As a fan of melee, so far I've been testing quite a bit with the melee mods. Weeping Wounds is basically 4x stronger than before (the wording has not changed, 40% per crit multiplier, but multipliers easily go up to 12x now).
This means with this mod alone, you will reach +480% status chance.
The calculation is pretty simple then: 100% / 4.8 = 20.8%.
So with 1 weeping wounds and 20% status chance, you will reach 100% status chance and don't need anything else. So for Zaw min-maxing, you don't really want to add more than 20% base.
But, there's more! Adding at least 1 additional element to your weapon will make your Condition Overload considerably stronger, so I recommend adding a 60/60. And Drifting Contact is usually still the best in slot (with some certain build exception, I myself want the combo duration aura for example). So that's 60% + 40% more that you actually have, making it 100% / 5.8 = 17.2%
So you only need 17.2% base status to get a full 100% status chance (nothing happens if you go over 100% unlike crit), thus you can settle for less status on your Zaw for more crit.
Example:
PLAGUE KEEWAR + SHTUNG + VARGEET JAI II
In the same way Weeping Wounds is 4 times stronger than before, the Gladiator set is also stronger. Even though it went from 15% to 10% per multiplier, you get a much larger multiplier. Since each piece adds 10%, each Gladiator piece is basically 120% crit chance if you're mostly melee (when not counting multiplier wind ups). And you can still let your sentinel equip the melee mods (I believe you need the Deconstructor sentinel weapon to put melee mods). There's also this pet secretly has sentinel weapon mods equipped thing, but that's a bug and I'm not sure if it's still there.
From what I've seen so far, pretty much ANY weapon becomes a beast if it has at least 18% status chance:
- Condition Overload
- Weeping Wounds
- Any 60/60 mod (I like using Fire now)
- Blood Rush
- Primed Reach
- Berserker
- [Anything]
- [Anything]
For the final two I recommend anything from the Gladiator set if not using Helios' Deconstructor weapon.
Otherwise Quickening, Primed Fury, Riven, Healing Return, Organ Shatter are all pretty good.
And yeah, I've been rambling about a higher base crit chance, but I forgot to explain what it means.
Blood Rush = 60% per combo multiplier. 12 x 60% = 720%
If you combine it with 3 parts of the Gladiator set, it would be 12 x 90% = 1080% instead.
Red crit = 200%+ crit.
200% / 10.8 = 18.5%
So only 18.5% base crit is required to achieve red crits on weapons with the above mod setup.
300% / 10.8 = 27.8%
For an even more 'redder' crit, 27.8% base crit is required. Not many weapons have that, but more do now than before with the update.
Personally I run 1 more Gladiator mod on my Valkyr (Gladiator Finesse), which makes it a total of 12 x 100% = 1200%, so only 300% / 12 = 25% crit chance is required to achieve a permanent 'red x 2' crit.
So basically almost every melee is godlike.
My current favorite is Twirling Spire Polearm (so many cool moves at your disposal) but I'm working on a few others as well.
