Thanks for all the replies everybody! They really helped out.
I did slot up some EndRdx into my attacks and that helped out a lot. I also started only using two builders instead of three, and I hardly ever ran out of endurance. Turning off Athletic Sprint helps too.
I have an alt busy on following the guides to make money. Two people in a row gave her 1,000,000 influence, so she has seed capital. Thank you to those generous supporters of level 2 toons wandering around looking for a DFB. I'm wondering if I should turn down future offers?
I noticed an IO enhancement was going for 88k, and it was only about 50k total to make it at the crafting table. It does seem to take time to run to the SG portal, get into the base, find the crafting table in the gigantic base some SGs have set up. So I guess some people are in a hurry? The crafter toon registered her own SG, with only the default room and crafting table to save some time. And I found the ATO's. Yikes 100 merits. Each. The guides say to convert the Merits to Enhancement Converters and sell on AH, so I'll do that for now.
Looking over a bunch of builds, it seems folks drop Heavy Blow instead of Sweeping Cross. I made up a new build and respecced, dropping Heavy blow and taking Combat Readiness. The plan was to only use sweeping cross on low level stuff, but if Spinning Strike is off cool down, Sweeping Cross gets the nod. The animation for Spinning Strike is pretty cool.
Respeccing did show how many DOs and SOs I had and that most were out of date. I put the out of date ones in inventory and sold the bunch of them.
Some of the builds I found seemed more for level 50 than for leveling. Wait until 47 to take Resist Physical Damage? That's +10% at least in S/L resistance. I fit my defensive powers in early, figure I have four more free respecs.
It seems what with DFB, Posi 1 and 2, the game is set up more to get you to 20 pretty quickly. Then you enter the terrible 20s, when leveling slows down. Or should I not be working through missions in First Ward, and just do Synapse, Yin, and Moonfire TFs? I did find out Synapse TF is pretty long and its best done at +0. Get it done and get the badge and merits. If your team is lucky, Babbage will be right there as you exit a mission and you can kill him.
Again, thanks for all the help.