wassup everyone and welcome to a more general build video based on my thorough testing of melee 3.0 and seeing where the build meta sort of settles. This videos going to deal with what I feel are the 3 main builds that came out of melee 3.0 and when to use them. I've done videos on those weapons I thought were truly outstanding, and while theres a tonne of other very very good melee weapons, the kronen prime and the fang prime just to grab 2 off my head, its a bit pointless to spam out videos for them all when they essentially all boil down to the same few builds.

So with that out of the way, lets take a look at what is extremely likely to be by far the most used build and that is the one that focuses around building combo and using powerful acolyte mods. Funny thing about this is that honestly, pure status weapons are really terrible right now, so realisticly, no matter what the crit, and honestly, no matter what the status, this is going to end up being the best build for those weapons, even if they aren't traditionally what we would have called crit weapons.

So, the build. First mod is going to cause some debate, so lets talk about it here. Condition overload. Now, there are some saying that primed pressure point is a better choice than condition overload. Unfortunately, so much here has been taken out of context, so lets quickly address that. In a straight comparison, primed pressure point is 165% more damage, condition overload is 120% per status proc. So at 0 procs and 1 proc, primed pressure point is better. However, at 2 procs onwards, condition overload takes over. So as a straight up comparison, if you compare the 2 mods, its easy to see how primed pressure point looks attractive.

And admittedly, there is a window where primed pressure point is better than condition overload. Its that window where primed pressure point is still 1 shotting enemies. However, when a weapon with primed pressure point stops 1 shotting, CO takes over and actually kind of runs away with it, and the thing is, that honestly, when armour is involved, thats not a particularly large window. The thing is that at higher level, when you aren't 1 shotting, literally every stance has one or more forced procs spread between its combos, many having two or three, meaning thats always 1 or more procs added into your condition overload stack. Then you have to take into account multi-hitting strikes in the combo, the impact that weeping wounds has, especially since any weapon that is 19% status or above is hitting 100% status and you start getting a rather different outcome, especially when you start scaling into higher level content.

So theres a couple times where primed pressure point does come out ahead, mostly on status immune enemies like liches or the wolf, and in that window where you are still 1 shotting enemies. If you are looking to go into harder content, CO quite frankly runs away with it.

In the case of running both, the problem is that since they are both additive damage mods, you are far better off dropping one of them for a multiplicative mod like gladiator might, the ability to hit more targets with range mods, attack speed to hit everything faster or even a support mod like healing return. Having both on ends up being a bit of a waste of a modslot. Changing it for an elemental like in the example that everyone is quoting, yes, is not the way to go, however, there are plenty of better mods that make switching from both of these mods, to one, way stronger.


From then on, its a fairly standard crit build. Blood rush for crit chance as our combo goes up, organ shatter for crit damage, berserker for attack speed on crit. full elemental damage with our primed fever strike and shocking touch because we're going to up our status chance with weeping wounds, which is an insane mod now.

Now its important to note here how both weeping wounds and blood rush only work on your base crit or base status chance and not your modded one. So adding a dual stat elemental and status chance mod loses you a tonne of elemental damage, and doesn't really improve the weapon a whole lot. You are better doubling down on the elemental damage and using weeping wounds. The same kind of goes for crit chance, if you are a combo build like this, going blood rush as well as a base crit mod is a bit of a waste of that modslot, and even with how strong sacrificial steel is now, blood rush comes out on top every time.

The final mod is a bit of a weapon dependent one and where you can customise slightly. Primed reach is pretty much a fantastic option here. I feel people are sleeping on how good the change to the ranged mods is to the shorter ranged weapons, because the longer range ones aren't as out of touch as they used to be. Landing more hits on more enemies and more reliably is fantastic and almost always a great option.

Then you could do gladiator might for more crit damage, plus that gladiator crit chance buff. Quickening or Primed Fury if you feel your weapons not fast enough. What you use is down to you though. Quickening is 15% slower than primed fury, however you build your combo faster due to the bonus stat that quickening has. The issue with this is that once you are fully stacked, that bonus from quickening does absolutely nothing, so you are losing that 15% attack speed. Its kind of what you want to do at that stage and which you prefer. This is where you can also put your healing return if you want take advantage of your status chance and have some sustained healing, or combo duration mods if you want to make use of any other focus school than naramon.

Which does lead us onto focus school, which is naramon. Using power spike to keep our combo up is perfect. The way the new combo system works plays into power spike so well, it actually was a huge buff to it and it makes keeping your combo up just ridiculously easy.

And thats pretty much the average build for most weapons right now. I think that honestly, probably like 85% or more of my weapons will be running this build, or at least a slight variation of this build. Its definitely the strongest combo build available right now.

One slight variation of that build that does deserve mentioning is a version of this that doesn't run weeping wounds. Its really only for 4 corrosive projection squads, or if you have a reliable armour strip from frames for example, but drop weeping wounds for molten impact, and shocking touch for north wind. This gives us viral and heat, which is pretty much the best elemental combo against everything non armoured. This does require either a coordinated squad or a frame with 100% armour strip, but thought it was worth a quick mention.

So, the second build. The pure heavy attack build. This is actually a very simple one to explain when to use, its literally only when your heavy attack has a guarenteed slash proc. Some of these heavy attacks are a lot better than others, namely ones like the scythes and the nikanas, both of which have forced slash procs on their heavies, but just about any weapon can be modded for a heavy attack if you want to.

For this build we have a few core mods on the weapons, that are not going to change, no matter the weapon. Primed Pressure Point for our base damage, no need for CO here since we are only going for that single huge hit. Sacrificial Steel for our crit chance, 440% crit chance on a heavy attack is absolutely huge and will push most decent weapons into orange crits at least with ease. Amalgum organ shatter is on here for our crit damage, you do lose 5% crit damage compared to the standard version, but will make your heavy attack wind up 60% faster, which makes the weapon feel so much nicer to use.

Alongside berserker which is also going to increase your attack speed, that combo can make heavy spamming feel really nice to do. Corrupt charge is going to give us a permenant 2 times multiplier on our heavy attacks, which quite literally doubles our damage. And then we have primed reach as our 6th core mod which is going to allow us to hit multiple targets super easily as well as allow us to hit enemies that are backing up, which is something that fairly often happens to weapons with lower range.

But thats only 6 of our modslots covered. The rest are kind of up to you really, theres a few things to do. Honestly, a riven here is 100% the best option, they elevate pure heavy attack builds like this to the next level and really allow you to push them to crazy levels. The best stats to have on one of these would be initial combo, crit damage, crit chance and then damage to grineer. Thats pretty much the order of importance on them too.

But if you don't have a riven, you have 2 modslots to fill here. You also add in life strike here, since its a full heal even to an inaros on every attack, someTha really damn nice sustained tank with that on. You could go with killing blow, especially if your weapon is one with a forced slash proc, since that scales from your base damage, and like primed pressure point, killing blow is an additive damage mod. This means that its actually kind of expendable, much in the same way you tend not to stack primed pressure point and condition overload. However, its a must have for those slash based ones. Gladiator might for more crit damage can work well here too. Another option is dispatch overdrive, where you get movement speed on a heavy attack hit, so you can keep very mobile while attacking. Primed Fever strike is an option too for those weapons without that guarenteed slash proc, so going with at least a bit of elemental is good to try and push your heavy attack damage higher.

The pure heavy attack build is one that can be insanely powerful and the modding of it with 2 modslots that you can tailor to what you are doing as well as your playstle can make things really interesting. Its not a build that many weapons can pull off, especially at high level, that really only falls to the ones with those guarenteed slash procs, or are the ridiculous powerhouse weapons that are the gunblades, however, this is pretty much the standard heavy attack build if you want to go down this route.

The third build is actually a hybrid of these two builds, combining elements of the combo build and the heavy attack build. Weapons like the arca titron or the sancti magister have mechanics that really can make use of a hybrid build like this, but this is kind of the build for those of you that want to combine both normal and heavy attacks into one build. However, I will warn you, this is awkward as hell to mod.

Since we already went through a lot of the mods, condition overload, berserker, blood rush, amalgum organ shatter, primed fever strike and weeping wounds are going to carry over from the normal combo build. But as you can see, we only have 1 elemental right now, thats because in place of shocking touch, we are going to use focus energy, which gives us our corrosive damage as well as 40 combo efficiency, so that we lose less combo from our heavy attacks.

Looks simple so far right, well this is where the fun begins. We only have 40% combo efficiency, when we need to be hitting that 90% cap. Theres 2 ways of being able to do this. Either we put a reflex coil on here, which gives us that 90% cap, and that frees up our focus school to be naramon to be able to keep our combo up, since we have no room for combo timer. Or, if you want to do something else, like for example, the heal on the sancti magister scales with range, but if you want range, you need to drop the reflex coil. This then means we need to use the inner might passive from zenurik to hit that efficiency cap, but this leaves us with no combo timer. That comes from using the swift momentum aura mod that you can put on your warframe, meaning we're spilling so far over from the weapon, we are needing to mod our warframe for it too, but thats kind of what you need to do for this.

Admittedly, this is where a riven for the weapon comes in. You can fairly easily cap heavy attack efficiency on a riven, which only takes 1 slot, allows us to go back to the 90% elemental and frees up our focus school to go back to naramon. But as you can see, going for this hybrid build is so much of a pain in the backside, that its not worth the effort on most weapons.

However, if you are wanting to use a weapon to its quote unquote fullest, then this build is definitely an option, and allows you to use both the combo normal attack and the heavies without impacting your combo counter too much. It works amazingly well on the Arca Titron and fairly well on the Sancti Magistar, so might be worth taking a look at.