Is anyone like me?

[Ankhammon]

Defender: TA/Sonic.  Its hard to pick the best defender primary; they are honestly all good in different ways.  But I really like the utility and diversity of Trick Arrow, and Oil Slick Arrow is just awesome.  Supplementing that with Sonic helps overcome Defender's lower damage modifier with high resistance debuffs.  And in case of emergency, just break Siren Song's glass.

Definitely.
TA/Sonic was one of the more fun and effective combos that I ever played on a defender. Great damage and mitigation both. It really needed it's own AT as it was too controllerish (a Deftroller?) to be called just a defender.
I just wish I'd gotten mine built out. http://web.archive.org/web/20120905231124/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=295377

The other Defender that would be worth looking at (I23) would be Time/Ice. If TA/Sonic could be described as a Deftroller then Time/Ice could be termed a Deftanker. I used mine with debuff procs (in Time's Juncture) to get the agro I wanted and it worked unless there was someone actually throwing out Taunt at the time.

[Brightfires]

While I wasn't a frequent roleplayer, I did tend to have that roleplayer's habit of seeing each of my characters as individuals... completely different "people" regardless of what their power-sets happened to be.

That meant that playing, say, both Surruna and Grey Kestrel (My two DB/WP Stalkers-) didn't really seem same-old/same-old in spite of their matching power sets and ATs. Likewise Palrah and Ty'ree (Both WP/DB tanks-) or Ashirion and Ke'khali (Both DB/WP Scraps-). There were small mechanical differences between each of them, too. Different focuses with their enhancements, different pool power and epic picks, different Incarnate picks and such. That also kept them from feeling overly similar to me. Playing Kestrel with her massive global recharge and perma-summoned Adept partner was a whole different thing than playing Ty'ree with her through-the-roof Melee Defense, or Ashirion with his tendency to keep everything around him bouncing on its butt.

I was asked a few times "Why don't you just have multiple builds instead of duplicate characters?" and my answer was always the same... Because Kes wasn't Ru. Ty wasn't Pally. Ash wasn't Khali. I didn't see them as interchangeable collections of powers and numbers.   

[Supermax]

Thanks Arcana, that was an interesting read.

[silvers1]

I rarely overlap on primary powersets, but there are certain secondaries that are just too good.

Having said that, I wouldn't want to place restrictions on anyone else.  If you want to play a MA scrapper more than
once, more power to you.

[Teikiatsu]

Definitely.
TA/Sonic was one of the more fun and effective combos that I ever played on a defender. Great damage and mitigation both. It really needed it's own AT as it was too controllerish (a Deftroller?) to be called just a defender.

I was fond of Rad/Sonic for damage and mitigation, myself.  Between the sonic -RES and  Enervating Field weakening the opponents and the Defender inherent, Assault, Acc Metabolism boosting damage output, things tended to melt and not do a lot of damage.  A bit of an end hog to start but that's what Stamina and AM were for.

[Arcana]

I was fond of Rad/Sonic for damage and mitigation, myself.  Between the sonic -RES and  Enervating Field weakening the opponents and the Defender inherent, Assault, Acc Metabolism boosting damage output, things tended to melt and not do a lot of damage.  A bit of an end hog to start but that's what Stamina and AM were for.

You can't go wrong with Rad Defenders in general, and Rad/Sonic would be an excellent choice for someone wanting to play a defender.  Within the rules of this particular game, I could only use Radiation Emission once, and I elected to use it in my Ill/Rad controller.  In the spirit of the thread, TA was going to show up somewhere (in my opinion its too good to not use somewhere), and I think given a choice between Ill/TA (also a good controller) and Rad/Sonic or Ill/Rad and TA/Sonic, I leaned towards having the top AV-killer in my pool of characters (and a combination I personally played a lot) and still getting a top notch Defender in TA/Sonic.

Something I did not note but its worth mentioning: Sonic does energy damage which is important to synergizing with TA (because Oil Slick Arrow needs fire or energy damage to ignite it).  There are ways around that (origin powers, epic powers, etc) but its still better to not need them in a "best of" list.

[Ankhammon]

I was fond of Rad/Sonic for damage and mitigation, myself.  Between the sonic -RES and  Enervating Field weakening the opponents and the Defender inherent, Assault, Acc Metabolism boosting damage output, things tended to melt and not do a lot of damage.  A bit of an end hog to start but that's what Stamina and AM were for.

Don't get me wrong, I know the power that combo was capable of. But I tended to not play FotM characters unless I found out about them before the crowd (so Sonic was good for me :) ). And a combo like Rad/Sonic was Fot... well year or two.

I only made two characters ever that had Rad mostly because everyone played it so often. I know it was because it was such a good set, but it made thinks a bit bland when everyone is playing the same thing. One of the reasons I could never get into DCUO.

Heck, it's one of the larger reasons I ended up being a Defender specialist (more of them than anything else).
That and I loved how debuffs worked in CoH. Only time I've found anything as good to play was the Spiritmaster in Aion. Dots and debuffs were always my favorite in any game.

[Arcana]

I only made two characters ever that had Rad mostly because everyone played it so often.

True story: when I rolled my Ill/Rad shortly after release that combination was literally considered the worst controller combo period.  Partially because it worked a little differently then, and partially because players didn't fully appreciate it.

Basically, less hard control in Illusion (true through I23), lackluster damage (true prior to containment), confuse steals XP (true until they changed the XP calculations), terrorize sucks (true until they changed fear mechanics from "run for Mexico" to "stand and quiver"), and radiation is a poor healer wanna-be with silly toggles you had to manage.

Let's just say that eventually Illusion control grew up and made that set more popular, and eventually the playerbase grew up and made radiation more popular.

[Ankhammon]

True story: when I rolled my Ill/Rad shortly after release that combination was literally considered the worst controller combo period.  Partially because it worked a little differently then, and partially because players didn't fully appreciate it.

Basically, less hard control in Illusion (true through I23), lackluster damage (true prior to containment), confuse steals XP (true until they changed the XP calculations), terrorize sucks (true until they changed fear mechanics from "run for Mexico" to "stand and quiver"), and radiation is a poor healer wanna-be with silly toggles you had to manage.

Let's just say that eventually Illusion control grew up and made that set more popular, and eventually the playerbase grew up and made radiation more popular.

That's what separated CoH from every other game out there. We had FotM characters all over the boards and just as many absolutely "lame" characters. Only to find out that when someone actually played them well, those "lame" sets were actually pretty good.

My favorite example was when me and a friend basically made a bet to make characters. Mine was the new Sonic/Sonic set and his was the TA/Arch set. Both were said to be teh suck on the forums.

Tuned out my Sonic/Sonic made buzzsaw killing machines out of just about any pug and his TA/Arch was incredible in pvp and pretty nice solo too.

[Ultraamann]

I always looked for the sets that I rarely saw being played, or the ones that people specifically said sucked.  Those were the ones I liked to roll up and run with.  That's what made CoH so much fun.  You could take even the "bad" powersets and make them fun and effective as hell.

[silvers1]

I always looked for the sets that I rarely saw being played, or the ones that people specifically said sucked.  Those were the ones I liked to roll up and run with.  That's what made CoH so much fun.  You could take even the "bad" powersets and make them fun and effective as hell.

Yeah, I did that a number of times.   Once, when I invited a guy to a team (playing my BS/Dark scrap), he stopped and said "Wow, Ive
never seen anyone play /dark to this high a level."   He was a bit harder to play, but I liked the challenge.

I tended to go more for concept over what was considered FOTM.  I believe /dark became a bit more popular later on once people realized you could
make any defensive powerset fairly decent with the right IO set combinations. 

My DB/Fire though - never could get that combo to work - a mob could sneeze and she would die.

[Clave Dark 5]

Stalker: DB/Nin.  Dual Blades is a very good set in general, although other sets outmatch it in certain areas for most other archetypes.  But for Stalkers it has a very good balance between single target output and AoE (by virtue of Sweeping Strike being a short ranged cone with high DPA).  You also want to avoid sets with DoT (like Spines) or sets that have odd effects that can mess up placates (like Electric's chain effects).  Ninjitsu is another highly underrated set by many, although its strength had supporters.  But to put it in these terms, if Ninjitsu was handed to Scrappers, it would be among the most powerful scrapper secondaries in existence (almost as easy to soft-cap as SR and with a strong reconstruction-like heal). Its version of PB also had psi resistance, which SR scrappers would have killed for (to deal with non-positional psi).  About the only thing SR beats Ninjitsu on is defense debuff resistance (which is incredibly high on SR, making it an excellent set to run things like Incarnate content with).  On stalkers, low health limits Ninjitsu from being as powerful a set as it could hypothetically be on scrappers or brutes, but its still plenty powerful.

(Warning: the following post has no where near Arcana's appreciation and application of mathematics)

My first 50 level villain was a DB/Nin - and that was before the stalker buffs too - terrible build but she was just FUN.  I remember once putting out an LFT comment, something like "DB/Nin stalker LFT" and just getting back laughter (if friendly laughter) in response.  But dammit I stayed the course and I leveled her!  FOR THE FUN.

As I recall, a lot Stalkers forumites appreciated Nin as a solid jack-of-trades set, which I found it to be as well, so I'd definitely recommend it myself as well.  It wasn't flashy (I never did get a chance to try Ice), but it was a pretty useful tool box of odds and ends with all sorts of applications and tricks.  My one Nin regret was not leveling my Staff/Nin blue-side stalker past about 28...