Having gone through various sets of strings from different manufacturers throughout the years, I always keep coming back to the D'addario XL series. In my experience, they have outperformed strings many times their price and their quality seems very consistent.
There are better sounding and longer lasting strings, but for the price, I'd say nothing beats these. The 10-52 is my preferred set for guitars with around 25 inch scale length in E or Drop D tuning.