Two Dollar Bill

The Prismatic Aether Disguise just overwrites your whole costume, so you could make your character look just like a standard Bane Spider NPC, for example.

My current Crab build doesn't have a patron pool. He's mostly focused on being durable, which the patron pools don't particularly help with. Though, I have used Mace Mastery in the past, and gotten some use out of Shatter Armor and Summon Blaster.

I play a support-oriented "squad leader" sort of Crab, buffing the team with Leadership toggles, debuffing and knocking down whole rooms of enemies, while engaging in both ranged and melee combat. His DPS is only remarkable if he's delivering AoE damage to a crowd, he slows down noticeably if he needs to fight one boss. Guns are fine if you are little and puny and have just four limbs, but Crab Spiders have a unique combat style in which their cybernetic limbs can blast targets at long range and then lash out to shred them in melee. A perfectly over-the-top combat style for a superhero setting! Recent animation changes allow you to make Soldier attacks using Crab animations.

I think they're similar enough that you could chose based on theme/concept and be just fine. In terms of how they actually play, the main difference for me is range. Thermal can do everything except Power of the Phoenix from long range. You can hide in the back or fly overhead and still heal and buff. Pain has (de)buffs that are PBAoE and if you want to get your money's worth out of them you need to jump in to the combat for best coverage. If you're not willing to dive in to a big group of foes a second after the Tanker goes in, you'll never get maximum effect from Anguishing Cry.

I guess my question would be, what is your attack chain? You have a bunch of big area attacks, though hold, confuse and disorient don't stack in a useful way. You've got some PBAoE and Kick slotted as an attack (complete with a proc) and your sniper attack. I think a more focused set of attacks that synergize well with your Rad Defender debuffs might be more effective. Maybe a decent single-target attack loaded with some procs to deal with bosses when there's no-longer a crowd of chaff for the AoEs.

I feel like it's spending resources on frivolous things it doesn't need and neglecting the essentials. - I do prefer to slot Blind as a hold and not as a proc dispenser, but right now with just two enhancements, it isn't even a good hold. Blind is your primary hard control power. It also stacks with Flash. Slot that sucker like you mean it, so it's fast and reliable. - Deceive is amazing. I love to sneak a bit ahead of the team and confuse all the enemies that drain endurance, cast buffs or summon pets. In a hard fight, it allows you to stay hidden while healing, buffing AND doing crowd control with zero aggro. - Phantom Army is great of course, but the best way to make it recharge faster is to slot it for recharge. Right now it's not even triggering Enhancement Diversification. Give it a +Recharge IO. - Regeneration Aura is basically a junk power. Although it was once common for teams to pause for a group hug to get buffs, it's very difficult to get teams to sit still for it these days. The only character who will regularly be benefiting from Regeneration Aura is you, and you don't need it. Put those extra slots in Blind. - Adrenalin Boost is great for that teammate who really needs a respec because his endurance bar is always empty. It's not needed as a heal and doesn't need to be 5-slotted with Panacea. Again, I would put the slots into powers that you will really be using all the time. - Empaths can get away with having horrible endurance efficiency because they have Recovery Aura, so maybe it won't be a problem, but if it is... Superior Invisibility and Mystic Flight are horrible endurance hogs, worse than Leadership toggles. You can greatly reduce their endurance costs and get some set bonuses with an extra slot or two.

Back on Justice my primary was Ill/Emp, and he was amazing. Today the game is so easy that you can play a whole task force without anyone needing a heal, and nobody even considers the value of crowd control. Your biggest foe is boredom since only a small fraction of your powers get used. I would look in to the Sorcery Pool because it gives you some completely new support tools to play with, like Spirit Ward and Enflame, and you can include Arcane Bolt into your attack chain, because Spectral Wounds and Blind is not exactly a chain. Recharge is definitely the most important thing to slot for, and that does mean you'll want ridiculously expensive purple sets, though you can certainly get zero-downtime Phantom Army without going all purple. If you want a secondary goal for IO set bonuses, consider some AoE defense. You can take a lot of damage just by standing next to the blaster who suddenly gets aggro. If you want your super support character to feel useful, consider exemplaring with lowbie groups that don't have all their IO sets. Build your character to exemplar well, not just to function properly at 50+1.

I've never liked switching to a gun to fire a grenade, and I have been pondering new buillds for my Banes to take advantage of the animation changes. I think this build looks interesting, but one of the things I like about Banes is their ability to combine ranged and melee attacks into a single fighting style. If the mace is just a funny-looking grenade launcher and I can't hit people with it, I might as well roll a Sentinel.

- You have gone well over soft-cap on some of your defenses. Due to how the game calculates To-Hit chances, your maximum useful Defense value is 45%. Having more than 45% could still help if you get debuffed or if you're doing incarnate content and your slacker teammates aren't buffing you with their own Leadership powers, but for most purposes 45% is all you need. - It should be possible to soft-cap your Ranged and AoE Defense without even taking the Fighting pool, just by using your +Defense Crab powers and IO set bonuses. - Enhancement Diversification is a system that gives you diminishing returns when you heavily enhance one specific quality of a power. For example, the way you have Stamina slotted with three Endurance Modification IOs, you are getting a 99% bonus, but you'd still be getting 83% with just two of those IOs. Aim and Hasten work the same. - Tactical Training: Leadership is a great power which will make your pets (which are lower level than you and less accurate) hit more, and you can slot it with a full set of Gaussian's Sunchronized Fire Control to get +2.5% Defense on all your positionals. Very few IO sets can contribute 7.5% to your build's defenses. - Frag Grenade is an AoE knockback that will force your pets and teammates to chase your victims around. Be a good teammate and give it a Knockback-to-Knockdown enhancement. - My Crab has 8 points of knockback protection and he still gets tossed sometimes. (Carnie Phantasms, for example.) It's easy to get from Blessing of the Zephyr, but only if you embrace one of the best features of City of Heroes... movement powers! Steadfast Protection is also an easy way to get some since you are already slotting the +Defense unique.

There are some expensive uniques in here that you can get with merits. I included the ATO sets, though you can get by without them. +Recharge is about what you'd expect with no purple sets. It has soft-capped Ranged and AoE Defense, the important ranged attacks, and your pets will enjoy as many buffs a Humanly possible to try to keep them alive and dealing damage. I suspect most people would replace replace the Blood Mandate in Call Reinforcements and Summon Blaster with a recharge-intensive set, but I think that having your own defenses soft-capped is worth sacrificing some uptime for your pets.

My first character on Homecoming was a team-friendly Plant/Nature Controller. I was flat broke and wanted to get as much +Recharge and +Max Endurance as I could get on a budget, and this is the build I came up with. I generally stand behind the melee characters so I can hit them all with Regrowth, and I can hit the whole fight with Seeds of Confusion if needed. Although I have a macro encouraging people to gather for buffs, many people ignore it, so I usually wait for them to bunch up to finish off the last few bosses in a spawn, then jump in and fire off Wild Growth, Wild Bastion and Overgrowth before they can run off. Despite having Tough, Weave, and Mind Over Body, he's really not very tough and relies on crowd control and hanging back from the fight to avoid getting smacked.

What's the story with Infiltration, Stealth and Grant Invisibility? If the movement benefits of Infiltration are not too critical, I think I'd skip the Concealment pool entirely, put the Stealth IO in Sprint, and take Maneuvers, which will help you hit all your soft caps and give your pets and teammates defense as well. You've got three Impervium Armor IOs for Psionic Resistance, and a couple more that give you a 2.5% recovery bonus but basically zero Damage Resistance due to Enhancement Diversification. If you took those five IOs and used them to 6-slot TT: Leadership with Gaussian's Synchronized Fire Control, you'd gain 2.5% to every positional defense along with assorted other bonuses and better accuracy for your pets. Is Psionic Resistance important? Sometimes, but Defense is more useful. You're going to get merits as you advance so I'd strongly consider assembling a set of Superior Spider's Bite. It gives you 3.6% Max End, which is like a mini accolade (the Atlas Medalion is 5% Max End) and the 5% Melee Defense isn't bad either. I like the new Warp IO set for Teleport which gives you a range bonus to all your powers and a 3% Endurance discount. Anything that improves range is especially good with Suppression. If endurance is a big problem, you might consider taking four slots of Impervium Armor in Fortification and/or Tough since the 2.25% Max End is the real prize of that set. You could also slot the Panacea +Hit Points/Endurance unique in Health. And put some more slots in Venom Grenade! Where would these extra slots come from? CT: Defensive, TT: Maneuvers and Weave are all over-enhanced to gain tiny amounts of Defense due to ED. You could recover four of those while losing basically no defense. TT: Maneuvers and Weave can be 3-slotted with LotG and CT: Defensive could go down to 2 slots, especially if your IOs were set to level 50. I'm also not sure you're getting good value from 4-slotting Stamina. If you intend to run Infiltration with no end cost reduction, that's a big drain. I think I'd lose the run speed from Stamina to make Infiltration less of an endurance hog and you'll be more efficient overall.

When my Crab was new and on a budget I did have a build that used pets. It was pretty similar to this. I didn't have any purple sets at the time, but I did feel that a few uniques were worth the merits. This build has soft-capped Ranged Defense, lots of ranged attacks, and the spider pets that have the sense to fight from range.

Well, you can make characters that are fun to play steamrolling through speed runs.... Alternately, there is some challenging content out there if you look for it. Run some Dr. Aeon Strike Forces with ridiculous challenge settings. Try some "801 missions" at Architech Entertainment. Exemplar with some lowbies. If doing story arcs in Talos Island is more fun than speed-running 54 ITFs, then by all means exemplar.

Definitely a different take on the normally Positional-Defense-oriented Crab Spider, though I would trade in many of these powers for Frag Grenade! If you like min/maxing for small bonuses, something you could do to make your endurance management a bit smoother would be to look at extreme enhancement bonuses that are being wasted by Enhancement Diversification, and turn some of the over-slotting into end cost reduction. For example, the Immobilize bonus of Web Envelope is far past the point where it's economical to boost it any more. If you traded in the Immobilize IO for the Immobilize/Endurance one, it would have no meaningful effect on the immobilize value but you'd get a lot of your endurance back. Likewise, Weave has a Defense/Recharge IO which provides virtually no defense bonus due to ED. If you swapped it for the Endurance/Recharge IO, you'd still be soft-capped to melee, but more fuel efficient. The recharge is worthless either way, but end cost reduction can still be meaningfully enhanced. TT:Maneuvers is in the same boat. You could improve its endurance cost without losing soft cap.