Very nearly all attacks that check against elemental defense also check against either smashing or lethal defense. There are comparatively few elemental-only attacks, especially in the 5th.
Crey are a good example for elemental defense, although they also have large amounts of smashing/lethal. Smashing/lethal are the most common attack types in the game, so it'd always be better to gear for S/L over elemental, unless you already start out with considerable elemental defense.
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Originally Posted by Dispari
I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.
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Yeah, that's what's worrying me. I think I can cover S/L damage with Tough, but ultimately, it seems F/C/E/N is not so useful for the goals I want. 
Shame, it's so much cheaper than S/L...
If you're looking for a group to fight with an E/N/F/C defence character, Circle of Thorns would be a pretty good place to start. They have plenty of Fire, Cold and Negative attacks, and can be fought on tap at any level range via radio missions.
With regards to S/L defence, this got me thinking as I sold a Kinetic Combat triple for 89 million redside the other day...
The new Kinetic Dampener temp power offers 16% S/L defence in half hour doses. It costs a couple of million to get one maybe, including the rare salvage. Say a character gets to 50 in around 150 hours, they'd chew through around 300 of these at a cost of say 300 million all up, which might still be cheaper than 4 four-packs of Kinetic Combat (=15% s/l).
These are all handwaving figures, of course. You may take longer to level or want to keep playing at 50. You could obviously not turn your Dampener on if you feel you don't need it, say you're teaming with a couple of Widows or a FF-er or whatever. It might be much cheaper to bid ahead for the lowbie ones and use cheap rare salvage.
There's the inconvenience. You might have to end up RP-ing your character as incontinent, and they have to use the toilets in the University every half hour 
An afterthought: there is also the S/L shield temp power from day jobs. logging out for 21 days in a PVP zone is a pain since its often a zone or two away, but logging out in an arena also gives you an END bonus. It could cover the cost for the first 2 hours of each play session depending how often you play.
Dr. Mike is spot on - between the Gladiator dayjob accolade's shield and the ones that you can now craft, you can now amass a good-sized S/L defense boost from fairly low-endurance temp powers. Even if you don't totally max it out with IOs, you can use somewhat cheaper (not-kinetic-combat) IO sets with +S/L def bonuses alongside one of the toggles to really toughen you up against probably 80-90% of the attacks you'll face.
You don't need to burn through them all that fast though - if you manage your S/L defense temps carefully, by only turning them on when you're about to charge into heavy fire and promptly detoggling once all/most of the dangerous baddies are down, you can squeeze 2 hours of on-time into many hours of play-time, even with high-efficiency soloing.
Rule number six of an empathy defender is NEVER underestimate a blaster's ability to die. I don't care if he has CM, Fort, both RAs, bubbles (both FF and Sonic), and is fighting next to a Storm defender with hurricane on. If there is a way to die in that situation, the blaster will find it.
Also, you can visit Siren's Call and for 10k pick up Cryonite Armor (30 minutes of Smashing/lethal and cold defense), if a hero or the Kinetic Shield (30 minutes smashing, lethal and energy defense) if a villain.
"Hmm, I guess I'm not as omniscient as I thought" -Gavin Runeblade.
I can be found, outside of paragon city here.
Thank you everyone at Paragon and on Virtue. When the lights go out in November, you'll find me on Razor Bunny.
No kidding? I never realised that the Siren's Call temps worked outside of PVP zones. I think I'd checked out the Arena temp powers once, figured out that they only worked in PVP and assumed the worse.
That suits my plans even better...
The siren's call powers work anywhere, but the arena temps only work in the arena.
I love the villain venom grenades for all my characters and the arachnos mace for low-damage/slow maturing characters.
Also, the renewable jump pack is faster than the flight pack, so that's handy too.
Hmm, that gets me thinking, I wonder if a peacebringer can use the temporary teleport power and confuse the hell out of people.
I must experiment with that one!
"Hmm, I guess I'm not as omniscient as I thought" -Gavin Runeblade.
I can be found, outside of paragon city here.
Thank you everyone at Paragon and on Virtue. When the lights go out in November, you'll find me on Razor Bunny.
My speculative look through the 5th Column listings on Paragonwiki indicate to me that the most important type of defence to have against them is Smashing/Lethal. Negative/Energy and Fire/Cold both seem to be less common; Vampyri's melee attacks are smash/negative, so S/L protects there. There aren't a lot of flamethrowers, and warwolves do nothing but s/l.
So the question: S/L defences vs E/N/F/C defences for a dedicated 5th column fighter. Assuming both can be obtained in reasonably large amounts (30+), and that this defence is in addition to fire armour's resistances and heal, which do you think would be better? And, if one did build for E/N/F/C, is there any enemy type you can think who would be a great enemy group, who are copiously available to fight, to take on?