I wanted a Heroic counterpart, a "Commander" who could lead Wyvern, Longbow or PPD or maybe even a flock of superhero sidekicks, rather than just allowing players to choose to make a blueside MM. The Rogue/Vigilante paths would still be there, but Masterminds should have started as villains and Commanders should have started as heroes.
Outside of a world with unlimited resources, I don't see the point. That would be like asking for a heroic corruptor that is just like corruptors but start on the blue side. While it makes sense conceptually, it doesn't really make sense from a gameplay perspective.
Sidekicks was an idea I toyed around with. I had this idea that superheroes (and villains) could unlock and acquire a sidekick as a form of epic power upon reaching level 50. There would have to be strict limits on what the sidekick could do, because giving everyone a pet in City of Heroes given its game mechanics would be potentially game breaking. In fact I was experimenting with the idea in Architect beta, and it was clear that "friend" NPCs could get ridiculously out of control extremely quickly. So much so that the devs placed very complex limits on what NPCs could do to help players in AE missions.
Probably more importantly it would dilute the gameplay uniqueness of controllers. And in a world of finite resources and replay-focus, I felt most of them should be spent on expanding the world of gameplay rather than replicating gameplay in different contexts. There were still lots of things no archetype could do or was focused on.
Inventing an entire new archetype is expensive, but I had two ideas for doing so that would be "relatively" cheap. The first was a red-side archetype based on the concept of vampiric energy drain and transfer. The primary would be modified versions of some blaster primaries - dark blast, energy blast, electric blast, ice blast, psychic blast, sonic blast in particular. The powers would work similarly, but they would have a new effect where they would heal or buff the attacker or the attacker's team mates or both. Think powers like Life Drain or Fulcrum Shift (not necessarily that powerful though). The secondary would be blaster manipulation sets, basically unmodified. They would in effect be the buff/heal version of Dominators, but work functionally more like Controllers (where Controller offense is also their control, this archetype would use its offense for buff/heal). The powers basically already exist, they just need balancing of their secondary effects and some thought into archetype modifiers. Something close to corruptors, probably. This would not be "easy" per se, but far easier than creating a new archetype totally from scratch.
On the hero side, I was thinking about a much more complex archetype: the melee stealth controller. Modified stalker secondaries as the primary, modified controller primaries as the secondary but with powers truncated to melee range or PBAoE, and new stealth mechanics. The novel idea is that stealth allows interesting alpha strike control, and control mitigates attacks breaking stealth. And no pets: every melee control set would get pets replaced with something more like mass confusion.
I doubted these ideas would go anywhere, but they were reference points for the notion that even without inventing radical new powers (like shape changing or things like that) there were still many areas of capability the existing archetypes didn't overlap. I would have preferred continuing to extend the game in those directions than filling in the small gaps in between the existing archetypes which are there in part to keep the archetypes from blurring together in the first place.
