Ambush Farm Support

I'm sort of curious, with the somewhat new advent of fire enemy ambush farming, support* characters often don't play much of role. Reason being, even at the defense cap, the damage coming in from an aggro cap of +3/4's (all with high damage fire) WILL kill you eventually.

So to support the man plowing the fields, what is the best AT - power set?
(without being another damage taker)

In old farms, I found sonic best covered all the holes kin lacked (old most common farmers being fire/kins) it gave resistance to stack over the def cap, and -res that traveled with the farmer, no anchoring or reapplying required, along with some -defense.

Now, Sonic still has one thing going for it that no other support types do. It's Ally anchor res debuff draws no aggro, and can be kept toggled on at quite long distances (long enough to keep your character out of the way of ambushes). That allows the farmer to farm EXACTLY 30% faster, because that's all it offers, since fire brutes/tanks are the top farmers these days, you're not adding anything with +res since they're already hard capped.

Other than forcefields (whose contribution is obvious) are there any other aggro free support* types, or sorts that can somehow magically handle it?

* By support, I mean buff/debuff/control or indirect damage, basically anything to make farms go faster without being the farmer yourself.

Well, most of the people running these will already be sitting at the resist cap (for fire at least) and the defense softcap, and the enemies don't debuff resistance or defense. Therefore, the only support you can offer is buffs to kill speed (damage, recharge, to-hit) and healing/regen/recovery, or debuffs. Since you want aggro-free, that discounts most debuffs. Your best bet then is going to be empathy or pain domination.

Empathy can be used by a defender, which will mean your heals will heal more. Other than that, the sets are relatively similar, with pain domination having more damage buffs and empathy having more recharge buffs. Overall I'd say go with empathy, and aim for perma adrenalin boost, but either set will be good for what you want to do.

As soon as the ambush is triggered, every player character on the map gets aggro. Even dead toons. There are no aggroless players on that sort of map. For consitant buffs, the best bet is to have the farmer take veng and he can buff off of your door sitting dead body.

I predict the tears that happen once this sort of mish gets fixed will be very tasty indeed.

I'm not speaking canonically, but my gut tells me a character who boosts kill rate with attacks of his or her own is more useful than general support in this specific instance. Support can help some, but killing stuff is where the value in even bothering with this kind of mission is.

This is assuming the "farmer" has the ability to survive the enemies in the first place (i.e. probably soft capped at a minimum). If that condition isn't met, I would bet on Empathy first. But the main character would need purples to boost up to the soft cap.

The reason I put stock in Empathy and not a lot else is that part of the reason this mission works is that the lead can swallow inspirations as they come raining in, leading to very high resistance values even on characters who don't always have it. However, you can't eat a pill for the +100% recharge in AB, and the sheer survivability of that power helps a lot. If not Empathy, I'd say Kinetics for recharge and kill speed. This mission really is about mowing enemies down at maximum rates.

(Note that if the mission is done on "basic" settings, with bosses turned off, my vote switches to some kind of Ice Controller with Arctic Air. That's because Arctic Air has few limits on AoE caps, and the masses of confused enemies chew into each other. A Plant Dominator can do this to some extent with bosses on, but it's not quite the same trick.)

Just die near the farmer and pass red inspirations to him. Combine stuff as needed to make more reds.

Im not very skilled at AE, what map do you use?

I do this map with a Arch/MM blaster.

Pop Aim and Concentrate, RoA, Drain Pysche, The PBAoE from MM (forget the name), Explosive Arrow...repeat

These aren't an exploit in the sense that they aren't taking advantage of an unintended glitch in the system such as the rikti communicators, level 10 GM mastermind farms or monkeys. This is no more exploitive than making a high fire resist fire/kin for the Praetorian Demon mish. Since AE farming in general is frowned upon though, the first 2 rules of any farm you like is DON'T TALK ABOUT IT ON THE FORUMS!
It also boggles the mind that you're going to make a toon to be PL'd just to 'help out' with PL'ing, presumably 'helping' by being an extra body to lower the exp per kill. This has Freedom Atlas Park AE baby written all over it.