wassup everyone and welcome to another lets max warframe. since melee 3.0 people have been asking about new zaws a lot, and I thought I would show off one people have been enquiring about since I teased it in that meta builds video, and thats the weapon that knocks the orthos prime off the top spot for strongest polearm, and thats the plague kripath.

Build using the vargeet jai 2, seekalla and plague kripath, we're going for maximum crit, but at the cost of status chance. Thankfully its not that expensive to build, especially if you are still working on rebuilding all your zaws after melee 3.0 changed how good they were.

Fantastic base damage, split into 4 parts you have the normal impact puncture and slash that you get on most weapons, but you also get a nice dash of viral thrown in there as well, which is going to work really nicely, especially when you start playing around with condition overload. High crit is going to give you a really nice buff when it comes to blood rush and when the status chance, which won't give you 100% status, its still around the 70% mark, which is high enough to stip armour effectively when combined with its fantastic attack speed and range if you mod it to take advantage of it.

Talking of the mods, its a really standard light attack build here, nothing particularly crazy whatsoever, shimmering blight is by far the best stance, corrosive, weeping wounds, crit, condition overload. Absolutely standard. The only thing not standard is the exodia arcane which is specific to the zaw series of weapons.

You have a choice of 2 here. In the meta builds video, you saw me messing around with the exodia contagion where you doube jump or bullet jump and then are able to attack while aim gliding to throw out a projectile that does a tonne of damage, which is affected by status chance, crits and elemental damage. The way it used to be was that you needed a specific contagion thrower because we were running dual stats for status and not the 90% elementals. Now though, with the way the mods changed, we don't need to compromise any more, and contagion slots right in. One thing to note about contagion, the damage is pretty damn strong, but it has self damage, so either you need to get good with it and learn the ranges, something I personally am bad at, or use a frame where you don't kill yourself with it, like revenant or hildryn and only use it on them.

The arcane I will recommend though is exodia triumph which gives you a 50% chance for an additional combo count. So that means that you hit an enemy, normally that would only count as 1. However with triumph, you have a 50% chance for that single hit to count as 2 for the combo counter. This allows you to build your combo way faster than a weapon without it, and without sacrificing a mod slot for it.

So, with that out of the way, what are my thoughts on this kripath polearm. Well, its stronger than the orthos, however, realisticly, you might not even notice.

You know me, always trying to push the boundries of weapons and seeing what comes out strongest, and the kripath for what I do, does actually come out ahead. That small chance for a viral proc, due to the way proc weighting works, only really matters when you either start going against the grineer in the veil where they have a ridiculous amount of effective hitpoints, or against enemies above the EHP of a 170 gunner. So what this means is that realisticly, if you aren't going against super high level enemies like I do, and like I show in the footage in this prodman run, you aren't really going to feel a difference in the time to kill between this and the orthos prime for example.

Where you are going to notice a difference is in the speed, which is higher than the orthos, which that, when combined with exodia is going to stack to max blood rush and weeping wounds significantly faster. So while you might not notice an increase in damage, since lets be honest, there isn't any content where that extra damage that it does over the orthos is noticable, however as a quality of life thing to help build your combo quicker, it feels so much nicer to use.

I had to say all of this purely because I can already see people saying that it doesn't feel any different to the orthos, and thats because, in reality you are right. However, options are a good thing and having multiple weapons that do the job well is fantastic, and if you want a polearm to push to higher levels, like an hour or more into arbitrations, the kripath polearm is going to be fantastic for you, and going to be noticably better than the orthos, so it does have its niche.

But thats the kripath polearm for you. Its a great weapon, fast, hard hitting and feels a lot nicer to use and to build up than the orthos. I hope that you enjoy the weapon as much as I do. Its become my go-to and has replaced my orthos for general play, that quality of life upgrade with the quicker stacking was the dealbreaker for me, and I've not gone back since. But for now, I hope you enjoyed this video, and have as much fun with this as I have. Many thanks for watching, and I'll catch you in the next video!