page 3 [FOCUSED FEEDBACK] Spines Adjustments

[The Curator]

Spines

• Barb Swipe

  • DoT duration increased from 2.1 to 3.1 (3 -> 4 total ticks)

• Lunge

  • On hit, gain +15% to Spine Poison for 15s (replaces self)

  • Spine Poison increases the odds of Spines DoT of continuing per tick. While active, this increases the odds from 80% to 95%

  • When Spine Poison is not active, a highlight ring will appear around Lunge

  • Cast time lowered from 1.63s to 1.33s

  • Recharge lowered from 6s to 5s

  • Lethal Damage Scale lowered from 1.32 to 1.08

  • End Cost lowered from 6.864 to 6.032

  • DoT duration increased from 3.1 to 6.1 (4 -> 7 total ticks)

• Impale

  • Now deals -100% Regen debuff for 15s (replaces self)

  • Cast time reduced from 2.43 to 2.23

  • Recharge increased from 8s to 10s

  • Endurance cost increased from 8.528 to 10.192

  • DoT now lasts for 15.1s (16 total ticks) at 80% chance

  • DoT starts at scale 0.2, and decays to scale 0.05 by the last tick.

  • Combined, this is a possible total of Scale 3.64 damage

• Spine Burst

  • Cast time lowered from 3s to 1.67s

  • Recharge lowered from 16s to 10s

  • Endurance cost lowered from 15.184 to 10.192

  • Lethal damage scale lowered from 0.9 to 0.6

  • DoT duration increased from 3.1s to 6.1s (4 -> 7 total ticks)

• Ripper

  • DoT duration increased from 4.1s to 7.1s (5 -> 8 total ticks)

• Throw Spines

  • DoT duration increased from 4.1s to 7.1s (5 -> 8 total ticks)

[Sovera]

Ran several tests on Spines and it looks really nice.

 

In terms of pylons it's down to around 2:10 (Spines/Stone Brute, with a -res proc in Ripper) over multiple tests though I will once again point out that the DoT extra ticks did not budge that time which seems odd as some attacks like Ripper had a 268% DoT damage increase.

 

* Leveling with a fast animating PbAoE that comes up in 5-6 seconds even at level two, with SOs, feels *great*. I can only wish every set had this option and cones be abandoned.

* The Ripper improvements allow to use it for ST and AoE allowing me to skimp on Throw Spines. Yes, blasphemy, I know, but Stone is power hungry and with Spine Burst recharging in 3 seconds and Ripper hitting near, or slightly more, than Total Focus but in a 90% AoE arc (once the lenghty DoTs tick down) means Ripper + Spine Burst + Impale (with the occasional Lunge for extra poison) can be chained, and then double damage auras.

* Not ran myself, so a grain of salt, but a friend tried a couple iterations of Brute Spines (with Sonic Armor and Fire Armor) and says it felt slower than just Fire Melee. Probably due to lethal and toxic being more resisted in the end game.

* The 15% Poison from Lunge is poison chance, not poison damage. It makes Spines' DoTs go from 80% chance where there is a 20% change the DoT is interrupted if it fails once, to 95% chance of ticking to the end.

 

 

The build I was using. Remember Mids hasn't been updated. With the improvements to Brutes' defensive values it is nearly at 45% without Weave. Could be minimally tweaked further for the last 1%-ish but I'd want an updated Mids to do those granular tweaks.
 

Brute (Spines - Stone Armor).mbd

 

Edited December 6 by Sovera

[Neiska]

Happy to see Spines get some attention. Thematically and mechanically always loved the set, even if it was one of the lowest performing ones. Also happy to see them lean more into the Dot aspect of it, which kind of makes it unique among the melee sets.

[The Trouble]

On 12/5/2025 at 2:33 PM, The Curator said:

Spine Burst

• Cast time lowered from 3s to 1.67s

This is all I've ever really wanted, but all the other adjustments came anyway!

 

No leveling, instead played on a level 50 Spines/Stone Brute I transferred to test. Spines feels less plodding now, especially when the fight has thinned out to just bosses.  Boss fights used to feel like playing a Tanker with under-slotted attacks, but on test are slow-and-steady without being frustratingly slow.  The snappier cast times makes the set feel more flowing. 

 

Lunge is really worth having now?  What a time to be alive!

 

I wish I had more actionable feedback, but I can see these changes getting Spines more love from the community.

[Thraxen]

Fantastic 

[ScarySai]

Speed up impale's cast time to be under 2s and this is mostly perfect.

[Sovera]

Just now, ScarySai said:

Speed up impale's cast time to be under 2s and this is mostly perfect.

 

Greedy!

(But I like the way you think)

[ScarySai]

35 minutes ago, Sovera said:

 

Greedy!

(But I like the way you think)

I mean it takes 16 seconds and some luck to deliver the full damage payload, plus ripper is in the attack chain on top of that. I don't think making impale not feel like crap is too big of an ask.

[bAss_ackwards]

36 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

I mean it takes 16 seconds and some luck to deliver the full damage payload, plus ripper is in the attack chain on top of that. I don't think making impale not feel like crap is too big of an ask.

 

For reals. I'm too spoiled by Claws > Focus. 😩

[Sovera]

Even 5 second DoTs are too long for CoH, less alone 16. To top it the extra DoT times showed no improvements on my multiple pylon times. I'm not sure why we get saddled with lengthy DoTs but I do know it's a way of giving power but not too much.

 

I think that, baseline, if mobs die fast then what are we complaining, and if they survive longer then they take the damage from the full DoT. But it's going to be a set that Mids will inflate a lot.

 

That said 2:10 for a Brute is fine for me on a pylon and the AoE *seems* like it will be good. Unlike something like Fire Breath which is poor AoE used because nothing else is available (why 5 targets!?), Ripper will double for AoE and ST which is great.

[VPrime]

Is there a way to turn off the highlight ring around Lunge? 

 

If not, please give the option to do so.

 

[Sovera]

8 hours ago, VPrime said:

Is there a way to turn off the highlight ring around Lunge? 

 

If not, please give the option to do so.

 

 

The highlight ring tells you that the chance for poison buff has expired. It will not be visible if you're using Lunge on the regular.

[VPrime]

1 hour ago, Sovera said:

 

The highlight ring tells you that the chance for poison buff has expired. It will not be visible if you're using Lunge on the regular.

 

Right. So it's constantly visible when out of combat.

 

We get a buff icon by the health bar. No need for forced redundancy.

 

Just want an option to turn off the highlight ring in the power tray.

[PyroBeetle]

Personally I enjoy the highlight rings notifying me of when a powers secondary effect is available, it doesn't make a huge difference, but it does make a difference.

 

While there may not be an option to remove rings around powers, and spines is far from the only power to get them, you can turn off the UI when not in combat if the pink ring bothers you that much.

 

I have been really playing around with this, and although Impale's cast tine is still more than 2 seconds it was reduced. As far as the DoT damage being extended I tend to view it as being Hancock crashing through a building then slow walking away while everything crumbles behind him. It could also give me time to monologue about how pathetic and weak the heroes are while waiting for them to die. The whole set just puts out swarms of tiny orange numbers, and I rather like it.

 

Functionally, I have been trying to level a toon organically the same way I would in live, and Spine Burst feels greatly contributory and useful from the second it is selected as opposed to what it was previously, when it was soooo slow to fire and soooo slow to recharge that I often just skipped it as not being worth the pick.

 

Impale is still a little janky to use, but it is offset by how long its damage extends over time. This evening I will test the changes at a mid level around 30 when I normally first start slotting IO sets and see how it feels.

 

Please note that I never AFK farmed and never will, and even when I farmed I used Rad/Fire (haven't farmed since the double inf nerf) so I think about spines in how it plays in normal play, and these changes help smooth things out a lot.

[VPrime]

2 minutes ago, PyroBeetle said:

Personally I enjoy the highlight rings notifying me of when a powers secondary effect is available, it doesn't make a huge difference, but it does make a difference.

 

While there may not be an option to remove rings around powers, and spines is far from the only power to get them, you can turn off the UI when not in combat if the pink ring bothers you that much.

 

I'm not asking them to remove the feature, since I know people (like yourself) enjoy the feature.

 

I'm simply asking for an option to turn off that single (highlight ring) feature.

[drbuzzard]

OK, so I tried out the equivalent of a live character on test. This is a regen/spines tanker. Did my usual drive along the walls of Cimerora killing off romans. The set felt more quick which is a definite change for the better. I have a few spines characters and to be quite honest I don't play them much because the set just feels slow and really doesn't seem to kill all that fast. This set of changes does seem to improve those things in a notable fashion. I would probably advocate for a drop in lunge animation speed if possible, but that's about the only change I could come up with. 

[Psi-bolt]

On 12/8/2025 at 4:32 PM, ScarySai said:

Speed up impale's cast time to be under 2s and this is mostly perfect.

 

I have to say that after playing today on a Spines/Invul, this is the only thing I would really want.   Really I would just love Focus's cast time, but that's actually greedy. 

[Sovera]

3 hours ago, Psi-bolt said:

 

I have to say that after playing today on a Spines/Invul, this is the only thing I would really want.   Really I would just love Focus's cast time, but that's actually greedy. 

 

Don't let your dreams stay dreams. Make a petition and I will sign it.

 

It might, possibly, maybe, even happen, though the power would lose something in exchange. But I'd take it.

[Grimm2]

Thorns Impale is 1.43. And could use these Spines buffs. Just sayin'.

[ScarySai]

It's just the fact that you have two attacks over 2s in your main st chain that's a bit obnoxious.

[Troo]

20 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

It's just the fact that you have two attacks over 2s in your main st chain that's a bit obnoxious.

 

Spins shouldn't even have an attack chain. Enemies should just fall down looking like pin cushions.

 

The set has good feel, seems quicker even if damage is spread over time.

 

 

How cool would a new Poison/Toxic powerset be? Where poisons increase the odds of DoT of continuing per tick and actively works against an enemy's regen?!

 

Edited Thursday at 07:30 AM by Troo

[Riverdusk]

Impale just a little faster would be nice.

 

Other than that the main issue I see is just that there is nothing left to skip (at least on brute version, scrappers can skip confront as always).  Good problem to have I guess!

[Zahnee]

I want to love Spines but it’s not quite there yet for me. Rolled a Spines/Stone Brute with 2 different builds, one with Spine Burst and no epic AoE and another with Fire Ball and no Spine Burst. 
 

Spine Burst is very underwhelming on Brute. The fast animation is a welcome change but the reduced damage which coincides with the faster recharge speed kills it for me. I would have loved for Spines to have better internal AoE and not feel like I have to dip into epic for it, but a super fast recharging Spine Burst doesn’t carry the weight to convince me to take it. It’s very spammy when I think it should be blammy.
 

I can get over that, it’s easy enough to replace Spine Burst with Fire Ball or Dark Oblit, but it’s not very easy to deal with the animation time of Impale. For reference, Ripper + Impale’s cast time is longer than Headsplitter + Disembowel’s. I get that Quills is technically providing damage during these animations but it’s still a buzzkill and keeping me from actually playing the set. Trivial, I know, but I think a the general consensus is that Impale’s animation time is far too long. 

[Hjarki]

I tend to agree with the 'make it faster' notion. Dropping Impale down to Lunge's activation time and reducing the overall damage scale by a proportionate amount would make the set flow a lot more smoothly. However, because activation time is tied to animation, it's often difficult to change the activation time of powers - you have to subtract animation frames (which may make the power look strange).

[Midnight Mystique]

6 hours ago, Hjarki said:

I tend to agree with the 'make it faster' notion. Dropping Impale down to Lunge's activation time and reducing the overall damage scale by a proportionate amount would make the set flow a lot more smoothly. However, because activation time is tied to animation, it's often difficult to change the activation time of powers - you have to subtract animation frames (which may make the power look strange).

Check out impale in dominators thorny assault - it's pretty much the same power with a much faster activation (1.584s w/arcanatime), a slightly longer recharge (10s vs 8s) and extra range. Just pull the animation from that power replace the melee AT version with that - bingo, faster impale without playing around with animation frames in the current animation. 

 

EDIT: I just jumped into character creator to take a look at both attacks (spines impale and thorny assaults impale) and in the creator the animations for both powers looks almost exactly the same, so I have no idea why spines impale take 1.1 seconds more to cast than the one in thorny assault - the only thing I can think is spines has a huge amount of 'hang time' after the power fires off, which means when it was adapted to thorny assault someone ALREADY fixed the animation. I see no reason NOT to copy the thorny assault version over to spines. 

Edited Friday at 03:29 AM by Midnight Mystique