New meta, new incarnons! I don't have any commentary this week since everything is new.
The offerings:
Sybaris
Sicarus
Okina
Dera
Cestra
What did everyone pick? I went with Okina followed by Dera. I love melee incarnons, and I love Cold, so Okina was an easy pick. I went with Dera because it's an OG weapon from back in the days when "laser damage" was a thing, and because I don't believe we have any Magnetic incarnons (excluding Synoid Gammacor, kinda).
Will post my thoughts on my picks as I unlock them.
The Okina are really good! There are a few quirks that make them exceptional: the first is that the cold procs are forced, so you get cold + any other cold-related elemental combos, like Blast, Viral or Magnetic. The second is that the spectral Okina obey glaive maths, so melee damage and swap damage (such as Holster Amp, Toxin Ward and so on) are multiplicative, and Eclipse and Vex Armour are self-multiplicative. I haven't tested it, but word in my Alliance is that they have multiplicative Condition Overload, and these weapons are very proficient self-primers. Needless to say, Chroma is a monster with these bad boys.
Since they can be evolved for combo storage, all frames and loadouts have super easy access to a Melee Influence build, which means they can easily mass-freeze within 20m.
I still need to test if Afflictions builds are underperforming due to the multi-element bug, which is currently still afflicting Hate and Ack & Brunt. I also will test a Blata's Influence build for general use and see how it compares to Eclipse builds.
I will update this post with the tests, and in a couple of days I should also have the Dera.
Update:
Dera is neat. It has a low proc rate due to its crippling base 2 fire rate, but you can also build it down having noticeably high crit factor if you build it down status. My corr/cold loadout is sitting at 57%/3x. I'm going to keep playing with builds, but I think optimising its proc rate is going to be my personal goal, so fire rate and SC. More goals will be seeing if I can get Frostbite to stack at an acceptable rate, otherwise I think Deadhead will continue to be the play.
The good news is that it hits like a truck: I was getting deadhead hits for 450k on a boilerplate hybrid build, and blast procs would onetap crowds of enemies.
What kind of build did you go with on Okina? Cold lends well to a crit-focused build but it seems most evolution are better suited for a status or hybrid setup. I was hoping to use it on frost but I think the overall crit chance gets too high for arcane duplicate and frankly I'm not sure what to replace it with
Yeah, I took it down the status damage and duration evolutions. I settled on an Influence build, specifically viral/electric. The multi-CO means you can also build CO onto it and just mod pure electric for mag/cold/electric for much higher damage. The Okina and all melee incarnons are still strong enough to kill most priority targets anyway, even doing focused Influence builds.
The boilerplate Influence build I run with the new Galvanized Melees is (for incarnons with +100% melee damage when shifted): Weeping Wounds, Blood Rush, Elementalist, Galvanized Steel, Blast 60/60s, Shocking Touch, Elementalist, Discipline's Merit on Exilus. On this weapon, if you're trying to optimise for damage, you would swap the 60/60's for CO and Berserker Fury.