User:Falterfire/Modding 102

[This is part 2 of an ongoing series. The first part can be found here]

Disclaimer
This guide is designed to be a lot more narrowly focused than my previous guide. Where before I was focusing on general modding techniques and a rough idea of what you were aiming for, here I'm going to be a lot more direct. I'm going to be covering specific builds, and when you would use them. These builds are likely to feel quite restrictive, and they don't have a ton of room to make them your own.

You are welcome to ignore this guide and mod in your own way. If you have a sweet mod build that works for you, awesome (and please leave a comment describing it and why you like it if you have the time). This guide is meant to be list of things that myself and others have found useful rather than a comprehensive list of how to mod melee weapons.

With that out of the way, let's get to the fun stuff:

Introduction
Many eons ago, when Warframe began, I wasn't playing. And I haven't looked up details, but I know the damage system was different and weird, so I'm going to skip to the part where I was playing. So slightly fewer aeons ago, there was no melee combo counter, and melee weapons were awful. When I first got into Warframe, the general advice given was "Melee weapons are all trash. Just bring Dual Zoren or the Tonbo so you can copter better." And DE looked at this, and they said "We can do better."

And they did. And now we can indeed do better. Much better. So much better in fact, that at this point melee scales into the late game better than pretty much any other weapon type. Thanks to several newer mods, there are some rather powerful strategies available that can push a wide swath of melee weapons to a level where they will make mincemeat of even level 100 enemies.

The rest of the guide is split roughly like this:
 * The Main Builds - This section covers the primary ways to build melee weapons
 * Building for Crits
 * Building for Status
 * Building for Both
 * Other Important Mods
 * Covert Lethality
 * Life Strike
 * Maiming Strike
 * Primed Reach
 * Conclusion

The Main Builds
Although there are many ways you could, in theory, build a melee weapon. In general the melee weapons worth using fall into one of three camps: Either they are Critical based, or they are Status based, or they are blessed with both.

If you're new at this, you may be asking "How do I tell what to do with a weapon?"

Fortunately, it's pretty simple: Just look at the stats. If a weapon has 15% or more critical chance, and at least a 2x critical damage multiplier, it qualifies for a critical build. The higher those are, the better off you are obviously, but 15%/2x is just about the minimum to make it really work. For Status, the minimum bar is 20% status chance. For the hybrid build, it just needs to meet both the Critical and Status minimum requirements.

Now that you know what kind of weapon you're looking at, let's get into how to actually mod it: