Cold/Ice: Nerve or Spiritual?

So, I'm mulling over what to do with my Cold/Ice defender once she hits 50. Thinking of going for some kind of softcap build, or maybe I'll just try to give her maximum Debuffage.

My question is for the Alpha: As in the thread title, Nerve or Spiritual? Nerve would give Acc (always good) and an extra bit of defence (not sure how much it would add up to though? Any ideas? Not really clear on exactly how the "reduces ED" thing works) spiritual of course is mainly there for the recharge.

So I follow the tradition and ask the boards. Suggestions?

EDIT: A minor additional benefit to Nerve would be that it helps getting Judgement to hit, if only a bit.

First, do you really need the accuracy? What are your tohit rolls regularly?

Second, the exact def buff you'll get from Nerve depends on what powers you're using and how they're slotted, of course. But if we suppose that you're already at at least 60% (pre-ED) on all your def buffs (the benefits from Nerve will be a little greater if you aren't), then this calculation will work:

Def buff from Nerve paragon = (.01 + 4/30) * (sum of base def buffs)

Or, as a decent approximation, .143 * sum of base def buffs.

So, for instance, if you already had Arctic Fog slotted well for def, Nerve paragon would give you roughly 5 * .143 = .715 more def from Arctic Fog.

Another example, close to my heart: My FF def uses Dispersion Bubble, Combat Jumping, Maneuvers, and Weave to hit the softcap. That's 21 base def (10 + 2.5 + 3.5 + 5), so a Nerve paragon would have given me 3 more def (actually, 3.01, and actually, a tiny bit more, because CJ isn't slotted as heavily--pre-ED it's only at 53.64%--but it's close enough). That could let me drop the Gaussian's set in Tactics, or maybe drop CJ if I slotted more heavily for def buffs in other powers, but those savings weren't going to be enough to make up for the global dmg boost from Musculature, so I went with that instead.

Or, if you just want to plug things in and see what happens, you could use Mids'.

But the short of it is: Nerve is pretty weak for most builds (though not all, I'm sure), and I definitely wouldn't go for it over one of the others just for the def buff, unless you can really make use of whatever slot/power savings you're getting from the 2-3% def buff.

The reason I was thinking Nerve is that it A) would provide a tiny bit of extra defence for my shields and B) I was thinking of picking up Scorpion Shield, which is about 20%

EDIT: Seems like I'd get about 3.4% extra defence from Arctic Fog and Scorpion Shield alone, not too shabby actually considering it means I can (at the very least) drop a slot from Heat Loss.

Yeah, it might be worth it then. My problem was that I couldn't find a way to turn any saved slots/powers into more damage, which is all I could really hope for with janky power sets, but if you can do something with the savings that outstrips the gains from Spiritual (and you certainly have more options for that in your power sets than I do in mine :P), that's awesome!

Yeah, the question isn't that either isn't good: Recharge is ALWAYS good and the benefits from Nerve are nice too, I just don't know which one is better

cold domination has alot of high recharge time powers, spiritual gets you closer to having them permanently active. the only thing nerve could help is if you didnt want to slot for defense but still wanted some defense. imo, this is silly since with minimal cheap IOs you could softcap s/l def and get decent def to others. on my cold defender i have the mace mastery pet almost perma and heatloss is always ready when i want it.

I don't have a lot of incarnate experience on my cold yet, but I went the musculature route. I have 5 7.5 Recharge Buff LotGs already. I am about 10 seconds shy of perma-hasten. I could change horses to spiritual.

Musculature: My defenders are usually built where I wish I had more damage. One of the enhanceable features of heat loss is the endurance drain. My main point is more damage for defender secondaries like howl and shriek that I compromised damage slots on. As you get higher level alpha abilities, the more it ignores ED.

I do think Nerve for more defense in the ice shields is more than a LITTLE more defense. Pushing the defense numbers up on maneuvers isn't wasted either.
edit: Increasing the defense debuff in infrigidate isn't a wasted exercise either.

Spiritual is the better choice by far. All of your attacks should already be at 95% accuracy thanks to sleet and your own slotting, and the defense buff to your shields isn't very large. It's only about 2% at the very rare slotting. Meanwhile, spiritual will help benumb, sleet, and heat loss come up more often.

Spiritual. Easily. Cold has several long recharging powers which should be ED-maxed on recharge already. Spiritual giving even more recharge for them, making them perma or close to it is win.