New Player wanting Char advice

Hi thought I would try out the game been reading for about a week now and seems there is just so many options so. I figured I would ask.

My play style is usually solo I am a casual player and dont get alot of time to play sometimes. Other games I have played I have been magical in nature, ranged.

So far I was looking at
Stalker
Controller
Corrupter

Now it is just a matter of the build.

Which would make a good solo/farm char for a casual player and what type of build?

Thanks

Since you mentioned both Controller and Ranged, I wonder if you have given any thought to playing a Dominator (I have a Mind/Fire that is quite fun)?

Of your options, I would recommend a Dark/SR Stalker as a good Soloing character. Farming, not so much.

I am sure you will get lots of other suggestions in this thread!

(Welcome to the game, hope you stay!)

Spines/Willpower or Claws/Willpower Scrapper would be my choice. Very hard to go wrong with either and it should be good both solo and in teams. Your single target damage will be a bit weak with Spines but you'll have some great AoE and mitigation, with Claws you'd have a lot better single target DPS, but weaker AoE. Once you have most of your AoEs just set your difficulty so that you have many relatively weak foes to mow over them fast.

Dominator? Never thought of that at all.. hmm

Yeah, Dominators have the nice feature of instantly refilling their endurance bar after inflicting enough damage on their enemies. Certainly useful when you get stuck in an energy rut.

Best soloers, in a rough order and mostly IMO and not including VEAT's and HEAT's:

Masterminds
Scrappers/Brutes/stalkers (about equal)
Dominators
Controllers (certain sets and all post 32)
Blasters
Corruptors
Tanks
Defenders
Controllers (other sets, generally pre-32)

Others will argue the exact order but I suspect most folks will agree that the best soloers are the damage focused melee classes (which DOES include some tanks) and masterminds, who are a group unto themselves.

If you want to solo a controller I would recommend mind, illusion or plant - any other controller will have trouble either doing enough single target damage or won't have AE control's up often enough and early enough to solo well, however every controller solo's fairly well after 32 and pets.

What you can solo a depends a lot on the style of play to which you can adapt. For example, I find blaster solo really well up until the mid 20's - after that I either have to play a very defensive blaster (/device or /ice) or stay at heroic level or I die a LOT, which pisses me off so much I tend to give up on characters. I just can't adapt to the kill or be killed nature of most blasters. But prior to that point blasters are one of the easiest AT's to solo - they just do SO much damage and are one of the most end efficient classes. If you want a ranged class but don't want to dance on the ege of death all the time a dominator is now a nice alternative - not as much AE as blasters but a lot more control.

Masterminds are insane soloers IF you are content with debuffing mobs and/or buffing, healing and directing your pets instead of actually attacking the mobs yourself. A well played mastermind will always be busy but generally not attacking the enemy directly.

If you want something that is easy to solo go brute or scrapper - you really can't miss with these two AT's. You can even farm well with some builds. Which one will depend on playstyle again. If you want to constantly fight non-stop, dashing from group to group without a break you probably want a brute. A scrapper CAN play that way but it isn't a requirement where a brute needs to keep fury up. However a brute with fury up is pretty awesome. The flipside if that is a scrapper - better damage out of the box but can't hit quite as much of a high as a brute.

If you want a cheap blueside farm build (casual players generally don't have a billion inf lying around) I'd suggest a Shield / Fire or Willpower / Fire Tanker. Shield / Fire if you are willing to spend 50-100 million or so on IOs (not at all hard to collect that much by level 50 just from playing the game), WP / Fire if you are sticking with SOs / generic IOs. /Fire Tankers do very respectable AoE damage and are tougher than Scrappers (unless you go Fire/Fire), especially with a budget build. A Spines Scrapper will do more damage, but the Tanker will be able to handle larger spawns. If you don't care about soloing 8-man spawns go with a Spines Scrapper (Spines / Willpower or Spines / Regen are my picks)... they absolutely mow down mid-sized spawns but they're quite a bit squishier than a /Fire Tanker without a large IO investment.

Redside, you can't beat a Brute or Mastermind. Electric / Willpower might be a good Brute choice (Super Strength needs a lot of recharge to be a really good AoE machine and that's expensive), or Dual Blades / WP. A lot of people dismiss Dual Blades as a second rate set, and it is once you start talking about high end builds, but for budget builds it's very competitive. If you don't mind letting pets do the damage then a Mastermind is pretty much the toughest thing out there... Bots / Traps, Bots / Dark, Thugs / Traps, and Thugs / Dark are probably your best bets for farming. I personally like Bots / Traps the best... you start off slow but once you hit 32 you turn into an AoE death machine with extremely good survivability. The drawback is that Masterminds have a very distinct playstyle that some people don't care for.

Thanks for all the Advise, thug/dark mastermind sounds interesting. Kinda burned out from pet classes from DAOC and WOW but I may give it a try here to see what it is like. I cant even remember the last time I Played a melee class lol..

Some recommendations for starting out:
Brute: Dark Melee/Super Strength/Stone Melee/Claws/Warmace with Willpower
Corruptor:Fire/Dark, Ice/Dark, Sonic/Dark
Controller: Fire/Rad, Plant/Rad
Dominator: Plant/Fire
Scrapper: Spine/Will, Dark Melee/Will , Claw/Will, Katana/Will, Katana/Super Reflexes

All of hem solo well.