Build combo by spamming light attack (neutral combo of [Pointed Wind] or [Stinging Thorn]) until x12, then heavy attack Tennokai when prompted to activate Incarnon form as well as deal forced bleed status on heavy attacks (from x12 multiplier + 250% slash). Keep jumping while using light attack to take advantage of the aerial based perks.
UPDATE JULY 2024
With health and armor changes, slash has been relatively nerfed while raw damage has better TTK, particularly if you end up using a viral heat or corrosive heat primer. Melee Influence allows you to spread non impact/puncture/slash status effects in a 20m radius, after being activated by electric status. This effectively allows you to clear maps fast. For single target damage, use [Primed Fever Strike] over [Shocking Touch] and Melee Duplicate.
- Incarnon Form : Heavy attack at 5x combo to activate Incarnon form. This gives +3m range, +40% attack speed, aerial projectiles and Incarnon Resilience buffs on finisher
- Orokin [Reach]: +0.5m range to maximise range. Feel free to swap to +30% movement speed if you prefer the speed boost.
- Skyborne Lunge: Increase range of aerial attacks by 0.5m.
- Swooping Lunge : up to +150% dmg at 3 stacks after airborne kills. Kills from slash DoT while you are airborne count, making this very easy to build up by simply jumping around a bit.
- Armed Inspiration or Stunning Brutality: Armed inspiration gives passive combo gain without even attacking, which can be useful if you plan on using guns more than melee. Stunning Brutality is pretty niche and provides a 10m stun when you perform a finisher. Blood annointed is now the least useful evolution due to Tennokai, since you can now perform x12 heavies without spending any combo.
Range and attack speed are optional since the Incarnon bonuses are enough to replace them (+65% attack speed and +3m range), but you can double stack them if you prefer.
Pointed Wind : Neutral combo Parting Edge has high multiplier of 774% dmg/s with short animation duration. NOTE, CURRENTLY [Condition Overload] is bugged with stances, and Parting Edge only has 50% effectiveness with Condition Overload (meaning only about 387% dmg/s. The Foward combo Viper's Bite 560% dmg/s but with 100% effectiveness with CO, meaning you should probably stick to forward combo until this bug is fixed.
[Condition Overload]: +80% damage per status effect. This is NOT capped by the number of unique statuses i.e. with impact, puncture, slash statuses alone you get +240% damage per hit. Paired with a primer such as Kuva Nukor or Epitaph, you can get up to 8 unique statuses for +640% damage per hit.
Organ Shatter: +90% crit damage. We no longer need amalgam since Tennokai heavy are independent on wind up.
[Weeping Wounds]: +440% status chance at x12 combo, giving 108% status. This means with each hit you are guaranteed a status (in addition to forced slash status procs from Pointed Wind).
Blood Rush: +440% critical chance at x12 combo allows crit chance to hit 108% on light attacks.
Gladiator Might: +60% crit damage with +110% crit chance at x12 combo allowing crit chance to hit 143% cc on light attacks.
[Primed Reach]: Makes [Innodem] have a devastating final range of 8.3m (8.8m while airborne), which doesn't suffer as much with [Follow Through] due to the high innate 0.9 followthrough of daggers (this means each enemy hit reduces the damage to the next enemy by only 10%).
[Quickening]: +40% attack speed for final 80% extra attack speed, which really helps since the dagger is very slow at base. Extra combo count also means you can build to x12 incredibly quickly.
Primed Smite Grineer: 55% final multiplicative damage , double dipping on slash procs to +140% (i.e. 2.4x multiplier)
Melee Influence: allows you to nuke maps with electric DoT.
Melee Duplicate: This is best in slot for a slash build, allowing yellow crits to have 100% chance of hitting a second time at r5. This second hit is capable of rolling an Orange crit, meaning the optimum CC value to maximise average DPS is 137.5%, giving an average multiplier of 10.56x (compared to 6.72x without duplicate and 9.85x at 100% CC). This is reached closest by simply running Blood Rush + Gladiator Might WITHOUT additional crit sources such as Sacrificial Steel or Avenger etc.
FLEXIBLE OPTIONS:
Melee Elementalist: swap Quickening out for this if you are happy with the innate attack speed or offloading attack speed.
[Sacrificial Steel]: Another 220% crit chance for light attacks, doubled to +440% on heavy attacks to hit 240% final crit chance on heavy (with [Blood Rush] and glad might). Note this makes light attacks worse when accounting for Melee Duplicate, but makes heavy attacks similar to slightly better.
Melee Animosity: Since Melee duplicate is incredibly rare, Melee Animosity is a great alternative for hybrid heavy builds since it provides a huge CC boost to the heavy attack after light attacks.
- Crit damage, Range, Attack speed are ideal positives. If you can roll attack speed, slot over [Quickening].
