Can you beef up traps a little bit? Its not very useful on a team

Im playing a Traps/AR defender and have him up to lvl 27 now. I have to admit it is fun to play, but its not very "defender-y" on a team. I think it would be a killer secondary set for a blaster, but as a defender...eh.
I dont see people being excited when they invite a defender and find out its a Traps defender. I sense groans, like they do with Trick Arrow.

I feel the powerset is too slow and just doesnt lend itself to defending the team too well and i find myself in more team wipes then when Im playing other defender sets. Its slow and awkward to position the traps in the right spots.
Teams are not going to wait a minute for me to plant Trip Mines and Poison traps on each mob.

And also in order to defend the team I need to run right in the middle of a mob and lay my traps, getting me killed or almost killed often.

Twice now I've been on teams where people left to go get their emp or their kin so we would have a better defender than the job I was doing. So I kind of feel a little useless. Ive never had that happen when i was playing a kin.
So because of this I wont be rolling more traps defenders as they are now.

In all honesty it feels like Im playing a defender-Lite. It definitely needs *something*

Some suggestions:
1. Let Triage Beacon recover End as well as Health. Also bump up the health on it. I actually sit in it and watch it as its "recharging" my health and I dont see a big bonus in health, but I have mostly recharge enhancements. Which I need because its so slow to recharge.
An Emp can spam their heals, but a Traps can only offer a little dinky heal that takes a long time to recharge. meh.

2. Let Caltroops cover a wider area
3. Ability to throw poison trap, or shoot it to activate it. I keep getting killed having to run into mobs to plant this trap.
4. Seeker drones should so more damage, or have more than 2 at a time.
5. Trip mine is too easy to interrupt, I would take the interruption away or make it less so.

anyways thats my opinion from playing traps for a little while.
Thanks devs for listening

Get better teammates?

Are you one of those nooby Trapsers that stays back with their FFG where it affects noone but you? Traps is fine, you just need to learn to play..... with it.

Traps isn't about defending, it's about disruption. If you're having trouble laying your traps, I'd suggest investing in stealth abilities (Stealth pool, Super Speed, IOs) or wait for aggro to be controlled before toe-bombing.

The alternative is using your traps like....traps, which admittedly is hard to convince a team to let you do, but it's not like you didn't know what you were getting into.

FFG should be giving your party 20% defence to all (including psi) and more than 6 mag protection from Holds, Stuns and Immobilises. If that alone isn't enough to keep your party alive, I think you're all doing it wrong.

And if you don't have FFG (I notice you didn't mention it), then you're definitely doing it wrong.

Get Web Grenade too. -recharge on a boss or a few Lts is really nice.

I have a good amount of experience playing both Devices as well as Traps... and you've really gotta have a different mindset for a lot of the powers than for a standard (de)buffing set. Trip Mines aren't something you just run in and plant willy-nilly. If you're going to try to toe bomb with them, you need to first have more than enough stealth, as well as good timing so that your team is hitting the mob right when it's blowing up. As an alternative, if you have invisibility worth of stealth you can use the poison trap for the alpha instead of a trip mine, or even alternate.

Traps offers you lots of different potential playstyles, you just have to accept that your goal isn't to be passively defending your team by buffing, and healing them (you'll mostly be doing that secondary, FFG being something you just fire and forget, really).

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

You're mistaking your job title: Defending doesn't always mean 'Make sure no one dies', but rather 'Make sure the bad guys either can't attack, or can't do much by attacking.'

If someone whines about you not doing 'your job' while healing, just lay down enough traps to get the job done and incapacitate the enemy.

And if it gets REALLY bad? Take Stealth. Take stealth and use it to plant traps within the mobs. Or a Tanker; whichever you'd prefer.

how to play traps:

1. Keep FFG up
2. Web Grenade bosses (-50% Recharge is awesome)
3. Acid mortar everything
4. Don't take Time Bomb (seriously..)
5. Caltrops when burn or other like effects are on the ground
6. The Triangle Beacon of death WILL DESTROY ALL MANKIND!!!
8. Pretend like your secondary actually does a decent percentile of the entire teams damage and just blast away thinking that your dealing "Good Damage"
9. Ignore the fact that I skipped 7.

To the OP:

Actually, your idea/motivation does have a point. Just that the way you put it makes people want to give you a lesson how to play. There is an on-going discussion in the defender forum about traps. You can take a glance. I remember that there are numerous discussions in the past about how to improve traps, I think you can research a bit on this topic.

In my opinion, traps is pretty good in debuffing, and the force-field generator is not bad. You feel that traps is "defender-Lite" because if the team has problems surviving (in particular at low levels), the debuffs (that helps to kill faster) doesn't help much. Traps will be more appreciated at high levels. I think most people complain about mines/bombs and the setup time.