Channeling Variety in Melee Weapons

[SilentWalrus91]

While I thought the addition of channeling was awesome to this game, I feel as though it has not been fleshed out as much as other mechanics in the game. Primarily in variety. Look at every weapon in the game and there's generally a particular "build style" that you can gear it towards (crit chance/damage, attack speed, a particular damage type, etc.), which is great! However, no melee weapon has anything that makes it better than any other for channeling. What if different melee weapons had differing energy drain costs and/or damage modifiers from the start? Most cost 5 energy with 1.5x damage bonus (if memory serves me correctly). Why not have some that cost different amounts and some that have different damage amounts? The mods are there to allow for people to build around these, but personally I haven't felt a huge drive to with a lot of my melee weapons. Thoughts?

[Kagezima]

Well thats true and pretty annoyin cause i wanted a coll channeling melee too

[Kagezima]

Just now, OuroborosPhenix said:

Well thats true and pretty annoyin cause i wanted a coll channeling melee too

i meant cool

[AzyWng]

2 hours ago, OuroborosPhenix said:

i meant cool

It should be possible to edit your own post. That way you can correct your spelling and grammar if you need to.

EDIT: It's located at the very bottom of the post, right next to the "quote" button.

Anyway, about the OP...

We might need to make the weapon stats screen/panel a good deal bigger if we're going to give different weapons different channeling stats, to make room for the proper stats. Aside from that, there's a bigger problem we need to think about with channeling. 

Channeling costs, what? 5 energy per enemy hit or something? That can add up to a lot of energy lost with groups or strong enemies, and not everyone chooses (or wants to choose) energy siphon as their aura. Another problem is that the boost from channeling isn't that flashy or awesome - we only get a damage boost and disintegration upon the enemy's death. Hooray if you're a Nekros, amirite?

With physical weapons we get fun things like blowing enemies across the room, dismembering them, or even bisecting them (either vertically or horizontally)! That's fun!

With chemical weapons, we can slather enemies in lethal green goo, burn them to ashes (then burn the ashes), shock them until their corpses twitch, or simply turn them into ice statues! That's fun!

Don't even get me started on the combined elements.

And then we have channeling.

With channeling, we... cause enemies to slowly disintegrate, while not doing a whole lot before the actual kill.... That's... not fun.

That's the problem with channeling. With melee weapons, we already have combos (complete with a combo multiplier), charge attacks (which I didn't know we had back until I started playing again very recently), aerial and slide attacks... Channeling does nothing to supplement these (or to change melee combat in general) aside from improving damage (maybe other effects with mods, but take a look at my section on channeling costs). That's the bigger problem with channeling, and I think that making channeling stats different for each weapon would only go a little way into solving that problem.

Edited June 16, 2016 by AzyWng

[Arcira]

Some special channel abilities would be cool:

invisibility for daggers, life leach for  Scythes, improved block + melee counter for shield and sword, better aoe for 2handed etc. It could be a special channeling mod slot like the stances.

However it should use a different regenerative ressource. Otherwise it's always the same question. What's more effective, my warframe or channeling abilities? Maybe something like rage could work: kill stuff charge a bar and use it for a short time.

Edited June 17, 2016 by Arcira