Why not give Defenders/Corruptor melee powersets?

Is there any reason defenders and corruptors, or even dominators could not have the mellee sets like martial arts, claws; etc...?

I can see how it might be troublesome to give scrappers/tankers;etc..a ranged powerset, but mellee for defenders seems harmless.

Or am I missing something obvious?

Because they have ranged primary/secondary damage powersets, and have REALLY poor melee damage mods.

Now, making a new AT that is buff/debuff and melee damage would be okay (and I would honestly like this a lot). But just giving Defenders and Corruptors a melee damage set isn't as easy as you think.

This is weird. I woke up this morning thinking about the exact same thing.

For some strange reason, I really wanted a Martial Arts/Time whatever. It seems to me like it could actually be a new archetype: Scrapper-esque primary, Corruptor-esque secondary. (although simply giving melee sets to existing ranged AT's would probably be less complicated?)

edit: Aett_Thorn typed over me ... didn't mean to seem argumentative about giving existing sets melee power sets. sorry.

Defenders can get melee powers through Epic powersets; Thunderstrike, Total Focus.

To clarify; I was suggesting the option to take, for example, Martial arts instead of Electric Blast as an offensive powerset.

If the main issue is ranged vs mellee damage settings, I would think you could change that fairly easily.

What you are "actually" asking for is "another" AT. That is why.

1) Existing support sets are meant to work at range. They are full of powers, some that corruptors are forced to take, which are extended knockbacks, repulsion auras and fields, huge areas of fear (rain), or that require the user move to the center of their team mates to stand between the melee and ranged users, etc. Some sets like Storm Summoning are completely backwards for pairing melee, with non-self heals, self stealth, and tons of knock back.

2) Comic book supporty type heros and villains don't LIKE melee combat. Name five melee support characters, hero or villain. I'm sure you could wedge one square peg into the round hole and argue for one or two characters being 'melee support' because you saw them throw a brawl out one time, but give me five and I won't call it nitpicking.

3) Thematically it's an awkward thing to play a support role from melee range. Melee combat is engaging and in-your-face, usually when heros and villains fight in hand to hand combat they're not doing much else. Maybe two melees going on next to eachother will have a combatant in one toss a weapon to his ally or take a shot at the enemy engaged in the other fight, but that's about it. Many melee sets have a single ranged attack for this like hurl or impale.

4) The previous experiment to see how many players actually would go support/melee largely flopped. Peacebringers get melee attacks with built in KD, adjust to support the team rather than exaggerate it, and have a melee hold plus a heal. Everyone plays WS's for other reasons. Granted this is a subjective point that could be argued forever, so I will punctuate with IMHO. This is just IMHO.

5) Redraw. The community at large has developed an aversion to drawing weapons, and drawing them seems to be cemented into the games programming. Once we get staff fighting I think scrappers sets with weapons will outnumber non-weapon sets something like 10-6. Brutes and tankers do a bit better.
In fairness if you pooled all the non-weapon sets across all three melee AT's and finally added Radiation Melee that would be around twice as many primary options as MM's have even with Beast Mastery, so I guess I just argued myself out of #5... >.>

6) Melee sets all include taunts, or placate/assassin strikes. They would need all-new powers made and balanced specifically for the AT's they were ported to. This doesn't rule out giving them melee power sets on it's own, but it takes it down from 'just give it to them' down to 'we need to design all new powers for that'.















But it would still be totally sweet if they did this.
I would roll a Radiation / Axe for sure! XD

I will always be nostagic for the 'what could have been'

If my memory is any good, the Alpha version of CoH had no Archetypes, and you just picked any two powersets as primary secondary.

I assume that was changed because everyone would have taken Fireblast and Invulnerabilty

But the idea was awesome.




That being said, I love how much proliferation has been done.

This one is off the rails.

Please just give us Dominator assault powers as a primary and Buffs/Debuffs secondary(or flip flop primary/secondary). I would love to play a Thorn Assault/Poison or a Cold/Icy Assault Character.

I've always wanted to see a melee/support style AT. VEATs are along that vein and look at how awesome they are.