AT Proposal: Melee/Support

• Working Title: "Captain"

Captains lead their squads from the front lines, inspiring allies and terrifying enemies.  Although they are more vulnerable than the warriors they lead, the Captain is every bit as ferocious.

• Inherent: Tactical Advantage

For each enemy up to 10 within radius 15 of the Captain, the secondary effects of their powers such as heals, defense buffs, endurance drains, disorients, etc etc etc are all improved; for each ally in this range, the Captain receives a small bonus to regeneration and defense.

• Discussion

This Archetype is partially built around a problem raised when Ancillary Power Pools allowed strong support characters free-form access to power build-up effects.  PBU and similar powers significantly enhance support archetypes in ways that weren't noticeable when the effect was locked into particular, mostly Blaster, powersets.  Rather than simply making "a scrapper with Defender-level buffs" at the high end or "a defender without ranged attacks" at the low end, this archetype is intended to reward a higher-risk style of play than its "parent" classes.

• Other Notes
   
  
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  • This is affirmatively a DPS class.  Its intended damage scale is similar to Scrappers, but without crits.
    
  • Rather than Taunt powers, this archetype gets an active mitigation power in their primary.  Examples would include a click absorb, a "dodge" power (5s intangibility), parries in sets which do not already have one, or an unresistible AoE knockdown.  An alternative would be to give the archetype a Placate in place of the Taunt, but this doesn't fit well thematically.
    
  • For powers from their secondary, all anchored toggles are anchored on self (negative toggles still only affect enemies).  Every Captain set would have at least one toggle, which would also serve as their mez protection power.
    
  • Initially Captains would be limited to Sonic, Force Fields, Time, Dark, and Radiation.  Some sets like Empathy need reworking to function appropriately for this AT.
    
  • Captains have above average to excellent scaling for all power pools, notably and intentionally including Leadership and Fighting.
    

I like the idea of a melee AT that can support and heal team. Matches well with some concepts I have for strong hand to hand fighters who utilizes their body mastery to support themselves and others.

We already have this, they're called VEATs

We already have this, they're called VEATs

They don't have the mechanical and thematic range of sets that an actual melee/support AT would, though.

We already have this, they're called VEATs

Well, too bad you couldn't go back and get Brutes, Corruptor, and Masterminds unwritten, because we already had melee damage, ranged support, and pets support archetypes.

We already have this, they're called VEATs

 

They don't have the mechanical and thematic range of sets that an actual melee/support AT would, though.

i give everyone on my team 25% defense and 30% damage and have res/recharge/def debuffs out the ass, not to mention having the two best ST melee attacks in the game, the second best PBAoE, and every single one of my attacks does knockdown/knockback

five of my secondary powers directly benefit my team in some way that isn't doing direct damage (the three leadership powers, surveillance, web cocoon)

widows also get mind link and vengeance, which are both mega OP

pretty sure you can call spiders an actual melee/support AT

Yes, you can. I don't disagree on that. They don't have much in the way of nature, sonic, radiation or similar powers, though. Never mind stone or fire powers. I love the psychic ninja paladins but they're not a replacement for a full AT from just purely a design and variety PoV.

I mean a melee/support would be cool but every melee powerset AT has defense secondary for good reason, so you'd need to make an armor/support hybrid set a la VEATs rather than just flextape together scrappers and defenders

FF defenders (as one example) are perfectly capable of being tanky; their biggest problem in melee is lack of mez protection.  That's why I'm proposing to put that into a support toggle.  The inherent and "dodge" add more than enough additional resilience.

This combination has less of a need for armor than Dominators.  But otherwise I do agree -- it would be cool.