The Zenistar

There’s not much I dislike about Warframe, but one thing I dislike is the daily login rewards, known as Daily Tributes. It’s as if the Lotus is saying to you “oh god, thanks for coming back, Tenno! Here’s a token of my gratitude.” And by ‘token’, she means token. Your Daily Tribute is often a single ‘rare’ component, ones that can be found in any mission on any planet, and by the time you’ve reached your 200th tribute, you’ve probably got tons of. One piece of Gallium. One Neurode. One Fieldron Sample. Sometimes you’ll get a random blueprint for literally anything – the only reason I ever tried Ash was because I got his blueprint at random.

If you’re really lucky, you’ll get something nice in your Daily Tribute, like a 2-3 hour Credit, Resource or Affinity Booster, which doubles money, ingredients and experience earned. Or maybe you’ll get a Resource Drop Chance booster, which isn’t as impressive but still has its uses. The BEST thing you can get is a 2-day discount on Platinum purchases, available in 25%, 50% and 75% flavours.

Every 50 and 100 days, you reach a milestone and get something nice. Either a cache containing a sigil, an Orokin reactor and a forma or something like that; a specific Primed Mod (e.g. Primed Fury), or a specific weapon. The bullshit thing is that you have to keep on logging in – while it doesn’t require consecutive logins, it still requires you logging in for 200 days to get a Primed Fury.

The Zenistar is rewarded to you on your 300th daily login.

But the Zenistar is fucking awesome.

From the looks of the weapon, it has the appearance of a flaming, axe-like thing, with a large, silver disc in the middle. The Zenistar though is actually a Heavy Blade, the same way top-tier weapons the War and Galatine are. It deals solely Heat damage (just like my old favourite the Ignis) and this can be combined with elemental mods to change it to Blast, Gas or Radiation damage. This means you can get a maximum of three different elements on the Zenistar.

Unfortunately, you most likely won’t have room for three. Because there’s something else the Zenistar does, and you’ll need as much range on your axe-pretending-to-be-a-sword as possible.

When you do a heavy attack with the Zenistar, it fires out that shiny, silver disc in the direction you are looking. This disc will hover in the air and start emitting waves of energy which (if modded right) will absolutely fucking destroy anything that comes close to it. This energy disc is affected by range and attack speed mods that you put on the Zenistar. Range obviously increases the radius of the energy disc’s effect, while attack speed mods affect just how regularly the energy waves do damage. Add some high Status Chance (100% if possible) and you will have a weapon that will clear rooms and hold choke points with ease.

The best way to build the Zenistar is with Corrosive or Gas damage and maximum status chance, as these do the most damage to most enemy types – gas damage will destroy Infested and screw Corpus, while Corrosive is mainly for killing Grineer. Blast damage also works pretty well since it will repeatedly knock over anything that comes close.

What you really need though is a mod called Condition Overload. This mod increases your melee damage based on how many elements are affecting a target, by 60% PER ELEMENT. Even with just default heat damage, that’s a nice little boost, and combined with your Pressure Point, that’s way more damage than one might expect from an energy wave.

There’s something else though that makes the Zenistar even better. Because it’s a Heavy Blade, you can equip the stance Cleaving Whirlwind on it. Cleaving Whirlwind is an awesome, high-energy stance, with both a sweeping, AoE melee combo AND a cool-looking, leaping, smashing attack and a pretty neat slide attack. So not only is your Heavy Attack awesome, but your quick attack and combo attacks look amazing too. You WILL need a forma though because Cleaving Whirlwind’s Vazarin (D) polarity doesn’t match the Madurai (V) polarity in the Zenistar’s Stance slot. Luckily the Zenistar always comes with a Catalyst installed, so it’s not too bad.

It’s just such a shame that the Zenistar is locked away behind THREE HUNDRED DAYS of logging into Warframe.