Going to make my first Defender

Now I am no number cruncher prebuilder type person. So throwing builds at me will probably just cause me to have a large brain fart. That said. General advice is welcome.

I have not picked a build yet...as for I have to level some on my Tanker tonight to get to Shark Head Isle ...then it's on to defender.

Before I pick, I want my defender to offer some solid support for big teams...and I am undecided if I should even go down the dark path . I have a corruptor I love already. DP/Dark he does a great job in heals and dps. This time I want to be more support less dps for future teams on Villains.

Throw me some pros and cons you Defenders.... I would love your input.

Hey dt long time no team! Defenders are corruptors flipped. They should basically play like your corruptors did with higher debuff and buff values while offering lower damage. If you want support without havingg to heal cold is awesome if you wanna be able to heal emp is great and you can make any one person on the team untouchable. Send me an in game tell @BL00DBATH I have tons of 50 fenders and would show u any of them in action.

My first suggestion for a recovering corruptor: Cold/ice defender. You get plenty of support. You can recolor the shields to make them less obtrusive now. Your rain powers are still gauged with blaster scale damage. You get access to sleet which is one of the beefiest debuff powers (along with freezing rain). It has no heals, but it's a sweet, sweet combination of ally buffs and foe debuffs.

Controllers are like dominators with the control powers as a primary, and defender primaries as secondaries. They are very strong support, too. If I were rolling my first controller, I would probably make a fire/thermal for nice control and very good support. It's by no means a "one trick pony".

Speaking as someone who made a defender first then rolled a corruptor... Stick with corruptors.

/cast PFF to deflect rotten vegetables

No more tomatoes? Ok, cool. /splat! Awwwww.....

1. You get no scourge
2. Your defender inherent causes you to lose 30% of your overall damage when in teams larger than 4
3. You have lesser buff values as a corruptor, but right now in teams and solo, I find I'm not really asking for higher buff/debuff percentages on my trappers (yes, trappers for both corr and def). The corruptor values were fine enough when we were restricted to the Rogue Isles, and I find them fine enough when teaming in Paragon. You know... I think sometimes corruptor values are overkill for blue side.
4. As a rogue corruptor you sometimes get treated like a dps by teams . Pew pew pew /support pew pew!

Plus, fire blast!

Sonic Resonance is a great support set that scales well to large teams.

Defenders get noticably better values than Corrupters, adding 58% Resistance to a team rather than 42%, and debuffing Resistance by 60% instead of 45%.

For further team support, choose either Sonic Blast to further debuff enemy resistance, or Dark Blast to debuff enemy To Hit and add another layer of safety.

Sonic/Sonic in particualr is well worth making as a Defender over a Corrupter. Try that.

Force Fields is the MOST support with the LEAST dps. If you get Maneuvers, and you keep the bubbles up on everyone all the time, you softcap everyone who can be bothered to stay within 25 feet of you. To translate that out of number-crunch mode: Take someone with very little defense. Take four small purples and go up to something that should kill you a lot and slap it a couple times. Watch it not kill you.

Force Fields does that for your whole team, except you.

You're at a real risk of getting bored if you play it, though, because it's a very low-impact set.

Healing is seriously overrated. If nobody is getting hurt, who needs healing? Answer: Nobody. Most Defenders can keep the team from getting hurt. FF in particular I never saw a huge demand for healing around. My FF has medicine and yes, she uses it sometimes, but most of the incoming damage is so gradual that it's unnecessary to worry overmuch about it.

So get the whole idea that "I have to heal!" out of your head. Everyone heals naturally. in essence, my FF heals people quite well WITHOUT medicine pool, by leveraging their natural regen rate.

There is no 'support/mez'. There is no '*/mez' period. If you want to be full support you will need to go mez/support.

Defenders with -resist and Corruptors of all sorts pull together on damage. Defenders are very potent in support. Our blast sets have some support or mez in it, but not so much that you can envision yourself as a Controller. I suppose if you went ape with Dark Blast slotting or maybe Ice Blast you could get some of that going on, but you still wouldn't be a control type.

Your sig makes me smile