To recap what I've been up to and to share some additional findings I present the following:
Yesterday I had the idea to run a build focused on shoulder charge since you can easily have it up all of the time with the revelry tonic. This is actually already possible (Arc tree only with Insurmountable Skullfort which refunds melee energy on kill) but my wild idea was to use the melee tonic to take the place of Skullfort and run with Mk.44 Stand Aside's which grant an overshield during sprint AND refund a portion of the melee energy if you get a kill. And that last part is important, as you will see in a minute.
As I have already stated, the results, once I started using MIDA and focusing on playing well instead of just trying to force shoulder charge, were impressive. MIDA takes care of the range and shoulder charge + SMG can be used to initiate (and I was actually able to kill 2 or 3 person groups with this last night although I probably got somewhat lucky) and facilitate some really aggressive play. Yesterday's results in IB were 10 wins and 2 losses whereas the night before, running a more normal build, were 5 wins and 8 losses. And my average KD (not KDA) across the 12 games was 2.5 compared to the previous 12 games which was 1.36. That's not a huge sample size and more testing is needed but the early results are impressive and even more than that, it was really, really fun.
But what if you didnt have the melee tonic? Would this build still be viable? It would depend on how quickly you can get shoulder charge (or hammer strike or shield bash because it works with all 3) back under the most optimal circumstances. It turns out that it's like this: Mk.44 Stand Aside's appear to refund 50% of your melee energy if you get a melee kill while using them and if you load up on Impact Mods in every Mod slot you will get 100% of your melee energy back in 15 seconds. I know because I just tried it using Sunbreaker and the Tempered Metal buff lasts 15 seconds on ability kill and it wore off the same instant the melee charge came back.
That is really good news. That means that 95% of the stuff I was doing last night is doable without the melee tonic as there were only two or three instances where I shoulder charged someone and then immediately shoulder charged someone else in less than 15 seconds. Usually it was shoulder charge, get the kill, reset positioning/hunt for next target and then decide if it was another charge candidate or if I was better off just using my weapons.
But still, for a build to run around with in Quickplay (and when I say run I mean run as you spend A LOT of time sprinting and being really aggressive) I think it's completely viable. I wouldn't take it into Comp as I think it thrives off of the chaos of 6v6 but man, talk about bringing the fun back to Quickplay. I actually did not want to stop playing last night and I am actually looking forward to playing Quickplay (IB) today! And I really can't think of any better endorsement than that.