Ever since the Shadow Debt event, there is no doubt that melee has jumped from being arguably the worst way of dealing damage with weapons to being one of the best. In the few months after that event, multiple new builds have sprung up for melee weapons that make them some of the highest scaling weapons in the game. Recently, one specific build that differs greatly from the norm (it uses no elemental mods) has sprung up that makes one very specific type of weapon extremely powerful.
Here's the build on the Atterax. Disclaimer: the build is VERY expensive.
Now, at face value, this build seems trash. There's essentially only one damage mod in it. However, all that means is that the upfront damage is very small. The general idea of this build is to have enormous slash procs, which scale very hard since slash procs completely ignore armor. Primed Pressure Point (or the normal one if you don't have the primed) increases melee damage and is necessary on pretty much all melee builds. Primed Reach (or the normal one) increases range by very significant margin, which is important for two reasons. First, the Atterax has essentially the length of the Orthos Prime, meaning that extra range is gonna be pretty darn powerful. Second, the sheer number of enemies you are hitting will increase your combo significantly, whose duration is increased by Drifting Contact (which also increases status chance, a very good bonus). This means that Blood Rush and Weeping Wounds are fantastic, since the Atterax's crit and status are on par with the Prisma Dual Cleavers. Weeping Wounds increases the chances of slash procs, and Blood Rush increases slash proc damage (which we will discuss further). Organ Shatter is fantastic and works in conjuction with Blood Rush to increase slash proc damage. Berserker is always a great mod to have on a crit weapon. The last slot, which I have Maiming Strike in, is replaceable with different mods. The goal of that last mod slot is to either speed up combo build up (with Relentless combo or Fury) or to increase slash proc damage (Spoiled Strike or Maiming Strike). Elemental mods could be used there, I guess, but that kinda ruins the purpose of the build.
As stated before, the goal of this build is to slash proc anything and everything. A good resource to understanding how slash procs work is this article: Slash. The most important things to note are that slash proc damage scales off BASE damage, not SLASH damage, making Buzz Kill and Jagged Edge not very good on this weapon, since they don't effect the weapon's base damage, only the chance that a status proc from this weapon will be a slash proc. The reason why crit mods increase slash proc damage is because crit multipliers affect the base damage of the weapon, thereby increasing slash proc damage with every critical hit. Thus, Blood Rush, Organ Shatter, and Maiming Strike are great for increasing the slash proc damage. Spoiled Strike is also a reasonable replacement for Maiming Strike, since Maiming is incredibly expensive, but the slower attack speed is very noticeable, but that can be fixed with Berserker.
The types of weapons that can work with this type of build have to be very long range, be primarily slash based, and have high crit and status chances. Unfortunately, that cuts the list of viable weapons for this type of build down greatly. The ones that I can think of right now are the Atterax (which is probably the best weapon for this build), the Galatine Prime (if you want higher upfront damage, but with less range), the Telos Boltace (which definitely has better builds that this), and maybe (emphasis on maybe) the Orthos Prime. Weapons like the Nikana Prime that fit most of the criteria for this build but miss one or two still work with the build, but for most of the content in the game, more upfront damage (i.e. elementals) is the way to go.
Tell me what you think of this type of build, and also leave feedback for me since this is my first blog post. Thanks for reading!