Best high-end pve controller for teams?

My vote goes to Earth/Thermal.

To me /Storm is infinitely more fun to play that /Cold. Heck, than anything really.
That's sufficient to make /Storm my choice (I think I have 4 /storm controllers alone), they also provide a lot of diversity on how you play them depending on your style, build, size of team and primary.

The fun factor is a big part of what is "best" for me. My high level Earth/Rad is very powerful, but I often get bored playing him.

For the same reason I like Fire/ because it's different from other primaries, since you really have to be in melee a lot.

I've yet to play a combo where I don't think I make a significant contribution to the team.

my 2 cents.

Heat loss is really good. Benumb, however, is really good. Cold can do things that no other set can. With poison coming to controllers in I21 that's a little less true but cold is better than buffed poison.

That said, my latest project is a plant/storm. I already have a cold defender and I kind of feel like it shines with defender values on the debuffs and simply by being the primary set. Storm, meanwhile, is amazingly good at supplementing a strong controller primary by filling in virtually every area that could be called a deficit.

My vote is for plant/storm, oddly enough, but there's a dash of hopefulness in there as I haven't finished the character yet. Shaping up nicely, however.

Kin is my second least preferred secondary to have as a teammate (sonic being least). But that may not speak to it being best or worst for large teams. It speaks more to my lack of willingness to alter my behavior based on the presence of the kin wielder.

Lewis

Enan,

It varies. If my friends are on, which they are about 50% of the time, we play on huge 8 man teams. The other 50% of the time is split evenly between solo and 3-boxing missions for xp and/or Purple recipes.

So I guess I truly solo 25% of the time, and I am on large teams half the time.

However, my opinion is further skewed by the fact that one of my friends pays for 8 accounts and he has these crazy teams with 3 bubblers, 2 rads, 2 stormies (all controllers or defenders) and a driver (usually a blaster or a tanker). He drops to make room for the 3 others (me, and 2 others). But as we also favor various controllers, we usually have these insane softcapped teams with tons of automatic damage or heavy controls or other special powers.

We sometimes have a kin for fulcrum shift but rarely are the other aspects of the set even used.

Not a common situation, I admit.

Lewis

In defense of kin; there is a lot of 'rounding out' toons at the higher levels, especially post incarnate. There, the last bit of buff not generally in abundance (at least to capped levels) is +dam. To a lesser degree, +recovery and +recharge. Both are in kins wheelhouse.

Resistances and defenses are usually already high for melee toons. Squishies get those in their APP, PPPs (mine is one orange and one purp away from soft cap). Also, most high end toons have no problem hitting stuff, so -def is not so useful. -Res is very nice though, but not generally as game changing as fulcrum (imagine if there was a -res at the levels of fulcrum, game breaking for sure).

-Regen is probably the other big item. Again, kin has SOME of that.

So recap, kin has big damage, recharge and recovery, strong heals, a little -regen. These fill MOST of the blanks for your high level generic teammate and therefore brings a lot to a team.

Game play reflects this. A kin on a team makes the team considerably more potent.

The caveat, and probably the reason why kins are not so in demand, is that generally one is a enough. Several /storms, /colds and /sonics will out buff/debuff a kin of course. In fact, a couple of /colds on a team is pretty potent. The amount of -res and +recovery begins to stack with those.

Again, this is all in defense to kin (kinship ya'll know). Really, all of them are good for high end pve teams. Kin is generally better, but there are situations where it is not.

That's very good reasoning, -regen and -res areextremely useful in the end game and is the one things most ATs don't bring.
Now I remember why I liked my old Dark/Sonic defender (just rerolled one for 2x XP weekend)