Otaiken

As a side note Dagath dark mage build with Incarnon Ceramic Dagger and Grimoire is some of the most fun I've had in this game. It's just an unceasing rotation of massive damage and particle effects. Is it more effective than cracked Mesa or Saryn build? No. But oh boy is it fun to trample enemies with spectral horses in between throwing "fireballs" and spectral daggers. The Grimoire and Melee Exposure were made for this frame. Now I just need to find a fitting primary for this. Is there a decent spear gun for SP+?

Dagath is certainly strong. She also has extremely good passive damage buff. But getting her to the point where she is comfortable to use in SP+ is pretty expensive. For me that point is Vitality + Adaptation + Arcane Guardian + 2 health shards (Tauforged for max overkill). This makes Dagath comfortably tanky in SP for me. I also use Incarnon Ceramic dagger with Life Strike to instantly heal myself. I personally hate shield gating on Dagath thematically and mechanically. With that I have a frame with great passive buffs, great survivability and decent nuke potential. I also don't have to spam abilities like crazy just to survive. But looking at the investment it's certainly not cheap and accessible. I made that investment for the sake of variety because I'm getting bored playing other frames but it's not like I would recommend an average player go and get her asap as their first generally powerful frame in favor of frames like Protea, Mesa or Saryn.

It helps all of them. Obviously melee weapons which already had strong heavy attack builds benefit. But then there's weapons that have heavy attacks which are good, but not worth building for. For example Venka Prime (Claws in general) has a very strong heavy attack with a slash proc but it's a forward stab. So even if it is very good for obliterating a single tough target in the middle of a group, you will never build for it. With Tennokai you can actually use it for its inteded purpose now. It's a similar story with all weapons with single target focused heavies.

So that mechanic is not 4 years out of date. It's almost 10 years out of date. But since SP is about 3 years old the impact wasn't that noticeable. Since before SP it was pretty rare to reach meaningfully tough enemy levels. Also mods like Condition Overload and meme strike got nerfed somewhere along the way. So we're about due another melee rework. Or I'd rather DE remove follow-through or make it flat linear value like gun falloff than slap a bunch of arcanes to farm on top of melee. Because there's a reason why zaws are pretty much best in slot for their respective weapon categories.

Back in the old days before galvanized mods and primary/secondary arcanes guns really struggled with SP-level content, Meanwhile using melee with huge range and gimmicks like meme strike was the go-to option. So when the melee 2.9 came DE saddled melee weapons with negative damage scaling on AoE. Which honestly was baffling to me even then. Meanwhile guns have got stronger and stronger and AoE on them more and more prevalent. Also, AoE falloff on guns is linear unlike on melee. In short melee got left behind. Anyone remember the activated "beast mode" that was supposed to come in melee 3.0 which never materialized? The melee system we're currently on is literally unfinished and has been for ages. Follow-through needs to go at the very least. Also, I suspect DE will try to "solve" the problem by slapping arcanes on all melee so sheer powercreep can overcome the bad mechanical design. You can tell melee in general is not in a good state when an increasing amount of high level melee guides mention the use of a primer as a core part of the build. So using actual guns is now a part of a melee build. The clear elephant in the room being, if i need to shoot things to kill them with melee why not just, you know, keeps shooting and killing enemies that way.