Vermain

Not especially. The biggest problem for PBs has been the fact that their whole jack-of-all-trades schtick was superceded by a lot of the Villain classes, and, more recently, VEATs, but they never received anything to compensate for it. Musculature can somewhat compensate for the lowish damage Human-form Peacebringers can pump out, and Clarion Core will eventually be able to give you the mez resist you've always wanted, but you're still going to lag behind Scrappers/Brutes/Blasters, and your actual group support is still lackluster. You're pretty good at surviving (depending on team composition), but so are Brutes, and Brutes are far less reliant on perfect team composition to do good damage and survive well.

Basically:

-Seeds of Confusion is (for non-specialized circumstances) the hands-down best Blow Up The Group Of Dudes control power in the game. It's a huge cone Confuse that lasts a long time right out of the box. Due to how the AI works, most creatures will inherently bunch together to melee eachother, which lets you throw down Roots and then blow them up easily.

-Fire is the best AoE damage-dealing set that Dominators have. Combine bunching everything up into a tight ball with your massive AoE damage and things will die super fast. You also have the advantage of having an offensive secondary that comes without any controlling effects, meaning the Confuse effect will be even more pronounced.

/Psi also works great as a secondary, since Drain Psyche in a full group can knock your Regeneration up into the 160 HP/second zone, and you get some good AoE once you hit Tier 9.

That's not to say that Mind is bad, by any means. It's got a lot of great tricks and, as mentioned, is highly welcomed on the two major Strike Forces. It's lackluster on normal map-clearing teams because it doesn't have the cool up-every-fight AoE control powers of every other set. Most of your strength on map-clearing teams will come from being able to stack up Confuse on a boss really, really quickly.

Scorpion is probably better defensively, especially for someone without a lot of IOs. Tough + Weave + Maneuvers + Scorp Shield + Shadow Fall will get you to around 40% S/L and 20%~ resistance to everything except Fire and Cold. Softcapping after that would be easy and cheap.

Isn't that true with everyone's opinion of powers, though? Aside from the ones with blatantly inferior numbers, of course.

Don't forget Vengeance in there! Letting someone eat it every 120 seconds is actually a perfectly viable strategy if you have Vengeance, because Nerve Radial plus all of your passive +Defense will amount to something like +90% team positional Defense.

Their ST melee damage is pretty exceptional thanks to Follow Up/Aim stacking. I honestly think melee is superior for them, barring heavy resist situations.

The really great thing about Fortunatas is:

-Three AoE lockdowns for group combat (Aura of Confusion, Psychic Wail, and Total Domination).
-Group Defense buffing (about 34% with Mind Link, which is super good).
-Solid boosts to team damage and to-hit.
-Great single-target control with Dominate and Scramble Thoughts.
-Excellent single-target melee damage and good AoE damage.
-Stealthing around is super cool.

They're a Stalker/Dominator/Defender crossbreed. A stominender, if you will.

I'd be tempted to say that Elec/Elec/Elec's a bit better, if at least a close second. Short Circuit + Power Sink will shut down nearly everything with the right SOs, and anything left standing can be chain held with one of your three Mag 3s.

Finally, everyone who secretly wanted to take Flurry but could never quite slag a good power for it will be able to live our their fantasy.

I guess my big thing about it is that it's got essentially Shield levels of defense and resists, but instead of having absurd damage and a super-powered charge ability, it has a cloak and essentially unlimited endurance. Shields is undoubtedly easier to softcap, though, since you don't have to worry about dancing around with a whole handful of different sets to hit softcap on each Defense type. The cloak's got interesting tactical possibilities, but... I dunno. It seems like you give up far too much for what you get.

I should probably actually read the thread instead of repeatedly punching myself in the face.

EA's still pretty buggered. Pairing it with Dark Melee does help considerably, though, since the Life Drain heal shores up a lot of your otherwise unimpressive defense. I never really used it much, though. It always felt like Super Reflexes' wimpier brother.

I wouldn't really say that. EA's problem is that it has the rough protection of a fart cloud early on because you're a resist set with no heals and no HP buffs. Then you get Energize, and it's a little better... except it's on a 120 (technically 100 with Lightning Reflexes) second cooldown. You have to pray to God that every mob drops a Respite or you tend to drop like a rock.

The big change comes when you can get Power Sink and have Lightning Field running at the same time. Fully slotted with endurance mod enhancements, EA will zap 80% of everything's endurance bar, and Lightning Field can help to clean up the rest of it. This is some amazingly good soft control, and it only gets better once you can grab the Mu AoE immobilize. It might not have the pure "oomph" of Dark Regeneration or a softcapped Invulnerability, but it's still able to stand toe-to-toe in most situations. There's obviously some better sets, but I'd still place post-buff EA on reasonable standings with things like Dark Armor. It could stand a bit more of a buff (like, say, slashing Energize's cooldown and moving it to some time below level 26).

I liked my Dark/Sonic quite a bit for my Defender. Works well for soloing and you can crank your team's damage up to absurd levels.

I'd vote that stylistic reasons are more likely, given that Grounded has that same quirky ground requirement.