5punk

Tanker (Hero)
A Tanker's role in any group is to distract the enemy and soak up the damage. With this in mind, the powers to concentrate on are defensive buffs and taunts. While it may be tempting to try and become a one-man fighting machine by going for the offensive powers, you'll mever match up to the Scrappers and Blasters and only detract from what you do best.
A Tanker should spend the early levels concentrating on defensive powers, as the taunt powers don't come until around 15th level. These are the most important skills you'll have because your chief aim will be to get as many enemies attacking you as possible, allowing the damage dealers to bring them down unmolested. With decent defensive powers you'll be able to hold them off for longer, and you need to be able to soak the damage until your team have finished the bad guys off because escaping if things get hairy will be tricky. Later, by which point your defensive skills should be up to the task, you can concentrate on the powers you need to draw away the enemy. Taunt is essential - it will attract foes to you and away from your team-mates and keep their attention on you. Other useful skills that will allow you to control your opponents are area effect powers that will hold them or slow them down, and teleport foe is always useful for pulling bosses out so they can be dealt with.

The Tanker's main priorities then:

1) Protect yourself - a dead Tanker is a useless Tanker
2) Protect your team - your primary role is to prevent your friends being attacked
2) Crowd control - manipulate your opponents so that they are easier to handle

Scrapper (Hero)
The scrapper is basically a mixture of blaster and tanker. Primary powers give it the ability to provide damage on a similar scale to a blaster, and the secondary powers enable the scrapper to secondary tank if the main tank is bogged down in baddies. As scrappers usually have very few AOE attacks they are usually best taking on the harder enemies and letting the tank / blaster sort out the minions. Although the scrapper is harder than most classes you must still be aware that you are very vunerable if you wade ignorantly into battle. I found this out from personal experience
Choosing powers is not simple, If you choose all primary powers you will find that you will get killed very quickly, and if you choose too many secondary powers you will find yourself waiting for your few primary powers to recharge.

Main Priorities:

1) DPS - work out strategies for causing the most damage
2) Secondary tank - Keep an eye on the softies of the group and be prepared to help them out
3) Protect Yourself - You can't kill the enemy if they kill you first

Mastermind (Villain)
The Mastermind archetype is devoted to the control of a group of minions (pets) to do the fighting. He's a strange fish, with no equivalent in Heroes, but controlling your little gang can be very satisfying. The Mastermind has an offensive primary skillset and a support secondary, but to my mind the expendable troops you get are better in a tanker role - bogging the enemy down with numbers. With this in mind, your powers should concentrate on enhancing or supporting your pets and then pushing the odds a little more in their favour by debuffing your enemy. The secondary skillsets, as already mentioned, can provide some useful support skills too so don't ignore these as you'll be spending a lot of time hanging around at the back. Might as well use that time to help out the squishies.

Priorities then:

1) Buff your pets - they're going to be in the thick of it. Don't mistake this for keeping them alive though - they're more expendable than your teammates and you can create more after the fight.
2) Debuff your opponents.
3) Support your team.

Controller (Hero)

Controllers are essentially crowd control. Although they have a less obvious effect, with other classes doing more damage and healing better, they can actually increase a teams effectiveness an incredable amount. They do this basically by making the enemies less good: Either by holding them so they cant attack, debuffing them so they go all rubbish, or confusing them so they attack each other (and buff your teammates ). They are generally long ranged, sitting at the back of the team messing things about. However, the different power sets for the controller make for some very different styles of play, with some being more offensive, others giving some healing abilities and still others having some pet powers.

Priorities:

1)Crowd control. Making it easier for the rest of the team to do thier respective jobs.
2)Buffing your team. Some controller powers buff your team mates, so make sure you are targetting the right areas for the most benifit.
3)Blasty type damage. Although its not their main thing, controllers do get enough damaging powers to make them usefull in a scrap.

Blaster (Hero)

As a blaster, you exist wholly to do *RANGED* damage and keep the healers occupied.

Blasters are *Very* high damage, but the trade-off for this is that blasters are significantly more damageable than a tunnock's tea cake that's been left in the sun. as such, blasters should try to avoid attacking first, as they'll often find themselves very, very dead, very, very fast.

Despite the squishyness of blasters, they can be very rewarding to play due to the high damage, and reasonably lazy pace. (as they usually have a healer looking after them and they should be way out of the way of the main mob)

Weaponry ranges from bow & arrows to an assault rifle or various flavours of slightly more magic damage, basically all a set of ranged attacks in either:

Single Target: usually a single shot or burst fire to hit one target
Cone: Fires in a cone (angle depends on the skill) to hit many targets at once.
AoE (area of effect): think grenade, or explodey fireball and suchlike.


Priorities:

1)Killing shit
2)Killing shit that's killing your healer bitches/tank.
3)Sniping shit (to pull one or two baddies away from a larger group)


Other Notes:
YOU ARE NOT A SCRAPPER OR A TANK. you do get some short range or melee powers, these are handy for defence (they're often powerful knockbacks to stop people punching you in the skull)

Don't make a huge blaster, they can block hallways and make life difficult for tanks etc to get by (which will make you dead)

Defender (Hero)

Really, the clue is in the name. The purpose of a Defender is to protect and buff your team (or in some cases to de-buff the enemy). Attacking shouldn't come into the equation unless you're soloing or on a small team. I can't really stress this enough - every time you attack it's time spent not healing or buffing your team mates (plus it attracts unwanted aggro). Buffing should be constant - not just as someone is about to die.

Being a Defender can be very frustrating, especially the team splits and people get in over their heads, requiring you to run all over the map healing people. However, it also very pleasing to a team at full health mowing down a large group of bad guys, buffed to do extra damage, not having to worry about endurance, and seeing the enemy de-buffs fail.

Prioities:

1) Buffing - it makes your job much easier if your team isn't dying so readily

2) Healing - this sort of has it's own sub set of priorities with regards who to heal first. Blasters are very squishy and their high damage AoE attacks attract a lot of aggro, keep an eye on them (also Warshades and Peacebringers more or less fall into the same category). Controllers are also a bit squishy, their holding powers generally stop baddies from hurting them too much, but they are always susceptible to ranged attacks. Tankers take most of the aggro and therefore most of the damge, if they drop then the baddies turn their attention to everyone else (remember though, Tankers have much higher HP than other archetypes - a Tanker at half health is much safer than a Blaster who's health bar looks the same). Scrappers are very resiliant, with lots of nice perks to keep them alive. Due to the differences in how Tankers and Scrappers attack, Scrappers usually won't have has many people attacking them and therefore are more able to hold their own in a fight.

3) De-buffing enemies. This is probably as much attacking as you should do as a Defender in a group. Seriously, if you want to attack things don't be a Defender.

Good power pools to have as a Defender are Fitness (Health and Stamina are a godsend), Stealth (it's good for when you're having to heal people in the middle of a large fight) Teleport (teleport friend is good for getting fallen comrades from the middle of large groups).

Roman Totale wrote:Stuff

I think that mostly applies to healing type defenders (as that's what your experience is)

It's worth noting that non healy defenders can be useful and moderately high damage, but basically, you're mostly just fucking the enemy over using other stuff, it's almost like being the bastard child of a controller and a blaster.

However, Healy type defenders are probably the most useful to a balanced team. (as such, you'll never have a problem getting on a team)