Since defenders are so varied, I can only speak for the defender I spend most of my time on, the dark/electricity one. The second char I spend/have spent most of my time on would be the ice/fire blaster, which is unfortunately losing its luster to my new ice/devices blaster and my latest kinetics defender.
I have been wondering why I spend so much time on this defender, and every new alt I make comes across as a toy or distraction before I get lured back onto it. Is it because I enjoy playing a cleric to teams? Considering the fact that I spend 90% of my time soloing, this has to be a rhetorical question with a "no". Do I run an offender build to permit this extensive soloing? The answer is "no" too. I am what I would call a "balanced" build. Being balanced, I find joy in both the challenges of soloing and grouping, and my evolving role in different groups and with different level ranges.
Is soloing boring, repetitive, painful? Not at all.
Perhaps in my late teens/early twenties. At that time, I seriously lacked damage output, something I had exchanged for the ability of damage mitigation. Yet, even with things hitting me one out of ten tries, inevitably, as statistics tell us, there will be that blow the comes through. Or two blows that come through consecutively. My health bar would plunge from green to yellow to orange. And it took forever to kill anything. Bitterly, I watched the blasters and scrapper waltz through their missions, begging for some random scrapper to come help me finish mine. Blasters and scrappers who treated me with contempt and disrespect. Hey, controllers have it harder; I wasn't complaining.
Most of the time, I 'soloed' my boss mobs by playing endurance drain monkey, until it became a slugfest which I won because I was brawling them more often than they were brawling me.
Then I got my gazes and had a few slots to throw into my blasts. And I realised I didn't like to be in melee range with anything where even one or two lucky blows that came through my Acc debuffs could land me in the red, or drop my toggles (no debuff = death). So I respeced out my end drain powers and threw all the slots into holds and blasts.
The defender as an evolving build, changing with the gameplay. Do I feel powerful? Yes. Watch me chain hold a room full of yellow minions *and* the orange-con boss, *and* take them down, one by one, without a single scratch. As long as I have enough endurance (always a problem), everything that is remotely a danger to me is simply frozen in place or debuffed to scenery.
Oh, when I solo, I chop through stuff fast. It takes two cycles of attack for me to kill one white/yellow con minion. Maybe not as fast compared to a damage type, but it's a fair exchange for the my versatility.
I like grouping. When I am grouped with a meelee type, I concentrate on mitigating damage on it. Maybe they don't need me to live, but there's simply less down-time with me around. When I am with a blaster, I control/debuff things and heal up the damage that comes through so they can concentrate on pouring out their ungodly damage without worry. My favorite time comes when I am grouped with another defender or controller. Then I let lose the hidden blaster within me and quite simply, blow stuff up since my "support burden" has been cut by half.
And I haven't got my pet yet.
I don't feel like a cleric at all. There are defender powersets that are very team-oriented, such as force-field and empathy, but there is no need to play those if one doesn't want to be a team-oriented cleric. It's also sad how many defenders focus so much on their support role they forget they have a blasterish secondary. The damage might be capped for a defender, but it is quite enough since there is no urgent need to drop your foes before they one-shot you. So throw a few slots into those blasts, and gain some self-worth outside the team.
Then, when things get too easy, I go onto my blaster. Spending most of my initial gameply as a blaster taught me to be a cunning, self-serving *bleep* of a *bleep*. Anything to stop myself from faceplanting. It taught me how a situation that got out of hand looked, because if it was time for a blaster to turn tail, I had about twice that margin on a defender. Playing a blaster is a pure challenge for me, and I'm having a heyday with my new /dev blaster (so much more fun than that /fire). It's still level 6, but I spend more of my time torturing villains to death (arrest) with caltrops and web grenade than serious levelling. Because it is just so much fun.
Blaster is definitely my second favorite AT. I love how the odds seem so utterly impossible for it to even exist, but somehow your little toon wins through by sheer *bleep* of a *bleep*-ness.
Failed. No matter. Try again. Fail better.
I really have not played that much of other ATs to rank them all. However, my defender is sufficiently controller-ish for me to say I like the ability to control mobs (all my builds are pretty controllerish, and I go for the ice/ blaster over the other blaster primaries I've tried), but I don't care too much for being a group pawn for the first 32 levels of my life, so I will probably never level a controller. I love being a tank too and protecting my squishies. There are a few rare days when I like to just chop stuff at high speed, and at those times I enjoy fooling on a scrapper, but those are rare, rare days.
Which brings us to the "Motivation" part of the posting.
I don't think the enjoyment from just destroying stuff, dealing damage and being heroic is bad. I think it is a good type of motivation to play what archetypes one enjoys playing. Being a pretty introspective person, I do know what motivates me to enjoy playing the things I do. It could be a flaw, but it could be just me.
Power over life and death. Above all, power over other players and their 'life' and 'death'. The huge, unspoken reason why I play defender so much and I took to the tank almost immediately -- my power over the life and death of the other players that are depending on my 'support' or 'squishy protection'. It does not even matter if they do not know the power I am holding over them; I know I have that power.
When there are no players, computer-generated mobs provide a subsititute. Web-grenading them over a field of caltrops and slowly watching their health bars drop, and leisurely one-blasting them when I feel like it -- one expression of it. Chain-holding them or knocking them around - other expressions of it.
I find very little fun in running around high speed shredding stuff up as a solo scrapper or untouchability like a solo lowbie tanker punching my way through stuff.
Maybe I'm just a little sadist at heart. As long as it is expressed through a safe outlet (computer game), there's no real harm in it. As long as I have certain standards of ethics that prevent me from griefing innocent people, no harm done to real people either.
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