd say it comes down to playstyle.
My two favourite characters are a Fortunata and a Fire/Fire Dom. I find the Dom more fun because of the huge amounts of damage and that it's a bit more risky. Fort is almost boringly safe. 
Play both!
You can run a very, very successful nightwidow or crab spider on a very modest budget, and they do go up from there if you come into some money later. On a higher budget, fortunatas have reasonable control and high damage output.
Doms, however, have been buffed extensively and are now first-rate damage-dealers with quite strong survivability. They do, however, benefit hugely from the application of IOs.
"Experience is the mother of good judgement. Bad judgement is the father of experience."
Thanks for the feedback guys. I've decided to go with both. I'm leveling a Crab up with a friend, since i don't think id make it to 24 alone. Also got a plant/fire im working. After playing my fire/kin a little, figured I'd hold off on the fire/fire dom til a lil later. Now you guys can give me some feedback on my builds in a few weeks, hehe.
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Plant/Fire is one fine farming build too. Once you get perma dom, you can farm so easily with Seeds of Confusion. Just remember to take Ice Mastery for Freezing Rain which debuffs a lot of resistance for you. Plant/Fire/Ice FTW!|
Originally Posted by L_E_X
Thanks for the feedback guys. I've decided to go with both. I'm leveling a Crab up with a friend, since i don't think id make it to 24 alone. Also got a plant/fire im working. After playing my fire/kin a little, figured I'd hold off on the fire/fire dom til a lil later. Now you guys can give me some feedback on my builds in a few weeks, hehe.
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As for Crab, you can't really go wrong with it as long as you take the defensive toggles and shields. Crab is a mini-tank and pets can do quite a bit of damage for him since his ST damage is on the lower side.
What's left is to normalize all Assassin Strikes and improve Stalker's old sets (Claw, MA and EM)! You don't need to bring back the missing PbAoE attack. You just need to make the existing ones better! For example, make Slice a WIDER and LONGER cone.
I'll go a different route. Don't play a Dom or Troller. With incarnate stuff, controls are mostly irrelevant (this coming from someone who has leveled almost every combination of controller to 50) in the end game. Either you are strong enough to slaughter it outright, or the game doesn't allow you to hold it long enough to make a difference.
Basically the game has devolved to those that can cap defense, and those that can debuff. Really nothing else is needed. Sure Damage is nice, but survivable damage is much much better and close in numbers to squishy damage.
As for farming... well that's another story. There are plenty of builds which do fine minion killing. There's no threat from minions.
Go with the Crab.
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cant stop laughing... you obviously have not played with a good dom on the new trials. in the endgame doms are high damage dealers with consistently high mag controls. if you can hop from mob to mob with dom-boosted seeds of confusion there is no point to having defense. controllers are buffers with light control ability, they should be buffing doms and controlling what the dom misses. sorry to be blunt but its the truth, alot of controllers dont know that they should be filling this role. i blame the fire/kin farmer mentality for boosting their egos too much.|
Originally Posted by Torrynt
I'll go a different route. Don't play a Dom or Troller. With incarnate stuff, controls are mostly irrelevant (this coming from someone who has leveled almost every combination of controller to 50) in the end game. Either you are strong enough to slaughter it outright, or the game doesn't allow you to hold it long enough to make a difference.
Basically the game has devolved to those that can cap defense, and those that can debuff. Really nothing else is needed. Sure Damage is nice, but survivable damage is much much better and close in numbers to squishy damage. As for farming... well that's another story. There are plenty of builds which do fine minion killing. There's no threat from minions. Go with the Crab. |
to the op: play a veat 1st because once you go dom it will be hard settling for anything else.
I actually swapped over to a ss/fire brute for farming first. Got him to 50 in a couple of days. Gonna use him to boost my VEATs and my plant/fire a bit. the low levels are soo boring without powers. I wont pl them all the way to 50 though, i dont wanna be broken, maybe 40 though...
I'm coming back after a several year hiatus and looking at starting a new character. After browsing around, i think it's between a dom or VEAT. The villain epic classes weren't in game when i played last, so I dont know that much about them beyond the stuff ive read on these forums in the last couple of days. I've already posted in the dom forums about some powerset combos. Really, guess im looking for some input from people who have both. I've played mostly brutes and MMs. My MMs get kind of boring after a while, the brutes are fun, just looking for something different. Looking for something versatile for solo or group play with lots of flash. I'm thinking crab is probably my best bet as far as SoA go. Was also looking at an earth/fire or plant/fire dom. What do you guys enjoy the most or think i would be best off with? I should mention i dont have billions or even hundreds of millions of inf yet.