This is a melee guide for those who want to build for Steel Path and higher levels. These builds follow melees with a slash based weapon of choice, for example, the Kronen Prime. Kronen Prime has a 80% slash bias, with 21.2 impact damage, 21.2 puncture damage, and 169.6 slash damage. Bias can be calculated by taking the slash value of your melee and dividing it by all elements. For Kronen Prime, the equation would be 169.6 / (169.6 + 21.2 + 21.2). This will also work if your melee forces slash using stances. Additionally, your weapon should have at least 10% cc and 12% sc for this to work properly.
There are going to be a few mods which are present throughout every build.
- Primed Smites: Faction mods increase damage multiplicatively from +dmg mods, meaning that you aren't getting less overall damage by stacking them with +dmg. Faction mods also double dip procs, meaning that a +faction mod will apply twice, multiplicatively to procs, turning 30% faction damage into a 69% damage boost and, and 55% will give a 140.25% damage boost.
- Condition Overload: With a primer, Condition Overload gives us a much bigger damage boost than any other damage mod in the game. Condition Overload gives us +80% melee damage per status type affecting the target. There is no cap to how many status effects this works on.
- Blood Rush and Weeping Wounds: These are essential to any hybrid combo based melee. As your combo multiplier goes up, so does your crit chance and status chance. Crit chance, is the chance that any given attack will do bonus Critical Hit Damage. Values over 100% have a chance to become Orange Critical Hits, and over 200% have a chance to become red. Status chance is there so that you proc slash against enemies, in which the status effect is called Bleed.
Slash procs are called Bleed. Bleed deals True Damage. True damage is a hidden, unique damage type which has no damage modifier against health and shield, and ignores the damage reduction of armor, therefore it will deal the same amount of damage against any enemy if they are also not affected by special damage reductions.
Stances have different forced procs and multipliers that can make them better or worse depending on their combo. Take for example, the neutral combo of Sovereign Outcast. On the first attack, it has a 200% and 5 50% damage multipliers. On the second, a 200%, 100%, and 300% multiplier with a forced impact proc. On the third, it has 4 200% multipliers with forced slash procs. On the fourth, there is 2 300% multipliers with forced knockdown. Overall, it has an average damage multiplier of 860% per second with a combo time of 2.9 seconds. Comparing this to Gemini Cross with an average damage multiplier of 543.5 per second and a combo time of 4.6s, Sovereign Outcast is massively better (and the best stance in the game).
Stance guide
• Assault Saws: Butcher's Revelry* -> Neutral combo
• Blade and Whips: Defiled Snapdragon* -> Forward/Neutral combo
• Claws: Vermillion Storm -> Neutral/Forward block combo
• Daggers: Stinging Thorn -> Neutral combo
• Dual Daggers: Spinning Needle/Gnashing Payara -> Neutral combo
• Dual Swords: Crossing Snakes/Swirling Tiger -> Neutral combo
• Fists: Seismic Palm -> Neutral combo
• Glaives: Astral Twilight -> Block combo | No difference for throw
• Gunblades: No relevant difference. Both are fine. No difference for shots.
• Hammers: Crushing Ruin -> Forward block combo
• Heavy Blades: No relevant difference. Any is fine -> Neutral/Forward block combo
• Machetes: No relevant difference. Both are fine -> Neutral combo
• Nikanas: Blind Justice -> Block/Neutral combo
• Nunchaku: Atlantis Vulcan* Forward block/Block combo
• Polearms: Shimmering Blight -> Forward block/Neutral combo
• Rapiers: Vulpine Mask* -> Neutral combo
• Tonfas: Sovereign Outcast -> Neutral combo
• Two-Handed Nikanas: Wise Razor* -> Forward block/Neutral combo
• Scythes: Reaping Spiral -> Neutral combo
• Sparring: No relevant difference. Both are fine -> Neutral combo
• Staves: Clashing Forest -> Neutral combo
• Swords: Iron Phoenix -> *Neutral combo | Crimson Dervish -> Forward Block/Neutral combo
• Swords and Shields: Final Harbinger -> Neutral combo
• Warfans: Votive Onslaught -> Neutral combo
• Whips: Coiling Viper -> Neutral combo
* Only stance for the weapon type.
Note: The combos mentioned give the highest dps/best clear.
CREDITS TO SEALY (doesn't want his tag to be here, however he is in the community disc below)
THIS IS NOT MY WORK
A primer is any piece of gear used to prep enemies for a swift kill. It includes guns, sentinel weapons and certain pets such as panzer to put a large amount of status effects on enemies very quickly, for example, the Kuva Nukor or Epitaph.
Kuva Nukor can proc an invisible status effect called Microwave that causes the part of the enemy hit to become larger. With innate radiation, microwave, and and a progenitor bonus (preferably magnetic), we get a 240 (3*80) damage bonus to our weapon. HOWEVER, if we add on more elements using modding, we can get up to 5 different elements, viral (mods), heat (mods), radiation (innate), magnetic (progenitor bonus), and microwave (which is hidden). This gives us 400% damage bonus, much more than Primed Pressure Point can.
Epitaph, however, works a bit differently. The uncharged shot has high status chance, and has innate IPS, cold, and blast. By adding heat and viral, we can get 7 total status effects on enemies, giving us a +560% damage boost.
Example builds:
With a proper primer, you can get 10 stacks of viral within a few seconds.
Viral damage deals extra damage against cloned flesh. Viral status effects increase damage dealt to health by 100% up to 325% at 10 stacks.
For example, a weapon with 100 damage that applies a Slash proc, if the target has 1 Viral proc, will deal 200 damage, then 70 damage per second from Slash's Bleed until the Viral effect ends, when it will go down to 35 per second. If the target does not have a Viral proc initially, the Bleed damage will be 35 per second until the target takes a Viral proc, which will then multiply the DoT accordingly to 70 per second.
If you DO NOT have a primer, do not worry. A non-primer build is further below.
A typical hybrid combo count e spam melee weapon build would look like this. I have explained why faction mods, condition overload, blood rush, and weeping wounds are on there. Organ shatter and primed reach are self explainable, for more crit damage and range. For the last two slots, you can use any two of:
- Gladiator Might
- Berserker Fury
- Primed Fury
- or Quickening
If you do not have:
Primed Smite Grineer: Use regular Smite Grineer
Primed Reach: Use Spring-Loaded Blade
In some cases, where the melee has around 40% slash, Carnis Mandible will go over Gladiator Might or Quickening. For example, the Hespar.
If you do not have a primer, use this build. The reason we use unranked virals is to keep the slash bias high, as that is what is dealing the true damage and killing the enemies. Viral as a damage type isn't good, what really deals damage is the slash proc. If you want to use Primed Fury over Berserker Fury, feel free to do so.
If you do not have:
Primed Reach: Use Spring-Loaded Blade
Corpus have shields that will take too long to use with just slash. In this case, we use toxin, to bypass the shields entirely. Toxin procs deal toxin damage, both the raw damage and the proc bypass shields. This time you'll probably only want to use berserker fury or primed fury.
If you do not have:
Primed Fever Strike: Use regular Fever Strike
Primed Smite Corpus: Use regular Smite Corpus
Primed Reach: Use Spring-Loaded Blade
Slash based heavy attack builds look like the one above. This is for something that forces slash on a heavy attack, for example, Reaper Prime.
If your weapon does not force slash, replace Killing Blow with Primed Fever Strike and Berserker with Shocking Touch.
Corrupt charge is used on this, as our combo multiplier affects the damage of the heavy attacks. Corrupt Charge r2 is enough to get us to 2x multiplier, which makes r3 redundant. However, if you have a riven for +initial combo, max out corrupt charge.
If you do not have:
Primed Smite Grineer: Use regular Smite Grineer
Primed Reach: Use Spring-Loaded Blade
Sac Pressure: Use Primed Pressure Point or if not that, regular Pressure Point
Sac Steel: True Steel
For gunblades such as Redeemer and Stropha that do not force slash, the build above is a corrosive heavy attack spam build.
You can replace Primed Fury with Berserker Fury if you prefer.
For combo heavy spam, replace Corrupt Charge and Shocking Touch with True Punishment and Focus Energy.
This is the basis for most glaive heavy attack builds. In the last slot you want:
Glaive Prime: Killing Blow
Cerata: Primed Fever Strike in empty if going against corpus, or shocking touch if against grineer. Make sure to swap smites if facing corpus.
Xoris: Primed Fever Strike OR Shocking touch if going pure elec.
I will not be listing the other glaives here as they are redundant and they don't have a use that these three glaives here cannot do. However, if you want to use them, replace Killing Blow with Primed Fever Strike and Power Throw with Shocking Touch.
If you do not have:
Primed Smite Grineer: Use regular Smite Grineer
Sac Pressure: Use Primed Pressure Point or if not that, regular Pressure Point
Sac Steel: Use True Steel
Amalgam Organ Shatter: Use regular Organ Shatter
This is a standard 12x heavy build. 12x heavy builds are based on getting to 12x combo with light attacks, and then using a heavy attack on a stronger unit such as a demolisher.
Reflex coil for heavy attack efficiency, amalgam for heavy attack windup, and sacrificial for the 2x crit chance on heavy attacks. Otherwise, the rest of the mods should be pretty standard.
For Corpus, replace Gladiator Might with Primed Fever Strike and swap smites.
If you do not have:
Primed Smite Grineer: Use regular Smite Grineer
Primed Reach: Use Spring-Loaded Blade
Primed Fury: Use Berserker Fury
What you want for a positive:
Combo:
- Critical Damage
- Range
- Attack Speed
Flat damage and critical chance are decent, however both Condition Overload and Blood Rush take care of this for us. Not the best, but certainly not the worst.
Faction damage can be used, however it may lock your loadout to a specific faction.
Slash can be used for weapons that would normally use Carnis Stinger as a flex slot.
Heavy Attack:
- Critical Damage
- Initial Combo
- Range if not using a glaive
- Attack Speed if not using a glaive
- Damage, use over Killing Blow
- Crit Chance, use over Killing Blow
Faction damage can be used, however it may lock your loadout to a specific faction.
What you want for a negative:
- Crit chance on slide
- Impact, puncture
- Damage to Infested
What you don't want for a negative:
- All positive attributes
- Damage to Grineer
- Damage to Corpus
- STATUS DURATION, -SD LOWERS SLASH PROC DURATION
- Slash
- Chance to not gain combo count, it's not very fun when trying to get to max combo, wouldn't recommend.
Some melees don't fit into these categories, some have an innate element or have special combinations. If you have any questions, feel free to join the community discord (discord.gg/warframe) and ask one of the regulars in #builds any questions you may have.
Question
Death-And-Taxes
This is a melee guide for those who want to build for Steel Path and higher levels. These builds follow melees with a slash based weapon of choice, for example, the Kronen Prime. Kronen Prime has a 80% slash bias, with 21.2 impact damage, 21.2 puncture damage, and 169.6 slash damage. Bias can be calculated by taking the slash value of your melee and dividing it by all elements. For Kronen Prime, the equation would be 169.6 / (169.6 + 21.2 + 21.2). This will also work if your melee forces slash using stances. Additionally, your weapon should have at least 10% cc and 12% sc for this to work properly.
There are going to be a few mods which are present throughout every build.
- Primed Smites: Faction mods increase damage multiplicatively from +dmg mods, meaning that you aren't getting less overall damage by stacking them with +dmg. Faction mods also double dip procs, meaning that a +faction mod will apply twice, multiplicatively to procs, turning 30% faction damage into a 69% damage boost and, and 55% will give a 140.25% damage boost.
- Condition Overload: With a primer, Condition Overload gives us a much bigger damage boost than any other damage mod in the game. Condition Overload gives us +80% melee damage per status type affecting the target. There is no cap to how many status effects this works on.
- Blood Rush and Weeping Wounds: These are essential to any hybrid combo based melee. As your combo multiplier goes up, so does your crit chance and status chance. Crit chance, is the chance that any given attack will do bonus Critical Hit Damage. Values over 100% have a chance to become Orange Critical Hits, and over 200% have a chance to become red. Status chance is there so that you proc slash against enemies, in which the status effect is called Bleed.
Slash procs are called Bleed. Bleed deals True Damage. True damage is a hidden, unique damage type which has no damage modifier against health and shield, and ignores the damage reduction of armor, therefore it will deal the same amount of damage against any enemy if they are also not affected by special damage reductions.
Stances have different forced procs and multipliers that can make them better or worse depending on their combo. Take for example, the neutral combo of Sovereign Outcast. On the first attack, it has a 200% and 5 50% damage multipliers. On the second, a 200%, 100%, and 300% multiplier with a forced impact proc. On the third, it has 4 200% multipliers with forced slash procs. On the fourth, there is 2 300% multipliers with forced knockdown. Overall, it has an average damage multiplier of 860% per second with a combo time of 2.9 seconds. Comparing this to Gemini Cross with an average damage multiplier of 543.5 per second and a combo time of 4.6s, Sovereign Outcast is massively better (and the best stance in the game).
Stance guide
• Assault Saws: Butcher's Revelry* -> Neutral combo
• Blade and Whips: Defiled Snapdragon* -> Forward/Neutral combo
• Claws: Vermillion Storm -> Neutral/Forward block combo
• Daggers: Stinging Thorn -> Neutral combo
• Dual Daggers: Spinning Needle/Gnashing Payara -> Neutral combo
• Dual Swords: Crossing Snakes/Swirling Tiger -> Neutral combo
• Fists: Seismic Palm -> Neutral combo
• Glaives: Astral Twilight -> Block combo | No difference for throw
• Gunblades: No relevant difference. Both are fine. No difference for shots.
• Hammers: Crushing Ruin -> Forward block combo
• Heavy Blades: No relevant difference. Any is fine -> Neutral/Forward block combo
• Machetes: No relevant difference. Both are fine -> Neutral combo
• Nikanas: Blind Justice -> Block/Neutral combo
• Nunchaku: Atlantis Vulcan* Forward block/Block combo
• Polearms: Shimmering Blight -> Forward block/Neutral combo
• Rapiers: Vulpine Mask* -> Neutral combo
• Tonfas: Sovereign Outcast -> Neutral combo
• Two-Handed Nikanas: Wise Razor* -> Forward block/Neutral combo
• Scythes: Reaping Spiral -> Neutral combo
• Sparring: No relevant difference. Both are fine -> Neutral combo
• Staves: Clashing Forest -> Neutral combo
• Swords: Iron Phoenix -> *Neutral combo | Crimson Dervish -> Forward Block/Neutral combo
• Swords and Shields: Final Harbinger -> Neutral combo
• Warfans: Votive Onslaught -> Neutral combo
• Whips: Coiling Viper -> Neutral combo
* Only stance for the weapon type.
Note: The combos mentioned give the highest dps/best clear.
CREDITS TO SEALY (doesn't want his tag to be here, however he is in the community disc below)
THIS IS NOT MY WORK
A primer is any piece of gear used to prep enemies for a swift kill. It includes guns, sentinel weapons and certain pets such as panzer to put a large amount of status effects on enemies very quickly, for example, the Kuva Nukor or Epitaph.
Kuva Nukor can proc an invisible status effect called Microwave that causes the part of the enemy hit to become larger. With innate radiation, microwave, and and a progenitor bonus (preferably magnetic), we get a 240 (3*80) damage bonus to our weapon. HOWEVER, if we add on more elements using modding, we can get up to 5 different elements, viral (mods), heat (mods), radiation (innate), magnetic (progenitor bonus), and microwave (which is hidden). This gives us 400% damage bonus, much more than Primed Pressure Point can.
Epitaph, however, works a bit differently. The uncharged shot has high status chance, and has innate IPS, cold, and blast. By adding heat and viral, we can get 7 total status effects on enemies, giving us a +560% damage boost.
Example builds:
With a proper primer, you can get 10 stacks of viral within a few seconds.
Viral damage deals extra damage against cloned flesh. Viral status effects increase damage dealt to health by 100% up to 325% at 10 stacks.
For example, a weapon with 100 damage that applies a Slash proc, if the target has 1 Viral proc, will deal 200 damage, then 70 damage per second from Slash's Bleed until the Viral effect ends, when it will go down to 35 per second. If the target does not have a Viral proc initially, the Bleed damage will be 35 per second until the target takes a Viral proc, which will then multiply the DoT accordingly to 70 per second.
If you DO NOT have a primer, do not worry. A non-primer build is further below.
A typical hybrid combo count e spam melee weapon build would look like this. I have explained why faction mods, condition overload, blood rush, and weeping wounds are on there. Organ shatter and primed reach are self explainable, for more crit damage and range. For the last two slots, you can use any two of:
- Gladiator Might
- Berserker Fury
- Primed Fury
- or Quickening
If you do not have:
Primed Smite Grineer: Use regular Smite Grineer
Primed Reach: Use Spring-Loaded Blade
In some cases, where the melee has around 40% slash, Carnis Mandible will go over Gladiator Might or Quickening. For example, the Hespar.
If you do not have a primer, use this build. The reason we use unranked virals is to keep the slash bias high, as that is what is dealing the true damage and killing the enemies. Viral as a damage type isn't good, what really deals damage is the slash proc. If you want to use Primed Fury over Berserker Fury, feel free to do so.
If you do not have:
Primed Reach: Use Spring-Loaded Blade
Corpus have shields that will take too long to use with just slash. In this case, we use toxin, to bypass the shields entirely. Toxin procs deal toxin damage, both the raw damage and the proc bypass shields. This time you'll probably only want to use berserker fury or primed fury.
If you do not have:
Primed Fever Strike: Use regular Fever Strike
Primed Smite Corpus: Use regular Smite Corpus
Primed Reach: Use Spring-Loaded Blade
Slash based heavy attack builds look like the one above. This is for something that forces slash on a heavy attack, for example, Reaper Prime.
If your weapon does not force slash, replace Killing Blow with Primed Fever Strike and Berserker with Shocking Touch.
Corrupt charge is used on this, as our combo multiplier affects the damage of the heavy attacks. Corrupt Charge r2 is enough to get us to 2x multiplier, which makes r3 redundant. However, if you have a riven for +initial combo, max out corrupt charge.
If you do not have:
Primed Smite Grineer: Use regular Smite Grineer
Primed Reach: Use Spring-Loaded Blade
Sac Pressure: Use Primed Pressure Point or if not that, regular Pressure Point
Sac Steel: True Steel
For gunblades such as Redeemer and Stropha that do not force slash, the build above is a corrosive heavy attack spam build.
You can replace Primed Fury with Berserker Fury if you prefer.
For combo heavy spam, replace Corrupt Charge and Shocking Touch with True Punishment and Focus Energy.
This is the basis for most glaive heavy attack builds. In the last slot you want:
Glaive Prime: Killing Blow
Cerata: Primed Fever Strike in empty if going against corpus, or shocking touch if against grineer. Make sure to swap smites if facing corpus.
Xoris: Primed Fever Strike OR Shocking touch if going pure elec.
I will not be listing the other glaives here as they are redundant and they don't have a use that these three glaives here cannot do. However, if you want to use them, replace Killing Blow with Primed Fever Strike and Power Throw with Shocking Touch.
If you do not have:
Primed Smite Grineer: Use regular Smite Grineer
Sac Pressure: Use Primed Pressure Point or if not that, regular Pressure Point
Sac Steel: Use True Steel
Amalgam Organ Shatter: Use regular Organ Shatter
This is a standard 12x heavy build. 12x heavy builds are based on getting to 12x combo with light attacks, and then using a heavy attack on a stronger unit such as a demolisher.
Reflex coil for heavy attack efficiency, amalgam for heavy attack windup, and sacrificial for the 2x crit chance on heavy attacks. Otherwise, the rest of the mods should be pretty standard.
For Corpus, replace Gladiator Might with Primed Fever Strike and swap smites.
If you do not have:
Primed Smite Grineer: Use regular Smite Grineer
Primed Reach: Use Spring-Loaded Blade
Primed Fury: Use Berserker Fury
What you want for a positive:
Combo:
- Critical Damage
- Range
- Attack Speed
Flat damage and critical chance are decent, however both Condition Overload and Blood Rush take care of this for us. Not the best, but certainly not the worst.
Faction damage can be used, however it may lock your loadout to a specific faction.
Slash can be used for weapons that would normally use Carnis Stinger as a flex slot.
Heavy Attack:
- Critical Damage
- Initial Combo
- Range if not using a glaive
- Attack Speed if not using a glaive
- Damage, use over Killing Blow
- Crit Chance, use over Killing Blow
Faction damage can be used, however it may lock your loadout to a specific faction.
What you want for a negative:
- Crit chance on slide
- Impact, puncture
- Damage to Infested
What you don't want for a negative:
- All positive attributes
- Damage to Grineer
- Damage to Corpus
- STATUS DURATION, -SD LOWERS SLASH PROC DURATION
- Slash
- Chance to not gain combo count, it's not very fun when trying to get to max combo, wouldn't recommend.
Effectiveness:
https://imgur.com/yIIkzRQ
https://imgur.com/xBsgc7J (slash procs are absurdly powerful)
Some melees don't fit into these categories, some have an innate element or have special combinations. If you have any questions, feel free to join the community discord (discord.gg/warframe) and ask one of the regulars in #builds any questions you may have.
Last Updated: 4/8/2023
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