How do melee weapons & its mods affect Ash's Bladestorm?

[Renathy]

Recently I have been testing Ash Prime's Bladestorm with certain melee weapons and their respective mods. I know for a fact that it is affected by mods that change the melee attack speed and it seems that damage mods also have a significant change. Not to mention mods that change the combo counter.

I'm currently testing Bladestorm (Total damage of 3,580) out with Ash Prime (With the Steel Charge aura) using a Galantine (Highest innate Slash damage) with the following mods:

• Finishing Touch
• Fury
• Spoiled Strike
• Pressure Point
• Jagged Edge (Do not own Buzz Kill at the moment)
• Body Count

This allows me to take down a level 100 Corrupted Heavy Gunner in roughly 12 successive strikes in the Simulacrum at a Mastery Rank of 20.

I also tested it out with other weapons, such as daggers (with Covert Lethality), to see if there was any difference, although I saw no changes as I was still taking them down in the same amount of hits.

My questions are as follow:

1. Do melee weapon base stats affect Bladestorm at all, such as Attack Speed and Slash Damage? (I tested out different weapons with varying attack speeds with no change in the time it takes to kill.)
2. Do mods that boost Slash damage work?
3. Do mods that boost the finishing damage work, such as Finishing Touch and Covert Lethality? Does Covert Lethality even boost the ability's damage?
4. It is mentioned that the Quickening mod affects the Bladestorm's animation speed, though only if channeling has been activated beforehand. Does this mean channeling mods boost the ability in any way?
5. Does the ability land a critical hit at all?

Edited March 2, 2016 by JRMC

[(PSN)horridhal]

Only a few mods actually interact with Bladestorm and they are Fury, Quickening, and Spoiled Strike.  The only thing they actually affect is the speed of your execution animations.

 

The reason people suggest a dagger with Covert Lethality on Ash has nothing to do with Bladestorm and everything to do with Teleport.  Teleport allows you to instantly use a finisher on the enemy you teleported to, which is effectively a 1 hit for as long as you want to go with a properly modded dagger.

 

Edit : Sorry, just saw you also asked about Body count.  It works, effectively, the same way as his syndicate mod, allowing for longer times on the combo meter, which can increase your damage.

Sorry, I forgot about these mods as they aren't on my platform yet.

Edited March 2, 2016 by (PS4)horridhal
Small correction due to different platforms.

[LordOfScrugging]

As far as i can tell, ash hasn't had bladestorm changed to scale with melee mods. the only recent change was to allow steel charge to affect it's damage. But the new body count mod works in conjunction with ash's rising storm (? the blade strom one if i'm correct) augment to boost the melee combo meter's duration. other than that ash couldn't care less of which melee he's using.

[Ruby_Rose_]

As the other have said, it doesn't scale with mods yet.

It's damage DOES scale with the Melee combo multiplier though.

[Renathy]

12 minutes ago, (PS4)horridhal said:

The reason people suggest a dagger with Covert Lethality on Ash has nothing to do with Bladestorm and everything to do with Teleport.  Teleport allows you to instantly use a finisher on the enemy you teleported to, which is effectively a 1 hit for as long as you want to go with a properly modded dagger.

I do know that, though I'm using Covert Lethality for its extra damage, seeing as finishing damage seems to have little to no effect and I doubt it would be a lethal take-down when undetected. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Edited March 2, 2016 by JRMC

[Specific.Zod]

11 minutes ago, JRMC said:

I do know that, though I'm using Covert Lethality for its extra damage, seeing as finishing damage seems to have little to no effect and I doubt it would be a lethal take-down when undetected. Correct me if I'm wrong.

you're wrong. ash teleport open enemy to "melee" finisher. and covert lethality = guarantee dead enemy if you use it with ash teleport. it has nothing to do with detected or not.

Or for simple, ash teleport = valkyr's paralysis.

[Renathy]

11 minutes ago, Ruby_Rose_ said:

As the other have said, it doesn't scale with mods yet.

It's damage DOES scale with the Melee combo multiplier though.

You're both right. It seems that it's the combo multipliers that dish out most damage and the damage melee mods do nothing. Like I said, attack speed mods do still increase the animation speed. I'm going to test out Quickening, as mentioned in the Wikipedia.