Weapons:
The Cutter series sounds ideal to what you are looking for. When I first started, I'd been looking for a similar role, and rather found my place with this line of sword.
What with the slight attack nerf the series in general got some time ago, the damage output is not as high as it used to be - but the swords are still rather usable.

Just don't go swinging recklessly with full combos, and trying a charge attack head-on will usually lose you bars. Otherwise you're fine.
- Vile Striker upgrade path for the Poison debuff and less-situational use than the other path.

Protip: Use your shield a lot to safely break your combos and push back monsters. Hold down the shield button during the charge attack to have a sort of "shield charge", which will push enemies away and minimize the window of vulnerability. It's not perfect, but you'll see what I mean if it's tried.

For guns, the Antigua line seems to fill the niche, though it's difficult to obtain. 6-shot revolver sort of blaster, but does piercing damage.
- Silversix upgrade path to still do normal damage against Constructs, allowing you to snipe down Gun Puppies from a safe range.

Bombs are good debuff and support tools, giving DoA and crowd control. However, bombs hardly show their potent potential until the 4 and 5* upgrade. There's not really a bomb that would fit in with what you're looking for, but Fiery Vaporizers are always great. Just set one, stand in the middle with your shield up to bait them, then let them light ablaze.

Status:
You will usually just see Stun from Lumbers, and the breath attack of normal Skellies. Primarily Lumber attacks, which are easy enough to evade. Annoying, not top-tier bad, but hold that shield up and hope you don't get mauled in your slow-motion state.

Freeze is primarily bothersome when you are running solo; when the ice thaws naturally, damage will be taken. If a teammate were to swipe at it just once, you're freed with no penalty.

As for Sleep; I've yet to realize any monster that inflicts this, and as it is, (as far as I know), it basically does nothing.

No, you don't want cutter, cutter is a horrible weapon now. The combo takes forever and the charge attack leaves you immobile for even longer. Also, the damage is abysmal with the new nerf, even my unique Dread Venom Striker with High damage bonus vs Undead does less damage than my Gran Faust against skellies. (And GF suffers a damage penalty against them due to them resisting shadow damage.) No matter what you're doing with the cutter it can be done better by something from the Calibur or the Spur line depending on the job.

For emphasis on mobility I'd recommend a Spur as your 'fast' melee weapon. It does good enough damage early on and excellent damage for any tier once you upgrade it to a Winmillion. Furthermore, every attack of the combo has you lunge forward a good bit, making it a very good weapon for moving both you and your enemies around whilst dealing damage- mobility being very important to avoiding attacks from other enemies and key to defeating others. (For example, with a Spur combo you can shove a bomb gremlin away from his bombs whilst attacking him. The Spur is good for Gremlins in general because they love to dodge backward when you melee attack, but with the spur you can just lunge forward with your combo and get them anyway.) Furthermore, the full combo of the Spur series only consists of 3 hits, and comes out nearly twice as fast as the full combo of the Cutter series. This is EXTREMELY important because only the last hit of ANY melee combo interrupts enemy attacks/knockdowns/flinches and also deals extra damage. The cutter combo takes so bloody long that you can NEVER reliably interrupt enemy attacks using it, and thus you're usually forced to cut your combo short at 2 hits to block an enemy attack, whereas with the Spur and some attack speed you can practically stunlock several enemies until they're dead. Even if you don't quite need the lunging of the Spur series, the Cutter is still outclassed by the Calibur family for this exact reason. (Also the Calibur does much more damage, and actually has a useful charge attack.)

The perfect supplement for a mobile, melee-heavy character is the Freeze status. Freeze both keeps an enemy immobile, AND keeps them from turning. This means that if you're standing behind or too far away from a frozen enemy they are incapable of touching you. (Or dodging attacks, for that matter.) By taking advantage of the Freeze status you can keep everything off your tail while you do whatever you want. For this reason I recommend the Freezing Vaporizer bomb line, because it can semi-instantly produce the freeze status across a mob of just about any size as long as they're close together, and render the entire group useless. If you manage to upgrade it all the way to a Shivermist Buster, you'll have the single best crowd control weapon in the entire game.

Finally there are two more tools you'll want in your disposal; a greatsword and a ranged weapon. Greatswords are extremely important to the game because they have the longest range of any melee weapon, and a significant knockback on both the first and the second attack in their combos. These are basically a necessity for keeping your personal space bubble empty and opening pathways to move through. Any greatsword can play this role, Troika's line being the cheapest, though if you fork out the money the Sealed Sword family does much more damage and if you make a Divine Avenger you also gain a ranged bombardment in the form of a charge attack. (Divine Avenger is extremely good to use with the Shivermist Buster, because you can freeze crowds of enemies in place and force them to eat repeated charge attacks for extremely high area damage.) As for ranged damage, you'll probably want a gun simply for the ability to kite properly. DO NOT GET AN AUTOGUN because you are forced to stand still while firing it, I believe the Pummel Gun family has this issue as well. Try getting a Blaster or an Alchemer, or maybe investing in a Antigua if you can get the money/tokens for one. (Though a Sealed Sword would be much more worthwhile than any of these.)

Though Spur, currently, would not be the superior choice either, due to the pointless charge attacks and enemies blocking + evading once the sword is at Winmillion (they sure don't like the short range projectile disc each swing shoots out.)

Winmillion is viable in itself, but I wouldn't reccomend starting with the series. Cutter is comparably fine in the first stretch, but by the end, other swords do hit harder.

Eh, check it for yourself Skwiziks:
http://forums.spiralknights.com/node/1752
Try both if you can, or must.

Ohh,
>opinions.

the stun guns are weak and and only stun at charged shots. go for a freezing alchemer