Crabs are definitely viable.
In duels you'll want all 6 spider pets and Reactive Interface. That's enough DPS to take down anything, including regen brutes and WP tanks.
You'll want to focus on your survivability since the primary stategy to beat a crab in a 1v1 with 6 pets is to kill him fast, as they're fairly squishy.
In zone, you can try to get max preception and hunt stalkers. Even if all you do is throw a weak attack at every stalker you see, you'll contribute a lot to the team.
Another tip, the worst crabs I've fought are the ones that think they're a scrapper, and the best ones understand they're as squishy as a controller. Kite and use ranged attacks only.
Vincent Balmont had a really impressive crab not too long ago. He beat my Claw/regen about 2 years ago when he was in his prime. They've got potential. Think Rikti Pylon test standards, 1 target that doesn't even go for your pets, and the pets aren't affected by DR (Call to Justice + all leadership does wonders).
Good luck with a build, I've yet to make one on Mids I thought I'd enjoy, but I have little experience with VEATS completely.
@Sentry4 @Sentry 4
PvP Redux is discontinued, for obvious reasons. Thanks to everyone who helped and joined.
Is there anything really needed to PvP? IO wise.
Pets in pvp? They are pretty much worthless to non MM's unless someone is dumb enough to stand still and let them eat you alive.
Stay away from crabs. You could make a build to annoy the crap out of people, but it will be a very poor pvp toon. Banes are much better suited for the role. And even then banes/crabs don't benefit from pvp's "elusivity". I have no idea why they were singled out, but it makes them much easier to hit than almost any other defense based set out there during pvp.
So, how do Crab fair in PvP? I've done a tiny bit of dueling, and once I start getting hits, they tend to crumple pretty fast as they get CDF, where as I have a decent amount of res/defence even in PvP, with a couple of PvP procs and stuff.
Just wondering if it is worth me trying my hand at some full on PvP on my crab.