Patron Powers theme for Soldier

[ajchvy]

I'm a bit sad that there are no options for powers from Recluse as I feel the 4 available powersets won't vibe with my Arachnos Soldier. Would I be nerfing myself too badly if I didn't take a Patron Power?

I'm heavily leaning into Crab with pets and group support, so my thought was to take Mace but only use the summon power.

[Maelwys]

Soul Mastery is mechanically very powerful for a Crabbermind and is my usual goto for any Soldier. Both Gloom and Dark Obliteration when procced give very nice DPA and inflict substantial -ToHit debuffs; and the Widow pet also deals quite high damage and possesses enough inherent defense to let your leadership buffs push them to the softcap (although they "prefer melee" and tend to guzzle endurance). You can also choose to pick up Darkest Night as an additional debuffing support power.

 

Mace Mastery is serviceable if you opt for Shatter Armor, but none of the prerequisites for it are particularly good. The Blaster pet is by far the best of the two "prefer ranged" pets and as such is a reasonable balance between damage output and survivability.

 

Mu Mastery boasts Electric Fences and Ball Lightning. Both are good DPA AOEs, although neither is quite as good as Dark Obliteration. The Striker pet can fly and is very well behaved, staying at range consistently... although they're about as damaging as a wet noodle and slotting a Power Transfer Proc into them unfortunately will NOT let them self heal.

 

Leviathan Mastery has Arctic Breath which can technically inflict -res on up to 10 targets... although as a 30 degree cone it's tricky to do that consistently. The other two Cone attacks aren't worth picking up, but Spirit Shark deals pretty decent single target damage as long as you're spamming enough other attacks to build up Hunger stacks. The Coralax pet prefers melee but lacks much in the way of additional survivability buffs... if you manage to keep it alive then it'll deal reasonable damage; albeit less than the Widow.

 

Edited November 4 by Maelwys

[Two Dollar Bill]

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.