Adeon Hawkwood

Another possible theory would be people redoing their I19 respecs. A lot of builds I saw on the forums people seemed to be adding Leadership and/or Fighting in place of Fitness. Those are all high endurance cost toggles so it could be people did a respec to include them and are now changing their build because they are having endurance problems.

Ok, the first, and most important, thing to realize about Defenders is that they do NOT play the same way as healers in other MMOs. There are two major differences. The first is that a Defender is expected to take and use their attack powers including slotting them for damage. Yes, Defenders do less damage than other ATs but in a team situation a Defender who contributes damage and support is more useful than a Defender who just supports.

The second difference is that the healing powers in Empathy are not the most important powers in the set. They are very useful, especially before you reach the late 20s but as you get to higher levels you'll notice that people need less healing (at least on good teams) and the buffs that Empathy provides are important to achieving that.

At level 12 you'll get access to a power called Fortitude, personally I would say this is the most important power in an Empath's arsenal. It provides a very strong offensive and defensive buff to a teammate has a base recharge of 60 seconds and a duration of 120 seconds. So you can keep it constantly on two people with no slotting and with good slotting can potentially keep it on 4 at a time.

Regarding Dark Blast, the important powers to pick up are (IMHO) Dark Blast, Gloom, Dark Pit, Tenebrous Tentacles and Nightfall. I'd skip Moonbeam (I find the activation time on snipes makes them inefficient to use) and Torrent (the damage is sub-par and while knockback is sometimes handy it's not really critical). Life Drain is useful if you solo a lot although less important on a team and Blackstar is a personal choice (it's a nice power, some people don't mind the crash and some people hate it).

Dark Pit, Tenebrous Tentacles and Nightfall are your primary team support powers in Dark Blast. Dark Pit will stun most of the minions in the spawn which is a good way to reduce the amount of damage the team takes. Tenebrous Tentacles and Nightfall are primarily damage powers but the immobilize form TT and the to hit debuff both provide will also help reduce the damage the team takes. The only advice I'd give regarding TT is try to let the enemies bunch up a bit around the melee guys (if any) on the team before using it otherwise you're making things harder for them.

Before I forget, one pool that is worth picking up for everyone (but especially Defenders) is Leadership. It provides a set of 3 toggle powers that buff your entire team (including yourself). The numbers aren't huge but they are stackable and they do make a difference. The only thing is they are endurance hogs so be a bit cautious taking them until you are comfortable managing your endurance. My general recommendation for order would be Assault first, then Tactics and finally Maneuvers (if you feel comfortable with all three running).

Other than that welcome to the game.

Short answer, AR/Traps (or a Traps/AR Defender) will probably be the closest to what you seem to want. However, your preferred difficulty is not where AR shines. AR is very much an AOE damage dealer, and pays for it with weaker single target damage. Ignite is a good way to up your single target damage but the need to immobilize (or at least heavily slow) the target beforehand means it's slow to bring out the high damage so you tend to only use it against bosses. With my AR characters I generally run at +0 or +1 and crank up the pawn sizes to get more targets for my AoEs.

Technically Devices does provide you with good ability to keep out of melee but in practice taking Cold Manipulation and the Leadership pool is probably a better option.

From a min/max point of view Devices is pretty weak. If you have the patience to stack Trip Mines it can be very effective solo but that's about it. Most of the time people play Devices because they like the concept and with Traps being available to Defenders and the ability to take a Corruptor/Mastermind Blueside there's less reason to take it for concept either.

Warshades do benefit from significant recharge because it allows them to get perma-eclipse and get mire up more often (as well as allowing them to spam their AoEs more). You can get a build that's almost as good without purples but they do help.

Warshades also benefit in that unlike a lot of characters they can easily slot 5 purple sets in powers that are themselves very good so the extra enhancement values help while a lot of other characters would end up putting one or more purple sets in powers they they don't really use much.