what to pair with traps?

My only corr (sonic/therm) is on a 2nd account, which is inactive, and I don't know when or if it will be activated. So if I make a new toon, I'm positive it will be a corr.

The only secondaries I'm interested in playing and haven't played before are traps and cold. Cold doesn't really seem to appeal to me. I don't want to wait until the late 30's to see my true power. Traps seems to bloom a lot earlier, and I hear good things about it.

The question is, which primary should I go with? My first thought is fire. But I already have a fire blaster and prefer to play new sets. That leaves ice, dark, elec, and energy. Ice seems to lack AoE damage, as does dark. Elec is just weak from what I've heard. And energy, I assume, is counterproductive to traps, since you'll be knocking mobs out of your own traps.

Out of those choices, which would I be the happiest with in the end? I assume it's fire, but wanted to get opinions.

Keep in mind that /traps offers -tohit (which can stack with dark/) -rech (which can stack with ice) and -def, -regen, and -res which can stack with everything else.

There is also Assault rifle, archery, and dual pistols which you could use as /traps is a lot of fire and forget powers, so it won't cause you very much redraw problems.

I'd honestly go for dark though, as the -tohit from dark will stack nicely with the +def, and -tohit from /traps, and heal from dark/ would help out with triage beacon.

you'd also have 3 cones, plus caltrops and trip mines to round our your AoE. Its not as much as fire/, but its more then elec/ and ice/

dark/traps does sound pretty nice too.. hmm... might have to look at that myself.

I have a dark/trapper at level 26 and it is a pretty sweet combo, I keep trying traps but never have got one out of the teens however this combo is going strong I am really enjoying it, a very different style of play from my fire/cold corruptor (by the by /cold is insanely fun to play I also recommend it, but your right it is slow to bloom). With FFG and two hits from the dark and it feels like being a SR scrapper. Each blast has 7.5%tohitdebuff (even both aoe), not sure what that correlates to on defense (if I had to guess half the debuff value in defense equivalance?).

Some real nice synergies here too:
1. Tohitdebuff in all blasts with FFG makes for stout defense to all (I am building in weave and manuevers).
2. Caltrops is normally kind of optional choice, but it does some middling aoe damage. Combined with Tenebrous Tentacles (aoe immobilize) its a good combo.
3. The seeker Drones have a nice stun which combined with dark pit should give a mag 4 stun from range with two casts...I cant confirm but this synergy looks insanely good.

Pure speculation on the following but the following are my impressions of the combo to date:
-Need additional aoe and damage to complete dark blast and trip mine looks like it will be perfect.
-Layered protection: guessing I can get 30% def pretty easily, 50%smash/lethal resist, some good regen with the healing trap, and then life drain on top of all that. That looks like a wickedly tough build.
-Since traps really benefits from high recharge and I have good defense as well also plan on going power mastery for buildup, force of nature, energy conservation to round out my toon. That just smacks of tank mage game breaking awesomeness endgame but I could be wrong.

The big negative of course is Dark blast is death by inches (death by paper cuts is the quote I believe but not sure who to quote). It is not a heavy hitter at all luckily your defense and debuffs protect you but it is slow killing so far. I am experimenting with procs in dark blast (fastest charging single target) and teneberous tentacles (this one takes 4 damage procs that I can see). I think my damage will also be fairly dependent upon trip mines too.

-tohit translates to equal +def against even level mobs, higher level mobs resist the debuffs more, and AVs resist up to 87% of the debuff value, but with a full attack chain on dark blast, it can still add up to a pretty hefty amount of effective defense you have, especially when considering seeker drones have -tohit as well.

basically what you'd want to do with a dark/corr is throw seeker drones at the nearest mob, and while they are distracted run in and drop a trip mine. if you time it right, all the damage will be soaked from the seeker drones, and you can get your trip mine to go off. Then drop an acid mortar, and proceed to blast things. Acid mortar can become triple stacked, and you can slot the achiles heel -res proc in it, which i HIGHLY recommend. -20% resistance on top of the -20% EACH acid mortar gives means your dark blasts are doing about 60-80% more damage then before.

Fire. Traps needs neither the utility nor debuffs of Dark, both of which are paid for with bad damage.

If you want a more solo-safe and debuffing primary, go Sonic.

Dark/Traps sounds good on paper but in reality it's a bit meh compared to DP, Fire, Sonic and AR.

Was soloing COT on +1/X8 this moring with my DP/Traps. Was kinda surprised at how effective it was. AR or DP pair well with traps.

The only thing that urkls me about AR is changing all the running around you have to do to get the most out of the cones...it's worth it though. Dp is more player friendly lol.

I have a dark/kin L32 and a fire/traps L30.

As silas stated the -tohit of dark costs ALOT relative to the quick animating, high damage that fire gets. My dark/kin is pretty much unsoloable to my standards. He runs out of end before he can kill a mob at -1/x2/nobosses. My fire/traps on the other hand can handle that setting without much of an issue. Both are still very light on IO sets.

Cones are less optimal with traps than sphere AOE. The seekers help bunch stuff up, and then you want to keep it that way for trip mines, poison trap and acid mortar. Rain of Fire works pretty well with caltrops and poison trap.

If you really dont want fire/traps I would suggest Dual Pistols and traps. Hail of bullets and rain of bulltets would work well with the bunched up mobs traps wants. Just be sure to use fire ammo and not the default knockback ammo.

I have to make this another vote for Fire/Traps. Even if you have another fire corruptor, you won't regret it! Depending what defenses you softcap, you can play it from range and lets the npcs run into your traps, or jump right into melee, toebombing with the best of them.

If you want to be a scrapper, then Fire/Traps/Mu (Build Link).

If you want to be a tank, then Traps/Dark/Power (Build Link).

If you want to be a little of both, then Traps/Ice/Mu (Build Link).

Not much to say everyone pretty much said it all. As Silas mentioned Sonic is nice as it further increases your DPS after the first attacks hit. I have a Sonic Traps for that reason. Traps is great for sure.

Thanks for all the input guys!