Are there any? Other than heavy attack weapons like gunblades and glaives
While not exactly what you might be looking for:
There are tenet melees that pause combo when you sheathe them. You would still be relying on combo but could put it away and save the multiplier for when you’d like to engage in melee.
Innodem is good as a combo weapon or heavy attack weapon and would be my suggestion. With a heavy build, corrupt charge, and covert lethality you can always activate the incarnon mode (with the proper evolution) via heavy attack without starting a combo in order to get the running speed bonuses and additionally the forced slash procs on the heavy dagger attacks will make mincemeat of SP enemies (since slash DOT ignores armor.
The Vastilok can get a 12x combo within 1 or 2 regular attacks (double shot from High Noon stance) using the Quickening mod while applying slash and stripping armor extremely fast. So while it does rely on 12x combo the combo is basically free. This works well for frames that can’t deal with armor and don’t want to play Unairu.
That’s my 2 cents.
Good luck Tenno.
Light attack spam weapons to get you through the regular star chart? You’ll want anything with big range and high damage, so like slide attack whips, light attack and slide attack heavy blades, polearms.
Some picks:
Stropha is the highest light attack DPS weapon in the game, and it has punchthrough, and you can build it as a heavy attack weapon or a 12x heavy hybrid later on when you have mods.
Broken War is free and strong, and a Corrosive build will carry you all the way to SP. Run and slash, things die; very good.
You can do regular Circuit for the Duviri melees. Edun is great right out the gates.
Kuva Shildeg is a gigantic meat mincer and good all the way into SP.
Heck broken scepter might even work, that special interaction is very annoying tho
Another way of phrasing this is, are there weapons that dont want a 3x multi and access to strong mods. To which the normal answer is why would i give up free damage?
I need more context, is this for steel path? Or do you just have trouble maintaining combo duration? if its the latter mods and arcanes can fix that.
Its for steel path. I was asking because for alot of loadouts I’m more focused on using my primary and secondary weapons and wanted a melee weapon that could still work even if I don’t swap to it to maintain combo.
Incarnon hate gets double combo chance+innate duration + the other combo chance mod and you hit 12x in seconds and can keep it up
Forgot, there are a few incarnon weapons which have evolution paths that freeze combo duration when you weapon swap
Other than heavy attack weapons like gunblades and glaives
There goes my suggestions, uhh i use the skiajati with a killer riven and it works okay without combo, mainly because its pre-umbral formaed and would be a waste to madurai to get the combo mods on it
Only valkyr’s claws and excal’s blade i guess and that’s just because you cant abuse the gladiator mods like on Baruuk and cant use combo mods