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.)
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.