I guess rad, dark, TA and storm are less team-dependent than the others.
CoX 50s: <ill/rad> <ice/ice> <fire/kin> <grav/sonic> <ice/storm> <earth/kin> <kin/elec> <cold/psy> <thugs/dark> <fire/dark> <dark/elec> <night widow> <EM/ninj> <mind/icy>
I have a bit of experience with defenders 
I would say bubbles and empathy are useful for solo, they would make you hard to kill (heal and recovery aura's) or just provide good escape's (pff and dispersion field)
However for faster solo kinetics cant be underestimated however it can be a very involved fast action set to play.
Rad and dark offer alot throu their respective debuffs and are, in my opinion, slightly less involved to play you can often stick your debuff on a target stick your heal on auto and afk safely for a few minutes.
Storm can also be fun
Trick arrow I havent encountered much so I cant offer much advice.
Sonic I havent much used but seems to combine some of the aspects of radiation/dark (the resistance debuff) the "protection" from ff (the castable protection I am aware its +res not +def) the clearmind/increase density from empathy/kinetics in the form of clarity, but lacks the things that, in my mind, make all these respective sets stand out (pff, RI/LR, transfusion/transference e.t.c)
Ive probably missed a couple out, and thats just the primaries, the choice of which should compliment your secondary (for example ff/energy compliments nicely with knock backs, rad/dark and dark/dark work nicely with the aoe debuffs and the cone attacks of /dark e.t.c, kinetics/rad the -def of the rad secondary working nicely with kinetics need to hit to be effective.)
There are a lot of good solo defender builds, it just depends if you want to take it fast and hectic (kinetics) slow and steady (emp/ff) or somewhere inbetween (dark/rad e.t.c)
Im sure lots of people here will have opinions.
I'm soloing a forcefield/dark at the moment and finding it pretty good so far at lvl 18 (although I did hit a hump between lvl 12 and 14 where I was close to giving up and waiting for the freespec to change to a team build). Dark gets a snipe at lvl 4 and force bolt is available at lvl 2 with an almost guaranteed knockback so it's very easy to fit a snipe into your attack chain in a one on one situation. Picking up Dark Blast and Personal Forcefield at lvl 1, Gloom at lvl 2, Moonbeam at lvl 4 and Force Bolt at lvl 6 you have a reasonably good attack chain, a crowd control power and the ability to escape near death by turtling up in PFF. Granted, you're not a lot of a good to a team but if you're going to try soloing a defender you may as well commit yourself to the endeavour 
Edit To make a hybrid team/solo build you could pick up Deflection Shield at 8, travel pre-requisite at 10, Dispersion Bubble at 12, travel power at 14 and Insulation Shield at 16. You'd be able to solo and contribute pretty well in a team too that way.
Defiant 50�s: Generalissimo, Righteous Bob, Splortch, Brutus Cayuga
Union 50's: Chimera Obscura, Diet Anthracite, Grim Proctologist, Puny Little Minion, Raging Bitumen
In Soviet Russia, mission farm you!
Storm is pretty good for soloing - as others have mentioned.
The knockback from gale/hurricane/tornado just really gives you that extra bit of breathing space.
And it has lovely wow factor powers
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Storm is pretty good for soloing - as others have mentioned.
The knockback from gale/hurricane/tornado just really gives you that extra bit of breathing space.
And it has lovely wow factor powers
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Storm / Dark is a pretty nice combo too. Snow Storm, Tentacles, Freezing Rain & Nightfall. Nice
My defender is Dark/Dark and she plays more like a blaster than some of the blasters I know, (blappers eh? why don't they just role a scrapper and have done with it?) With all her -Acc debuffs and her lvl 4 snipe power she has a fairly easy time soloing, as long as a little care is taken due to her reduced damage compared to a blaster.
Also the animations of the powers themselves are rather nice, what with all the dark tendrils and such spreading down the arms then flying into the face of an enemy, quality stuff if you ask me.
Personally, I'm dead lazy so anything that has to keep recasting debuffs on -every- -single- -mob- gets old very, very quickly solo.
Kinetics, Storm, Dark, TA and *maybe* bubbles (Sonic or FF, although they have no damage augmentation which make soloing happen faster) would be my choices.
DON'T eat muffins while I'm developing you.
Pants! Turkey Magnates! A man in a box! Rogue AI! Come one, come all, to arc ID 10107 - It's [i]'Not as long as some other arcs'[/i]!
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Personally, I'm dead lazy so anything that has to keep recasting debuffs on -every- -single- -mob- gets old very, very quickly solo.
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surely there is an element of casting powers (not necessarily debuffs) on every single mob before a defender can effectivly solo??
Storm: snow storm, freezing rain, fluffy cloud, attack!
Kinetics: siphon power, siphon speed, fulcrum, attack!
Trick Arrow: Glue, Oil, Gas, attack!
Dark: Tarpit, Darkest night, attack!
Or maybe that's just how I solo
Take it from someone who played 38 lvls of FF/Dark (before deleting) that casting a debuff on a mob every fight is NOTHING compared to the soul-destroying boredom of casting 2 bubbles on 7 teammates every 4 minutes.
As for solo defenders, i'd say kin/rad or rad/dark (did a build for a friend and it looks like a VERY strong combo....debuffs and immobs, nice), personally i've played rad/rad and dark/dark, as i'm a fan of matching sets for concept reasons
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
~Edna St. Vincent Millay
Heh, with kinetics, the buffs stay up when the minion drops! Woohoo!
DON'T eat muffins while I'm developing you.
Pants! Turkey Magnates! A man in a box! Rogue AI! Come one, come all, to arc ID 10107 - It's [i]'Not as long as some other arcs'[/i]!
[ QUOTE ]
Heh, with kinetics, the buffs stay up when the minion drops! Woohoo!
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ah true...
Unless you cast fulcrum as the bad guy drops and then you don't get any buffage at all... so sad 
My suggestion is Dark/Sonic for a solo defender. I have a Sonic/Dark Corruptor and he is great and I kind of wish that I made him a defender. Although technically he would be an offender as he uses his powers mainly to defeat rather than to defender.
The reasons...
a) Dark/ has Darkest Night, a toggle debuff. This is -DAM and -ACC so effectively is a kind of armour.
b) Dark/ has a debuffing and strong AoE heal, it provides -DAM and -ACC on the target and heals all around you.
c) Dark has Tar Pit, a great -RES power ( ~40% ) that is permable with 3 recharges. -RES powers improve the performance of -DAM debuffs and make you defeat things faster ( essential for a solo defender ).
d) Dark has Fearsome Stare, a wide Cone , permable Fear attack that basically takes everything out of the fight. Because it is a clicky, it doesn't matter if you get stunned/held etc.
e) Sonic has -res on every attack. These have approximately the same duration as the recharge of the attack for single target attacks, meaning you can stack a 60% ( * 1.6 damage ) just from using all your single target attacks, if you use Howl too you can get 80% some of the time ( about 60-70% of the time ). This -RES also improves -DAM.
f) Dark has a single target hold.
g) Dark has a stealth toggle.
h) The combination of a) and g) with c) allows you to do incredibly impressive corner pulls into a tar pit, allowing you to hit many multiple enemies with Fearsome Stare and Howl.
h) All these things work just as well on a team as solo.
@Unthing ... Mostly on Union.
Dark Miasma for the reasons unthing said. Secondary is arguable.
Dark/rad is a great offender in PvE because of the number of AoEs that rad blast has, meshed in with tar patch.
pah, emp/psy all the way!!! 
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pah, emp/psy all the way!!!
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totally what i was going to say!
Emp/psi FTW!!!
just started a kin/dark wich seems good cant say how far it will go as i have a controller embedded in must level mode atm
I vote Trick Arrow. It's in my opinion the best debuff primary, since that's all it really has. Good -res from disruption and acid arrows with good crowd control in oil slick and glue arrow. Net and ice arrows are sometimes useful for soloing to isolate an enemy but those first four I listed are where it's at. Being archery secondary is great because you can feel the love for blazing arrow.
For a Solo Defender I recommend a Kinetic. Yes, you have some single target buffs that are useless solo, but you have Transference (never ending supply of endurance and decent single target "control" with the end drain) and Fulcrum Shift/ Siphon Power to boost your hitting power to a greater extent than any other Defender. Add to that stacked Siphon Speed and a few decent blasts and you have the ultimate solo Offender.
Dedicated debuffing sets such as Radiation, Dark, Storm, are also effective, but have much more downtime than Kinetics due to the problem of running toggles and Blasting.
Rad / Psi!
50s
controllers: Ill rad , grav rad, fire kin, ice kin
blaster: ice em
scrapper: spines sr
Currently messing with a Kin/PSI to ultimately get into PvP.
1. Kinetics primary allows me to pick more powers from my Secondary as I am concentrating on self-buffing.
2. Nice secondary effects from PSI like -Recharge and Immobilizes stack well with;
3. Siphon Speed for increased attack rate and -Recharge and -Speed on foes.
Just pick a concept you like and go for it. Don't worry about being uber. All the powersets are good fun!
Here's a crazy tank-mage idea, and I can vouch first hand that it works: Force-Field + Combat Jumping + Maneuvers. Once you're on SOs, you get hit a _lot_ less often than any other kind of defenders, and it'll get a lot better yet in I7. You can replace CJ with Hover if you want to, but beware that it'll need 6 slots instead of 3 to really be useful in combat, _and_ uses more endurance.
It also gives you limited mez protection. It neatly makes you a _lot_ less "squishy", though you're no tanker.
Now let's apply some more lateral thinking. Being hard to hit has an extra advantage: you can use your snipe as a regular attack. Both Psy and Dark get a snipe attack at level 4. So you can get a solid 3-attack chain early with either, although until the mid-20s you'll still get interrupted often enough. (Though you can still use the snipe to open a fight.)
Dark has the extra advantage of lowering enemy accuracy, i.e., it makes you even harder to hit. Psy, on the other hand, is resisted or defended against by slightly less enemies. Though some do. E.g., by the time you start meeting Zenith robots, those resist about 50% of each psy attack. Your choice.
At this point you've used two pools, though one is a travel pool, so it's not entirely wasted.
You'll also want Fitness as your third pool if you want to solo lots. (And you will solo lots. More later.) Vigilance is great in a large group, but the effect seems to range between a lot less and none at all when soloing.
Which leaves you with one more pool choice. On one hand, you can take Medicine, which really helps by the time you can heal yourself with it. It will make you a lot more popular at parties too. Or you can go really crazy about the tank-mage idea and get Tough and Weave. (But at that point, seriously, make sure you have Stamina first.)
The beauty of it is that when soloing you don't have to do anything special, really. No debuffs to cast, no enemies running far from the anchor (or the anchor running away through 3 other groups!), etc. Turn your shields on and start blasting with impunity.
The downsides are two fold:
1. Be sure that's what you want to do in a group. As was said, you might have to cast 2 shields on 7 team members regularly. And better not count on waiting before they expire to re-cast the shields, because it goes downhill fast if everyone gets unshielded in a major battle. So in a group you'll spend most of your time re-casting shields ad nauseam.
If you also took Medicine, also be prepared to heal people lots. (Yeah, a lot of people love to claim that shields make everyone completely unhittable, but in practice enough still gets through. So if you can tollerate doing that job too, it can cut down on the downtime a lot and even keep the mandatory berserk blapper alive through a long fight.)
2. Be prepared to actually need to solo lots, as a lot of people just can't get out of the "ur not a healer!!!" mentality. I'd love to be able to say that it's just in the 20s, when people still think they're in the Hollows on Trainings, but in practice it'll continue all the way to level 50. In fact, far from going down in the 20's, you might find that the problems getting a group as a non-empath actually peaks somewhere in the 30's.
To their defense, though, I must also say that it's easy to generalize when playing a non-defender. A lot of non-empaths out there do an awful job (e.g., grouping with a FF and only getting bubbled once per floor, maybe even once per mission, seems to be more of a norm than an exception) and a lot outright lie to the group too. After a couple of really bad experiences, I can easily see someone falling back to what does work, even if not optimally.
Then again, there are plenty of badly played Empaths too.
Speaking as someone who deleted a lvl 38 FF/dark i would tell you 3 things;
1) They are very very very dull to play
2) You get no +damage or -res powers, so you'll never be an offender, and
3) They used to work very well back before the GDN and i5/ED, but were hit very hard after
It's a nice idea and it did used to work that way, but sadly not anymore. The only worse solo/offender set i can think of is empathy, and no-one rolls an empath to solo
I would still say anything rad/ or dark/ or /kin (for that living on the edge between uber and ultra-squishy feeling ) would be your best bet.
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
~Edna St. Vincent Millay
It wasn't supposed to be an Offender, it was supposed to be, basically, a ranged light tank that still functions as a _Defender_ in a group. There's a difference there. The primary focus is still doing a FF's job in a group.
Hellowie!
I had a level 30 Storm Summoning - Psychic Blast Defender, and I almost completely soloed her to that level.
Having a Snipe early is fantastic. Especially because at the low levels, few enemies are resistant to Psi damage. Storm Summoning allows you be adaptable in ways that many other Defender primary's can't.
I have personally found it quite fun to Tank (carefully) with my Stormie. And when you get to the high levels, you can really let loose. You can create what looks like complete chaos, yet be totally in control
Pick Storm Control!
The Rot Hood.
never really played a defender but feel like trying to get one to 50
anyone know a fun defender build that can solo? (doesn't need to be "uber" just don't want to have to team ALL the time)
kinda like the look of bubbles