Like a lot of people on the Weapon Skills board, I've been mulling over ways that the melee weapon skill lines could be better, and it occurred to me that one big issue is that most of the abilities from the melee weapon trees do very little to help out the rest of the group. It also occurred to me that from a fluff/lore standpoint, the idea of a group of highly trained soldiers, adventurers, and throat-cutters *not* working together as a group just doesn't make any sense.

To remedy this, passive skills like the following could be implemented (take the numbers with a grain of salt):
Shieldmate (1H&S): Allies within 3m/6m have their armor rating increased by 2.5%/5%.
Distracting Swipes (2H): Allies within 5m/10m have their weapon damage increased by 10/20.
Shadow Dancer (DW): Allies within 3m/6m have their attack speed increased by 4%/8%.
These passives would act like constant area buffs for your allies, and, most importantly, these buffs would stack with the same buffs from other players. So if your trial group suddenly needs to stack up and you have two tanks with this ability, your entire 12-man group would see a 10% increase in their armor ratings.

These passives would encourage melee players to work together to take down targets, since the group would become increasingly more powerful with each person working together; this would be even more true if these passives weren't given a target cap.

This is just an idea that I had, and there's probably something about it that I haven't considered. Still, I think that social melee passives would be something cool that those brave enough to go toe-to-toe with Tamriel's nastiest creatures could call their own.

Thoughts?