Melee Crescendo - Worth the Legendary Status

[(NSW)Probably_Asleep]

I've been trying to get Melee Duplicate for a while now, and naturally I've accumulated some Melee Crescendo here and there. Well, Crescendo won the race and I ended up getting 21 of them first, so thought I might as well experiment with some builds and see if it's worth being called a "Legendary Arcane."

Why I didn't think I'd like it
Even at Max Rank, you only get 6 Initial Combo per Finisher Kill. So that means you need to actually successfully kill an enemy with a finisher 37 times before you can max out your Initial Combo. This just didn't seem like it would be very practical. For starters, Finishers don't always kill, and I didn't think there was any way to "spam" finishers until you did kill an enemy. Sure, a "Mercy" kill will do it, but that's only open to high ranking enemies and requires individual attention to ease them into range without killing them. More than just that though, 37 seemed like a bit much of a setup. By the time I got almost 40 enemies to cooperate with me I'll have already gone past the point where I would have probably finished the mission already.

I was wrong
This Arcane is SO FUN when you get it ramped up. It's not even about the power, it's just so entertaining to spam the strongest Melee attack available over and over again. But it's actually not that hard to set up, and the payoff hits like a train.

The Build
I'm going with the Sancti Magistar with Incarnon installed. The actual build has a lot of flexibility, but here's a good base:

Stance: Crushing Ruin | Exilus: Dispatch Overdrive
Spoiled Strike | Sacrificial Steel | Seismic Wave | Organ Shatter
Primed Fever Strike | Gladiator Might | Blood Rush | Primed Pressure Point
Arcane: Melee Crescendo
Incarnon Evolutions: 1 | 2 | 1 | 3

This build is maximized around the slam, particularly the Heavy Slam. For some context, a Heavy Slam works like this:

• Damage is 3x Normal Attack
• Type is Blast by default
• Radius: 10m
• Damage Falloff: 30%

With the above build, the Heavy Slam Attack (at 12 Combo and with Incarnon Active) would be a 411.6% Crit Chance, meaning...
27,355.9 x 5.5 x 5.5 x 5.5 x 5.5 =
25,032,358.24 Slam Damage
17,522,650,77 Damage at Perimeter after Falloff
20m Radius

So you can reliably think of it as a 17.5-million, 20m AoE attack with Infinite Ammo. And because it's the Sancti Magistar, it also has built-in Life Steal which will heal you and your nearby Companions/Allies every hit. It will always be using Incarnon Mode because the Combo will always be 12 and your primary attack is going to be a Heavy Slam (which activates Incarnon). In addition to all this, it procs "Lift Status." Lifted is usually annoying because you can't hit enemies as easily and it therefore lowers your overall DPS. But that doesn't apply to this build, because lifted enemies are just as much in range of a follow up slam attack as everyone else. So with this build Lifted serves purely as an extra Crowd Control perk.

The 20m Radius also has the splendid advantage of easily breaking all the nearby crates. It's a great utility weapon for finding caches in Sabotage and rare items like Voca and Void Angel parts. (Aside from just farming normal resources quicker) The end result is a single weapon that gives healing, crowd control, devastating AoE power, loot farming, and side objective progress.

But does it work?
Yes. I took screenshots but after trying 3 separate sites (Imgur, PostImages, and Upload Images) none of them are functional today. (Maybe WW3 started and I'm just blissfully over here talking about video games) But after looking at my screenshots repeatedly I realize they don't add much beyond just proof; they're not particularly exciting so I'll just describe the experiment:

• In Simulacrum (Ballroom so I can have all enemies nearby)
• Level 180, Steel Path Enhanced, No Armor Strip, No Status Priming
• Factions that can be one-shot with the above build:
  • Grineer Heavy Gunner
  • Kuva Heavy Gunner
  • Corpus Jad Teran
  • Amalgam Heqet
  • Corrupted Heavy Gunner
  • Narmer Heavy Gunner
  • Infested Ancient Healer
  • Murmur Rogue Culverin
  • Murmur The Hollow Vein
• Factions that endured a single Hit
  • Deimos Jugulus
  • Sentients

Most normal enemies, even their elite units, were blown away on the first shot. Deimos enemies were more durable; I didn't try modding specifically for their elements though. Sentients on the other hand I tried a lot of different builds and couldn't come up with anything that could one shot all of them.

Murmur in particular are great for this. By trading out Spoiled Strike and Primed Fever Strike with Focus Energy and Focus Radon, the elements specific to the Murmur are applied and all that Heavy Attack Efficiency lets you spam the slam quicker. Even though the Combo is up to 220, it still needs to grow back to that number after a slam which takes a few seconds. But with Heavy Attack Efficiency on it start much higher and gets to 12 much faster as a result. I tried it out on a Netracell run and it was a massacre. You could see the circle of death on the mini-map around my character.

Okay, but how do you get the finisher kills?
This one took some experimentation. I tried Rest and Rage, but that had to be continually cast on the same enemy if they were too strong. I did find some success with a non-heavy slam, which grounds enemies and leaves them open to Ground Finishers. But that clued me in on a solution that was staring me in the face all along: Pull.

I'm a Mag main, but I began years ago when Ground Finishers were much harder to pull off. Today's QoL has fixed that beyond anything I could have dreamed off. Mag's Pull is perfect for Finisher-activated mechanics:

• It's a cheap ability (25 at base Efficiency, or 6.25 at max Efficiency)
• It pulls enemies to you (duh)
  • But this is actually great because it "claims" those enemies from other players that might be about to kill them
  • This also allows you to only need two buttons (activate Ability, and activate Finisher)
• Ground Finishers hit all enemies in front of you, so you can land a high attack on all enemies you've pulled in front of you
• You can pull off 2 to 3 Ground Finishers before the enemies get up
• Once they do get up, just Pull them again and they'll fall right back down; keep spamming it until they're all dead
• Even enemies that don't get "Pulled" will still stumble and can allow a Ground Finisher in that brief moment
• It can be subsumed by the Helminth

It's a perfect Finisher ability for all these reasons. I found I can just spend the first part of a mission pulling and curb-stomping enemies (what I am now calling "Pull-Stomping") until I get the 37 I need to max out Melee Crescendo. Once I get to that point, then I'm an unstoppable natural disaster able to unleash as many 40 meter diameter AoE 17.5-million-point attacks as I please.

In conclusion...
It's still not ideal for short missions. But anything that's going to go on for a while is perfect for Melee Crescendo. It's like having an End-Game pre-nerf AoE gun with a battery magazine that just needs a few seconds to recharge. I fully recommend it! And I'm curious what other weapons it can be good on. The Sancti Magistar was already a favorite of mine, but with the ease that Mag brings to the Finisher game I really don't see why this couldn't work on everything. I think I'll look into the Glaive Prime next...

[Zakkhar]

1 hour ago, (NSW)Probably_Asleep said:

The Build
I'm going with the Sancti Magistar with Incarnon installed. The actual build has a lot of flexibility, but here's a good base:

Stance: Crushing Ruin | Exilus: Dispatch Overdrive
Spoiled Strike | Sacrificial Steel | Seismic Wave | Organ Shatter
Primed Fever Strike | Gladiator Might | Blood Rush | Primed Pressure Point
Arcane: Melee Crescendo

Erm, with zero Heavy Attack efficiency it kinda sucks. 

1 hour ago, (NSW)Probably_Asleep said:

So you can reliably think of it as a 17.5-million, 20m AoE attack with Infinite Ammo.

No you cant because you apply maximised stats to every attack when in practice it wont because the combo takes time to regen to x12. A long long time.

You also did not mention the Nira set (can be unranked).

Edited 3 hours ago by Zakkhar

[crazywolfpusher]

56 minutes ago, (NSW)Probably_Asleep said:

 

I was wrong
 

The Build
I'm going with the Sancti Magistar with Incarnon installed. The actual build has a lot of flexibility, but here's a good base:

Stance: Crushing Ruin | Exilus: Dispatch Overdrive
Spoiled Strike | Sacrificial Steel | Seismic Wave | Organ Shatter
Primed Fever Strike | Gladiator Might | Blood Rush | Primed Pressure Point
Arcane: Melee Crescendo
Incarnon Evolutions: 1 | 2 | 1 | 3

This build is maximized around the slam, particularly the Heavy Slam. For some context, a Heavy Slam works like this:

• Damage is 3x Normal Attack
• Type is Blast by default
• Radius: 10m
• Damage Falloff: 30%

With the above build, the Heavy Slam Attack (at 12 Combo and with Incarnon Active) would be a 411.6% Crit Chance, meaning...
27,355.9 x 5.5 x 5.5 x 5.5 x 5.5 =
25,032,358.24 Slam Damage
17,522,650,77 Damage at Perimeter after Falloff
20m Radius

 

I'm terrible at math so excuse If I'm wrong. Also tldr everything, especially the coping part with finishers etc

Galvanized Reflex | Sacrificial Steel | Seismic Wave | Organ Shatter

Corrupt Charge | Gladiator Might | Blood Rush | Primed Pressure Point

With the same build, replacing Melee Crescendo with Melee Exposure (+240% Corrosive), Spoiled Strike with Galvanized Reflex and Fever Strike with Corrupt Charge

Also, I'll be adding a single Gladiator mod on my Warframe so I can get an extra 70% Crit Chance and reach T4 crits (403%) otherwise I'll be stuck at T3 (373%). 

the Heavy Slam Attack (at x8 Combo and with Incarnon Active) would be a 403% Crit Chance (btw your crit chance should be 458% u are missing Gladiator Might 10%xcombo), meaning...

27,550 x 5.5 x 5.5 x 5.5 x5.5 =

25,209,971 Slam Damage

Which is about 177 damage higher than yours.... the main difference would be the x4 extra combo multiplier on the heavy slam, a 55% chance for T5 crits, and the fact that you have to take some extra steps to do some Crescendo finishers at the start of the mission.

The advantages of not use Crescendo:

+ Exposure require of me just playing the game as I would normally do. Also is way easier to get than Crescendo.

+ Slams here and there, I don't even need to stop building combo for the Incarnon as I'll be at 6x and 8x all the time.

+ Galvanized Reflex 50% efficiency highly reduce the cooldown between max combo slams.

- Sacrifice a mod slot for the Gladiator set on my Warframe

I could potentially also replace Organ Shatter for a Gladitor mod, not sacrificing a Warframe mod slot and bring extra crit damage on Purple Shards but that would require more investment I guess.

To summarize, the only melee Arcane worth the legendary status should be Influence.

 

 

 

[dwqrf]

Il y a 2 heures, (NSW)Probably_Asleep a dit :

27,355.9 x 5.5 x 5.5 x 5.5 x 5.5

If I'm not mistaken, and if I'm reading correctly what you wrote there, I believe that's wrong

While the first critical hit does Indeed x5.5 damage, the next layers of critical hits only get the critical damage bonus as an added multiplier, the bonus being x4.5 on the top of the base x1

Meaning your yellow critical is x5.5, your orange critical is x10, your red critical is x14.5, and your red red critical is x19.

(And not x5.5 ; x11 ; x16.5 and x21).

 

-

 

But yeah, Melee Crescendo is really fun.

I like to set it up and forget about it, and then one shot Acolytes when they show up.

Some people also use it to combo with the Secondary Outburst arcane that consume your combo counter to increase Crit/damage of your pistol.

Some people also run 0 or negative combo duration with the Aura Melee Guidance to increase the rate of melee combo counter going back up to x12.

A lof of ways to have fun. But it shines in longer mission, which people don't really do.

[dwqrf]

il y a 54 minutes, crazywolfpusher a dit :

+ Slams here and there, I don't even need to stop building combo for the Incarnon as I'll be at 6x and 8x all the time.

Remember that heavy attacks also benefit from added damage with the combo multiplier, x12 combo counter being also x12 damage for heavies.

 

 

Edited 2 hours ago by dwqrf
Stupid phone.