See my post titled Mayor McCheeselord for a partial example of a troll build.
How it works out is that a troll build can *soak up* more damage than any other build. They don't deflect it with high armor any more. I'm eyeballing it here, but it would seem that they will be able to sustain about 4-5 solid hits in combat, done right, compared to the 2-3 most characters can absorb. Not accounting for Stupid Edge Tricks, that is.
On the other side, a toon with high reaction high intuition character is your best bet for not taking damage in the first place, since that's your defense roll. You'll also want a basket of Stupid Edge Tricks to use, so you can maximize your Edge gains and spends when dodging, evading, etc. High athletics is good too.
Assuming you can figure out how all the various edge powers work, evading damage is the way to deal with combat now. Slow trolls will now get hit pretty often, even if they usually gain Edge for the hit, and have more wound penalties at the upper end. They also will need more healing way more often, and if they are cybered, you get penalized there too.
I suppose this was a way to incentivize even the supertrolls against standing in damage all the time, but it's a reality breaker that armor has no measurable effect when they do. All armor (DR in general) does is better ensure a consistent Edge recharge rate if attacked, which means you have to be standing in damage to obtain it. Not a great trade off.
Mayor McCheeselord the Troll will almost always gain Edge when attacked, but all that does is to unlock the full array of Edge options when it happens. I can do Stupid Edge Tricks on whoever attacks me first to best soak whatever that attack might be. Who knows, maybe I will survive that first grenade after all. If I don't use dice tricks, I'll take most of what anyone else would take anyway. Even if the Edge saves my hoop on the first attack, it's a feeble argument that my armor actually much the lift there, because what really did it was my existing Edge pool getting nudged from "most of the options" to "all of the options". The table experience of armor is minimal, even if the game effect is to unlock superior options. Once I make a 5 Edge spend, then all those options vanish until I have stood in damage for at least 3 more turns to recharge it (assuming no other environmental factors can help me out).
It strongly feels like the character that can evade damage will enjoy combat more. Standing there eating damage, even if you can still function mostly fine afterwards (due to Pain Editors or what all) is less fun than taking 0 damage. Taking 0 damage is what made the unstoppatrolls appealing. That's gone in this edition. If you want to have the take 0 damage experience, speed builds are your only route to go. Even then, your dice pool max is not ever going to be much higher than your attacker's dice pool (as far as I can tell), so Edge Tricks and a high Edge Pool will be the thing that lets you have the experience when your dice go colder than your attackers. Adepts may have some option for exceeding normal limits because they can buy skill dice.
Go with high Attributes priority, and dump points into Reaction + Intuition and put meta points into Edge for the build. Research the adept powers and cyber/bioware to see which gives you the best defensive options for Edge tricks. As a secondary consideration, figure out a couple game plans for when you get hit anyway. Do you want more damage boxes to take a bigger hit? Do you want damage comps to prevent penalties so you have a better chance to keep dodging at your baseline while you run away? Do you want auto-injectors to dump drugs into you when your biomonitor implant says it's time? Or maybe you are just going to lean on the team's healer, and go in as an adept who is easy to heal.
Combat in 6 has reduced reward options without Edge. You won't get spectacular hits (without Edge) and you won't make incredible dodges or soaks (without Edge). The balance in 6 is around enforcing mediocrity as the baseline, and exceeding it only through the metamechanic, not through something you inherently built into an optimized state by the raw numbers of dice (other than optimizing how you can spend or gain the metacurrency).
Dodgey McEdgepants will have more inherent rewards between combats than a Mayor McCheeselord too. You'll forever be struggling to heal up the Mayor by any means and paying the downtime tax waiting for him to heal between encounters. You sideline your bullet sponge after every combat, or else see him degrade in effectiveness long before you get to the climax of the game (forget doing ticking clock runs with the Mayor).
Dodgey ends up with less hits on the board, stays in combat longer since he's better at dodging, and spends less downtime healing up the lesser damage he took. If he's an adept, he can be healed immediately by magic, and get back into the next fight like it's a video game. If he's cybered though, that effect is strongly reduced, and he ends up paying the downtime tax to get back in the fight at full capacity. So once again, in all aspects of that build, magic rules, mundanes drool.
Enjoy Magicrun!