Spines as a primary

Well , I've noticed most stalkers nowadays it seems either pick Kinetic Melee or Electric Melee . Now with that being said, How does Spines measure up as a choice for stalkers? Is their a reason why there aren't that many running around using that power-set? I'm not complaining just simply trying to figure out whether or not quite frankly if I made the right choice picking Spines. I mean I like the set personally. I just would like to know where it stands as a choice for damage.

Personally, I think it has more AoE dmg due to simply having more *direct* damaging attacks...

On Elec melee, Chain Induction is a ST attack that jumps to other targets but those jumps cannot crit. Thunderstrike, while the AoE portion can crit, it's only a portion of the actual damage the attack does (the energy part) while the bulk of the damage is the smashing part (which is ST). Jacobs Ladder does some nice direct damage but only in a 50 degree 7ft cone. Then there's Lightning Rod which is great for burst damage but, again, it's not a direct attack and therefore cannot critical and recharges too slow to be 'chained'. It's still a great set though, and a nice balance of AoE and ST.

Spines will probably do more AoE because all its attacks are direct. Spine Burst is a 15ft PBAoE vs Thunderstrike's 7ft and will do less damage to 1 target for doing more damage to more foes. Ripper is a wider cone and does more dmg than Elec's equivalent and Throw Spines, while it does less burst dmg than LR, it can critical hit and recharges much faster. This, in my mind, equates to greater AoE than Elec.

However, the issue probably seen by Stalker players is speed. Nearly all Spines' powers are *slow animating*, with the exception being Throw Spines and Lunge. For ST, the only viable attacks to kill a target are Lunge, Impale, Ripper and Throw Spines and Impale is slow, Throw Spines is weak for a ST attack and Ripper...is nice but still on the slow side.

However again, if the new changes to Stalkers really make AS into a fast animating ST attack when unhidden, Spines will probably get the most from that change.

Well Test_Rat, despite being bitter on the forums lately, is a very nice player (teamed with him plenty before I took a break) who made top end builds for a lot of stalker combos, and if he said his spines/nin felt more damaging than his elec/nin I believe him. I'm leveling an elec/ because I dislike spines, didn't work for me as a scrapper, didn't work for me as a Dom (/thorns plays a lot like Spines).

The "arguably better" part apparently needed some argument. >.> So I'll clarify what I meant.

Numerically, Spines has more AoE potential. Realistically, it depends on the difficulty you're fighting at, mob placement and resistance, and all boils down to whether or not anything in the spawn lives through LR+TS - or at least how many things are left, since the difference in single target damage is more significant than the difference in AoE.

I have a Spines/Nin that I stopped playing after getting sick of what all lives through a lethal damage AS that dies to an energy damage one somewhere in the low 30s, and ran my PL'd Spines/WP through enough content to get accolades and Leviathan Mastery at level 50. I'm aware that Spines is playable and has good AoE damage - but I've never looked at my Elec/Nin and thought "I need more AoE, I can't keep up with that Spines character". For me both sets finish missions in roughly the same amount of time, and ElM has an easier time against hard targets.

And like I said before - if you enjoy the set, have fun with it. I just got annoyed that I had to hit Build Up to kill a minion with Assassin's Strike, so I switched to a set I enjoyed more.

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