Talk:Zaw/@comment-2A01:E35:8A6D:9040:B4AD:B246:D4B5:FE01-20171204010117

After the initial hype and hours of fishing for standing, I finally had the ability to get into zaw crafting. Looking at the builder and all the possible results, I'm pretty disappointed by how this whole crafting system turned out.

There really aren't that many stats you can influence, it only really revolves around two stats: speed/damage and crit/status. The latter isn't really a choice because you usually want to max out those base stats, and playing with a slower weapon makes your procs unreliable, so you'd usually go for a faster weapon that procs often, as there is no point in building a slow status weapon. You can't really influence the base damage stat repartition in a meaningful way eitherand if you could, you'd just go slash/viral anyway.

Stats such as weapon range are absent, and channelling damage is the same for all weapons at 1.5x (at this point I think the devs forgot it even exists). The only interesting part about this are the unique arcane procs which are mostly inconsistent; like Exodia Hunt which for some reason only procs half the time, so the only reliable ones are again those with a 100% chance on a single action (Plague, epidemic) or those with a lot of possible procs (Valor).

Those arcanes also require a mind-boggling ammount of standing to grind aswell (why not sell a single 50k standing reusable BP?), which gates the best aspect of zaws for a lot of players. I think that a lot of the community doesn't really care about stat-swap weapons anymore, and melees desperately need signature mechanics and gimmicks to distinguish themselves. It doesn't help that two of these were also event-exclusive

In the end it feels like it's less of a new era of melee gameplay, and more of a system for veterans to grind their busted version of Orthos Prime, and I really hope more zaw parts and changes are coming to allow better customization in the future