The Parazon – A Cool Yet Unfinished Thing

The Parazon was introduced with the Old Blood update as a way to not just kill Liches but to make doing things like hacking seem a bit cooler, like some sort of far future magic Swiss army knife. But its implementation so far is… woefully incomplete. Because you only really use it for two things: killing and hacking.

Now the killing is pretty sweet. You do some awesome flips and stabs as you jump around and skewer your enemies, most of whom are Thralls. It’s not quite as fun when you go to stab a Kuva Lich and get your back snapped, but the final kill animation on a Lich is also very cool, during which you strangle them with a bit of wire and then stab them in the back.

Yeah, you strangle them. With your Parazon. Because the Parazon is a really weird little item. I called it a magic Swiss army knife a few moments ago but it’s more just a magic stabby blade on a long piece of string. While in the Arsenal, you can see the Parazon idle animation, which involves swinging the blade around on its wire like some sort of homicidal yo-yo. Of course you can customize the colours of the Parazon and put a handful of mods on them (including the old Warframe mod Intruder, which gives bonus time to hacking and was mostly unused) too.

Speaking of Parazon mods, the mods involved are… kinda weird. They’re either buffs to hacking or they’re rewards for doing mercy kills with the Parazon. Well, the bottom three of them are. The Parazon has six slots and three of them are reserved for Requiem Mods. The other mods just kinda sit there for when you hack or stab things.

So it’s basically a weapon when you have no weapons that you have equipped at all times. You can’t go into missions just with a Parazon but the thought is there.

The Parazon is also used for hacking, with a rather… stiff animation where you stab whatever console you are trying to hack and just jiggle it around a bit.

I feel like the Parazon was supposed to be used for so much more though. Why aren’t we using it in Capture missions to incapacitate important enemies? Why aren’t we using the Parazon to stab mobile defense consoles so we can insert the Lotus’s payloads? And why can’t I power Excavators by playing Volt and stabbing the drills with my Parazon?

Actually, while we’re at it, why are they even called “mercy kills”? Because we’re… stabbing them with a small blade rather than a big blade? Frankly being chopped into chunks by a Galatine is probably more merciful than the painful and multiple stabs induced by a Parazon. Actually, most deaths are somewhat instantaneous compared to the brief stabs that Parazons do. When we stab someone, we have the choice to do a Secret Mercy or a normal Mercy but both of them involve utterly murdering our chosen victims.

I mean, they’re not merciful at all. We’re still murdering them. But considering that the Parazon has a long wire attached to it, why CAN’T we do non-lethal moves on enemies? Let me choke out all the poor fuckers instead of killing them all.

So yeah, the Parazon is pretty cool, but it doesn’t seem to be fully implemented yet. I mean, why can’t I just stick my Requiem mods on any other melee weapon and go Lich-hunting with that?