Electric Melee:Jacob's Ladder and Me

Did I miss out on something? I swear when I first started playing COH Jacobs ladder was horrible...not only was the animation SUPER long but the range was far to short...I'm running around with my stalker and I picked Jacobs Ladder just as a filler until I can respec out of it later and I am pleasantly surprised! Not only is the animation super fast but the range seems to equal that of Shadow Maul and it fires twice as fast!

Was my perception off back then because I was a newbie or was there a change? To be honest I don't want to drop the power it's a keeper! It still deals tasty dmg as well like it always did.

U were a n00b

I always liked Jacob's even seeing how many people saying how bad it was - but my second 50 was a DM/DA scrapper so by the time I completed 1 year of game time and got Sands of Mu, I was good at using it to hit 3 targets, so when I took an elec/stone Brute to 50 shortly after I enjoyed Jacob's the moment I got it - hated Stone Armor so shelved the toon not long after he hit 50, but I had to see what the deal about Granite was and I didn't want loltanker damage, not that I liked Elm with the recharge penalty on the Brute.

I played an Elec/Regen Stalker to 32, later rerolled into Elec/EA and waiting to be leveled past DOs now, but JL is a keeper for me who got used to melee cones since the start because of my DM scrapper. The damage is good even as part of a ST chain.

Actually, melee range was increased from 5' to 7' since then, which is a drastic improvement for melee cones (same for Shadow Maul). Off the top of my head, this increase of 2' nearly doubles the area of effect on Jacob's Ladder at 34 versus 67 square feet for 5' and 7' radii respectively.

I wrote a guide a long time ago for the Buzzsaw DM/ELA build that advocated tossing out Shadow Maul and running a proc chain on single targets given that Shadow Maul could not reliably hit more than 2 targets. It can now reliably hit 3 targets and 5 targets is not unheard of. My build has taken Shadow Maul since the change and uses it well.

JL is actually a vital part of the best ST chain you can get for elec. The activation time is not bad at all, and it also allows you to throw in PBAoE sets/procs, including a purple and the pvp -res.

Julius I have a feeling that it was your guide I was reading from back then! Thanks guys for the feedback I thought it had a buff...same thing for Shadow Maul but JL Fires off half the time as Shadow Maul.

Thanks everyone for the info!