New melee set.

Depends on how far back you go. It depends pretty heavily on whether you consider the beginning of Dragonball to be the equivalent to level 1 of the character (or consider him to already have been at a reasonable level at that point) or considering Dragonball Z to be the starting point. Even so, the fact that you would call the Kamehameha a special attack indicated that it wouldn't be one of his low tier attacks because it doesn't form the foundation of his combat style. Those attacks would be his normal punches and kicks.

Incidentally, my long term hope is that the new Staff is good enough that I can just drop MA off my main and alts and just beat up bad guys with a stick.

Didn't they learn their lesson with Blasters?

I took it to be more of a Siphon Power effect, but I have no inside info on that. I just mentally mapped Kinetic Melee onto Kinetics.

As cool as KM sounds I am still more psyched about the staff/polearm set being on the docket.

You're thinking of this post, wherein Castle said that making your attacks stronger the more you are hit is "on the right track". "On the right track" can mean all kinds of things, from all of the attacks having some kind of SR-resistance style base damage scaling to the damage bonus not being attached to you being hit but rather you hitting targets.

I'm doubting normal punches and kicks are lower tier attacks considering everyone has them. Those would be the equivalent of 'brawl'. Now combining flight and brawl for those over-the-top smash-the-guy-in-a-mountain attacks would probably be something of a tiered attack.

Considering when the attack was obtained and how multi-functional it is, is why I'd say the ki blasts along with the kamehameha are low tier special (primary/secondary) attacks.

I would have to agree with this. The thing about DBZ is the power-ups. A kamehameha wave from Chibi Goku is nothing compared to one from SSJ3 Goku.

Also, the Spirit Bomb killed Buu and Turless from the "tree of might" movie. The only one that was killed by kamehameha was Cell and Bojak. Everyone else was killed by a counter blast or a super punch to the gut. Not including those that were killed by non students of turtle style. ie: trunks and vegeta

If I would consider anything Goku's tier 9, it would be the Dragon Fist Assault since its the last attack he learned.

As far as kin melee, I keep thinking about Sebastian Shaw for some reason. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Shaw_(comics).