Energy Aura vs Electric Armour

(Would've put this in the powers forum, but F2Pers aren't allowed there)

Going to be making a new Scrapper (or Brute, probably Scrapper though) character soon and was wondering what the pros and cons of each of these Power sets were, because to me they seem to be pretty much the same besides their little 'gimmicks' (Energy's Stealth vs Electrics Passive AoE)

I'm going to have Electric Melee as my primary, and intend to go with 'Body/Energy Mastery' for my Epic Power Pool, so End costs shouldn't be that much trouble between End Drain attacks and the extra End Regen from Physical Perfection.

Energy is a defense based powerset (makes enemies miss more often, but you take full damage if they hit).

Electric is a resist based powerset (You take less damage when you are hit, but it doesn't do anything to reduce how often you are hit).

Currently it's easier to give an Electric Armor scrapper "layered" defenses than it is for Energy Aura.

That is, with Electric Armor you can hard-cap Energy resistance and get pretty high Smash/Lethal resistance, and at the same time soft-cap Smash/Lethal or get pretty high all around positional defenses by using IO bonuses. This makes for very robust characters, though it does take a lot of tweaking with IOs

You can easily soft-cap Energy Aura to Energy and Smash/Lethal defense, as well as get your other defenses pretty high. But it's not really possible to hard-cap any resistances currently. This gives you characters with high overall defense, but the problem with defense is that there's always a 5% chance that you'll get smeared by a big attack that you have no damage resistance for.

However: IO bonuses are changing significantly in i24, so things may be changing. The "useless" IO bonuses (immobliize resistance, debt protection) are being replaced by general mez protection and resistance bonuses. It's hard to know exactly how high you will be able to get resistances because Mids hasn't been updated for i24, and figuring out optimal builds is non-trivial without a tool like Mids.

It looks like resistance-based characters may become even more robust. For example, Fiery Aura tankers may be able to hard-cap smash/lethal resistance in addition to Fire resistance by using those same bonuses.

You don't say whether you're VIP or whether you have access to IOs. If you can't use IOs this may not matter to you at all.

Since you're F2P I'd suggest Energy Aura since you won't be able to use IOs.

Well I've considered both options and I've decided to go with Electric armour, mostly because its weakness is Toxic (which doesn't seem to be that common) and Energy's weakness is Psionic (which is)

Also does anyone know if 'Lightning field' has the same End leech effect as Electric Melee? because a Toggle AoE that drains End from enemies and gives it to me would be awesome

It does not.

I highly recommend using the Attuned enhancements available to you (the archetype-specific ones and Overwhelming Force). Energize is one of your most important mitigation and endurance-management tools, so it should be five- or six- slotted for heal and recharge (it might actually be worth it to buy the Numina's Convalescence SBE set and slot the whole thing there). Also, take Hasten, and three-slot it with recharge reduction for the same reason.