Behold, my melee/support AT you asked for, but my take on it. Genies have to have some fun!
The Guardian
Playstyle: Support/Striker
Powersets: Buff (Primary) / Melee (Secondary)
Innate: Coverage. For the Guardian to do their job effectively, they are often tasked with being in the thick of things. As such, they often need a little bit of the protection they offer to their allies. As such, when applying supportive (buff) powers to allies, the Guardian receives 50-75% effective feedback upon themselves. Additionally, as the Guardian finds herself surrounded, she receives a small max-HP boost per foe to allow her to continue performing her duties.
Guardian Stats (?)
Survivability: 5
Melee Damage: 7
Ranged Damage: 3
Crowd Control: 4
Support: 9
Pets: 2
Primary Powersets: all known except Trick Arrow.(!)
Secondary Powersets: all scrapper except titan weapon.(!)
Limits @ L50:
HP Base: 1204.8 (from Stalker)
HP Maximum: 2088.3 (from Stalker)
Damage Resistance: 75% (Standard)
Damage: 200% at L1, 400% at L21+ (Standard)
Defense: 97.76% at L1, 200.38% at L21+ (Scrapper/Stalker)
Regeneration: 2,100% at L1, 2,500% at L20+ (Brute / Tanker)*
Recovery: 10.42% / second (Defender)
Unless otherwise specified follows the “all others” standard of values. Damage and dam. resist are specified because they’re such big deals for play-style impact with Defense and others.
Ancillary/Patron:
The Guardian should duplicate Scrapper/Stalker for initial proliferation and patron coverage. These gave minor control and ranged abilities suitable for the purpose of ancillary sets on melee striker toons.
Notes:
(?)The scoring was kept close to the current distributions and has a total of 30. Support is weaker than a defender, higher than a corruptor, which is higher than other buff secondary classes. Survivability needed to take a hit to compensate for the support shield sources, mixed in with Coverage adding to that compensation. With melee at a 7, it’s the same output as a tank, but debuff sets would further provide improved numbers from baseline that aren’t immediately perceived in a straight numbers comparison.
(!)Trick Arrow applies a significant amount of “ranged assumption” in play style, includes weapon swapping/drawing and other specific abilities risk a high gimmick feel that may become problematic when centered in melee.
Similar justification to trick arrow for buffing, but also has very slow animations, slower than any other set already paired with a buff powerset from other archetypes.
*the regen rates for scrappers / stalkers is actually higher, which broke my rule of meshing defender caps with scrapper caps in balancing. Because of the supportive nature of sets like empathy and kinetics and a higher proclivity for self heals in buff sets, (should this be attempted) I recommend testing at this level first before including Guardian at those higher rates. Further, the brute is set lower, and is intended to holding agro...
Thoughts: there are some potentially powerful combinations that will shine on farming maps, specifically kinetics/spines, while other riskier combinations might prove counter-intuitive. Some powersets might be too powerful with the melee factor (stares at kinetics) but others would be largely ambivalent (empathy) in melee vs ranged effectiveness.
Coverage seemed odd. I wanted some way for buff powersets that gave shields to shore up the weakness that ST buffs have re: source, but there are fewer powersets that have this than ones that do. Also, there needed to be other ways of benefiting from being in melee without defenses, which led to the HP buff aspect. It’s a start...