FIRST TIME PLAYER. TEMPLATE ADVICE IS APPREICATED
Scrappers are a good choice for a first character because they're pretty easy to get, just dive in and start arresting. As a tanker other players are much more reliant on your performance. That's not to say tankers are too hard for a newbie, just that scrappers are maybe more straightforward to play well.
As for your question, it's really a bit too broad to answer properly. I don't know how familiar you are with the way to build characters in this game, but you get to pick a primary and secondary powerset that each come with 9 power choices. Only a fraction of those are available initially but as you level you get access to more and more powerful abilities. After level 6 you get additional access to power pools that are available to all ATs and that have all kinds of powers to help your character, most notably travel powers that practically everyone gets at level 14, which means getting the prerequisite power before that. You get to pick a new power every second level until level 32, after which it's every third level. Levels in between you will get enhancement slots to place in your existing powers to make them more effective.
Scrapper primary powerset is attacks and secondary is defense, and you'll generally do well by picking a balanced mix from both. Any combination of primary and secondary works, although some have a better synergy than others. Each set has its must have and skippable powers for sure, but that's a long and controversial subject to get into. Just pick a primary and secondary sets that look interesting to you, and then maybe look for example builds and guides on those. You can also just pick powers as you go along, based on what you feel would be most needed at the moment. If you do screw something up seriously it's possible to complete a respec trial later and get to repick your powers (but not the primary and secondary powersets, they stay the same).
Anyway, hope this helped some 
We see your crossposts, and we follow the newb to see where he goes 
I know everyone says go scrapper, and boy it can make you feel powerful, but blasters can be fun too, and not much more complex than scrappers, most do have more utility tho (holds/control type powers).
may i recommend the sets to avoid imho
dark secondary scrapper - generally weak, esp in pvp
(claws primary scrapper, in the soon to be released patch they are far better and viable again)
fire primary for blasters - total lack of utility, nothing but damage, esp useless in solo pvp
fire secondary for blasters - again almost total lack of utility
(assault rifle primary for blasters - great fun to watch, but not a minmax thing really)
(devices secondary for blasters great fun to play, but doesnt really do the whole team/huge damage thing)
pick anything other than these and even if you make a pigs ear you can respecify your powers at 24+, 34+ and 44+, go with theose sets and you may be wishing you had different sets.
as a rule in teams, ANYTHING works, but solo and pvp some things are just 'inefficient'
Plight
for solo controllers pre-32 are pretty inefficient as well
PS. Sure some of you may say "ZOMG! I soloed my controller very well! But if you compare it to other classes and the fact you're a new player, they dont
"god, how many devs did hami have to sleep with to get ED?"
Total Cat @Stagefright
Peace, you've now made 3 posts on the forum in a brief time, all in CAP'S.
A couple of people have pointed out this is against the forum rules in your other posts. Please take time to check the rules as Bridger, the forum mod, may take a bit of a dim view if he continues to see repeated violations.
As for builds, a regen scrapper is probably one of the more forgiving sets for a new player.
I'd recomend pairing it up with katana, dark melee or broadsword to start with(claws isn't very good, though it is getting a bit of a buff soon, and spines is probably a bit more difficult to master than the others).
Dark and broadsword have the edge in damage but are endurance heavy and kind of slow. Katana is more accurate and quicker but lighter on damage.
From the regen side, your key 'early' powers will be integration, reconstruction and dull pain. By the time you reach the point where you can pick other powers, you should have learnt enough about your playingstyle to make your own build choices or ask more specific questions.
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Fire primary for blasters - total lack of utility, nothing but damage
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And this is where the differences of opinion that Idris speaks of comes in. A lot of people will disagree with that statement completly as damage is exactly what a blaster should specialise in. For an experienced player, fire is on of the best primaries about as long as you can manage the aggor it generates.
As Idris says, pick what you like the look of, not what people say is easy or 'uber'.
Main advice I would give is try several builds up to about lv 10 then decide which one you enjoy most.
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(devices secondary for blasters great fun to play, but doesnt really do the whole team/huge damage thing)
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Gotta disagree there, a surviving Blaster is one who's there to do more damage, plus, Cloaking Device + multiple Time/Trip-mines equals serious damage. 
It's pretty hard to give an all-around great template, because each set is good for something, but sub-par for something else. I.e., the question is pretty much: well, what do _you_ want to use it for?
E.g., AOE builds (such as the Fire Blasters that were mentioned) work great for 8-player groups, but are a waste of endurance when soloing groups of 2-3 minions. They're also less great against enemies which prefer ranged combat instead of being easily herded in a compact AOE-able herd. For soloing, a high-damage single-target set can actually get the job done faster.
E.g., pure damage builds (e.g., Fire Blaster again or certain Dark Melee builds for scrappers) are great when you always have a tank getting the aggro off you, but utility sets with lots of knock-down, disorient, hold, etc, effects can be quite useful when soloing and for certain specialized group roles. E.g., my Martial Arts + Air Superiority scrapper was debatably more useful for the ability to shut off an enemy than for the damage itself. (Although the MA damage output is pretty high in its own right.)
E.g., certain sets and builds may really shine for PvP (against other players), but be a nightmare to level up in PvE (against NPCs). Super-Reflexes vs Regeneration comes to mind. While SR is later a great set, and will be even greater in I7, and is more useful for PvP too, until the 30's Regen is much easier to play in PvE.
So again, which is good and which is bad is more of a question of which fits your play style and goals.
And also let me state the obvious: pay attention to the animations, sounds, graphics, etc, too. No matter how powerful a character is, if that character's appearance or animations or concept turn you off, it won't be fun to play anyway. E.g., while I can understand why other people like Spines, for me... I can't really get into playing one. So basically don't hesitate to switch to another character if you find yourself in a similar situation about a set. The goal is to have fun.
So basically all I can do is take a wild guess, and recommend a build that I found easy and fun for soloing PvE at all levels. Not too shabby in a group either, but it can really plough through missions on its own when you can't find a group or aren't in the mood for groups. Namely, Martial Arts and Regen.
Martial Arts is a high-damage single-target set, and has some nice utility effects too. So it's great for soloing and small groups, but in a large group it becomes a more specialized role. You'll never be the guy who singlehandedly did 50% of the group's damage, that'll always be an AOE class. Don't even try. In a group you'll be the guy who hand-picks and elliminates the bosses, stuns the Tsoo Sorcerer before it tosses the Blasters around, and so on.
Martial Arts also gives you a good continuous attack chain early, and starts with an accuracy bonus which is a _lot_ in the early game (before level 22 or so), so you can start having fun right away. Take Thunder Kick, Storm Kick, Crane Kick ASAP, maybe even Cobra Strike if you want to shut off any liutenant whenever you want to. (And trust me, when you'll start meeting Tsoo Sorcerers, you'll be glad you took it.) If you don't mind taking flight as your travel power, get Air Superiority from the flight pool ASAP. It's a good damage attack in its own right, but the knock-down part makes it a _great_ attack.
You can skip Crippling Axe Kick or take it and respec later, your choice. CAK and TK are roughly equal damage-per-second, and both are the lowest in the set in that aspect. So basically when you get enough other attacks, you'll want to get rid of one or the other.
Regen is again a special set, great for soloing, but a bit more specialized in a group. Regen is (over-simplified and inaccurately speaking) more about cutting down the downtime than about damage mitigation.
For starters, Regen gives you more endurance than any other set. If you take Stamina too, you're pretty much on infinite endurance. (At least until you start taking Tough, Weave and Leadership, if you want to go that route.) So a Regen scrapper has no endurance-related downtime, ever. You can keep going for hours like the energizer bunny, ploughing through enemies non-stop. Compared to other builds which face an always-out-of-breath grind for Stamina, a Regen can be a _lot_ more fun at low levels, and still not shabby even at level 50.
Ditto for health. The Regen set isn't about taking less damage, but about healing it right back while running to the next fight. Heck, in most fights, by the second half of the fight, when most enemies are dead, your health is already rising back up in preparation for the next fight. (It may not be obvious from level 1, but when you get Integration you'll see what I mean.)
If by now it sounds too good to be true, and a case of "then what's the catch?"... well, the catch is also just that: it's a downtime reducer set rather than a mitigation set. It's pretty much god-mode for soloing (except AVs and early elite bosses), but it's also the most fragile secondary in a large group. You'll never be able to tank or herd for a large group, and even letting it rip with an AOE (e.g., Dragon's Tail) against a herd of enemies can earn you a faceplant before the Defender can react. If 12 enemies suddenly decide to shoot at at you at the same time, you _will_ face-plant without damage mitigation, no matter how fast you could regen that otherwise.
But finally, don't let me make it sound like it's some rocket science or recipe you must follow to the letter. One of the great parts about MA/Regen, and largely anything/Regen, is that you can go nuts and pick whatever you wish, and still not do too bad. E.g., while everyone else must get Stamina at 20, you can take it later (I took it at 24), or not at all.
So just use your common sense and you'll do fine. If it looks like you need another attack, get an extra attack, and stuff like that. You can deviate from the perfectly min-maxed template a _lot_ (I know I did) and still do just fine.
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for solo controllers pre-32 are pretty inefficient as well
PS. Sure some of you may say "ZOMG! I soloed my controller very well! But if you compare it to other classes and the fact you're a new player, they dont
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Illusion is pretty easy to solo pre 32, especially after lvl 18 when Phantom Army is available .
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for solo controllers pre-32 are pretty inefficient as well
PS. Sure some of you may say "ZOMG! I soloed my controller very well! But if you compare it to other classes and the fact you're a new player, they dont
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Illusion is pretty easy to solo pre 32, especially after lvl 18 when Phantom Army is available .
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depends on your secondary, and still think its inefficient to solo compared to other ATs (for the record, I didnt have a nice time soloing on stage till phantasms, and even then it wasnt really viable to solo)
"god, how many devs did hami have to sleep with to get ED?"
Total Cat @Stagefright
Well, IMHO a Controller is soloable in sorta the same way Stealth is a travel power. It certainly can get you there safely, but you really need to have patience
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dark secondary scrapper - generally weak, esp in pvp
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Lies! and slander!
DA is a tricky set to get used to, I'll admit. In fact, at first I bodged it up. But I think Seriphos has more utility than other scrappers do. He can fully heal himself from 2 mobs. He can resist every effect except knockback and slow. Also, DA has psionic resistance, which is incredibly fun. I can walk into red rikti groups side by side with any other scrap, and odds are I'll be the one walking away. So the build sucks in PVP, there are workarounds to that (using the utility of DA's fear, disorient, and damage auras coupled with the built in fear of DM and disorient of MA are some that could work), and it's a heroic thing to walk towards a portal spewing +2 behemoths at an obscene rate, and not only take it down, but a large amount of them as well.
Dark melee has an alright damage output, a heal, a hold, a fear, some damage, an endurance heal, and a self buff in it, and a built in accuracy debuff to every move. Dark armour has resist to pretty much all effects, damage aura, fear aura, disorient aura, self resurrect, nice heal, a stealth power with no movement penalty and good damage mitigation. It can't absorb physical damage like Invincibility, it can't fight endlessly like regens, has no regen/SR always-on powers, and it lacks a God-mode like the others. It is, IMO, the devices of the scrapper secondaries, able to turn it's hand to many things and be useful, but it costs a hell of a lot of endurance.
Sure, we have no God mode buttons. But zap us with Regen aura and Adrenaline boost, we don't need them
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DA is a tricky set to get used to, I'll admit.
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And the only one I have never mastered in all my time scrapping. Try as I might, I can't get the right balance in endurance as it seems to me there are too many endurance heavy toggles for a DA scrapper. Everything else I seem to manage ok, but never DA.
"Pride is all well and good but a sausage is a sausage"
For Lent I gave up...
Hope
Good Morning.
As the title indicated, Im a first time player to this game - infact as I write this the game is patching for the first time so Im about as new as they get. Im looking at the different classes and consider Scrapper or Tanker as my initial appeals. On the subject of Scrappers can anyone offer a good starter template to which would offer a balance between damage and defence. I appreciate its a difficult question as many aspects of this are a consequence of my play style, but are there some 'must have' skills in this class? Thanks in advance.