I crafted the Ghoulsaw earlier for MR, and I was thinking about how it was the only weapon in its archetype. I was wondering if there were any other forgotten archetypes, so I decided to look through every melee weapon’s release date. I ended up making this chart, which shows each melee type as a percentage of all melees.
It’s not a perfect system, because the number of weapons in an archetype doesn’t exactly correlate to their place in the meta. (I’m pretty sure more people are using gunblades and glaives than dual swords.) But it’s still interesting to think about.
I decided to find which weapons have been releasing the furthest apart since the archetype was added. (Meaning days since the first one released divided by total releases.) For example, there’s been a new set of Dual Swords every 208 days since the first one.
The Assault Saw didn’t even crack the top three, those being:
Rapiers: 904 days between each release on average Claws: 820 days between each release on average Nunchakau: 710 days between each release on average
Rapiers and Claws have their place (those being finishers and the venka prime as a statstick) but I legitimately forgot that nunchucks were in the game.
Hopefully we’ll get some new weapons in underserved categories soon. All I want is a tenet assault saw with some kind of energy blade. (And a buff to the stance. Please.)
New types means new stances, and DE hasn’t made a new stance that was good in at least five years. Well, Wise Razor was good for a short period of time before its nerf, but the move set for it was always terrible.
Saws, 2h Nikanas, and even Heavy Blade stances are just bad in some combination of their move sets and damage boosts or both.
I don’t hold out much hope that any new stance for a new weapon type will be good.
The new dual nikana stance is alright. Once they fix the weird bug that’s causing the forced slash on heavy to be offset behind and to the right of your frame, it’ll at least have good multipliers (although no guaranteed procs on light attack, sadly.) I feel like a truly good dual nikana would work fine alongside the stance, we’re just blinded by how mid Sun & Moon is. And the heavy scythe stance has bad multipliers, but there’s a lot of nice slash procs in there. I would call these stances alright. They’re not great, but they’re not so bad as to doom their whole weapon class.
Assault saws / two-handed nikanas are just bad though. If the Tenet Livia was any other weapon archetype I would never unequip it, but Wise Razor sucks so much that it ruins it. If they ever make another assault saw, they’re going to have to pump its base damage way up to account for the terrible multipliers on Butcher’s Revelry.
Overall it’s been pretty hit or miss, but there have been some hits IMO. I’m done getting excited for new archetypes before I can try them, but I think saying there hasn’t been a good stance in five years is a little excessive.
It really isn’t. It jerks you around in odd ways. I admit, I’m much picker about movement sets than most people, apparently.
Worse but not related to the stance, the sound effects for Sun and Moon just seem downright silly.
Gale force dawn could be guaranteed to kill everything with one swing and I wouldn’t use it, because again, the move set is just really terrible. Again, to be good, a stance needs to help with damage AND have fun, predictable movement that can be used to reproducibly move toward enemies or away from them. Some stances can’t even repeatable aim at a crate.
I’ve sort of given up on that altogether. I tend to run very high attack speed and bind melee to my scroll wheel, so my frame just flails at groups of enemies until they’re all dead.
From the perspective of feeling like an actual melee weapon instead of a flamethrower that forces you to walk forward, I think DE would have to tear down the entire stance system and start over if they wanted that to work. I don’t think we’ll ever see them do that for the simple reason that in many cases, they refuse to acknowledge that this game is a horde shooter - we need combos ripped out of a Dynasty Warriors game, not something pretending to be single-target. But lots of new content is still being designed with the assumption that players will spend multiple seconds dealing with a single corrupted lancer, which is the root of a lot of balance issues.