Outside of hitting your own defense numbers, you'll be fine on a team not having Defender-level buffs and debuffs; it will hardly be noticeable.
Just play which you like (unless easy soft capping is your goal, then go defender ;p)
Because sonic is king and deserves attention always. (As a side note, idk why they don't take drastic changes at this point since we tossed that out the window and put the two shield types into one button for sonic/FF/thermal lol)
That being said, give Regen to frostwork to bridge the gap somewhat from losing max hp, even if it loses the ability to.bypass the Regen cap.
I'm sorry, but powers with 10m cooldowns shouldn't exist. Like, at all.
Power pool or not. This isn't the type of game where that's necessary, and it certainly isn't fun.
I farm solely on torch bearer and it is usually pretty dead. The ae is usually empty too.
I move all my characters to excelsior and it's more active, but it's full of SITTER LF FARM spam