Why Crit is King for Melee

[Traumtulpe]

Crit is a separate multiplier that can increase damage enormously (for example to 12.8x on the Furax Wraith) with only two mods. It is so strong in fact, that you would use these mods even if your weapon had only 10% chance to crit with a 2x multiplier (resulting in 2.9x damage with the same mods).

Condition Overload is an additive multiplier, resulting in 700% damage with 5 status effects (reasonable from melee alone) as opposed to 265% damage from Primed Pressure Point.

So the Furax Wraith is at ~34x damage with the addition of PPP, the example status weapon at ~20x with CO. Seems reasonable at first, considering that the status weapon will also cause one of 5 different effects on each attack.

However, the Furax will have a 42% status chance (and also 5 elements) with 3 60/60 mods - enabling Condition Overload after all.

In conclusion: I believe that, to balance status versus crit, some changes need to be made. One option would be to discourage the use of Condition Overload on weapons without very high status chances. Another would be to make duplicate status effects have some kind of benefit. In addition, since >100% critical chance is desirable, status chance should also provide some benefit beyond 100%.

I'd like to offer a possible solution: "Condition Overload: On status effect, +xx% melee damage against the target for x seconds" This would affect enemies immune to status effects, have a chance to trigger twice on status chances above 100%, and not interact with guns in any way (neither would guns cause this effect since the mod is on a melee weapon, nor benefit from it).

[Asemnar]

We're in a better spot overall, weapons need to be properly balanced now instead of the meta being good status weapons being band-aided with maiming strike.

Condition Overload is also capped at 3 conditions now. So the maximum extra damage you can get is 360%, which is still good but only half of your given number. I may also be incorrect on this last point but I believe it functions like adding more pressure points, as opposed to buffing the final damage of the weapon.

Crit is good, and neccessary if you want to kill high levels, but so is status as they buff your damage (via CO) and also can strip armour. What good is a crit if their armour blocks 99% of it?

That being said, crit is certainly stronger, but status chance has a threshold people ideally would want to break before stacking crit. Also some stances/combo's have forced status procs, such as rapiers having a forced slash proc in one of their stances.

So yes, past a certain point crit is very strong, but you still need some base status in order to truly capitalize on it and take it to high level missions.

[(XBOX)GearsMatrix301]

It’s king now because they nerfed all the other options into uselessness. All Phase 2 did was give us less choices in how to build melee. 

[Xzorn]

Crit has never been king. Even before CO when the same thing was claimed by the community.

Then again for some reason DE destroyed a lot of the good Armor melting weapons by adding IPS to their base Elemental types. So if anything there's less options now than were before CO was added to the game. Lacera, Serro (Still a boss), Ninkondi, Ohma, Dual Split Swords, Dual Ichor. All monsters with a lil damage amp that would scale better than a Crit based weapon could ever hope. That's not to  mention Bleed builds. How quickly the community forgot about Lesion it seems.