Oh God the Zenistar Sucks So Bad Now
For a long time, the Zenistar was my melee weapon of choice. As a newbie, it carried me through many a Defense Mission whenever I wasn’t using someone like Frost or Limbo. Although, frankly, as soon as Gara and Khora came out, Defense Missions became a lot easier. However, in Melee 2.9/3.0, all melee weapons were reworked and rebalanced, and, well, the Zenistar kinda died. It became shit.
Simply put, the duration of the flaming disc was changed so it matched your combo count. The old Zenistar, the flaming disc would always last 45 seconds, which is a reasonable amount of time, considering how long most AoE effects last. These days, the disc lasts 10 seconds by default, and CAN go up to 120 seconds if you get a x12 combo, but it takes a long time to get there, and it’s not until you get a combo count of 5+ that it matches the old Zenistar. The Zenistar’s range was also nerfed heavily, and the visuals no longer really line up with where enemies can be attacked.
Apparently, the Zenistar was nerfed because it was an ‘afk’ weapon, which makes no sense, because it never did that much damage. And since the Zenistar’s flaming disk only ever did elemental damage, this made it impractical in long-duration survival, since you’d need slash procs to better trigger things like Nekros’s Desecrate and Hydroid’s Pilfering Swarm. On top of that, Octavia has existed for a long time, and she’s way more of an AFK frame, with similar durations and way, way more damage than the Zenistar with just base stats. AFK stats continue to exist, and the Zenistar was never a good one because it only caused a continual trickle of damage and did nothing to protect the user or complete objectives.
Now, technically, you can still use the Zenistar as a normal weapon. Despite its godawful crit chance, you can somewhat do a Heavy Attack Tennokai build around it, and that somewhat gets around its horrible swing speed. That being said, you can kinda use any melee weapon if you use Tennokai, since Tennokai gives you random free heavy attacks that do extra damage. And the mod Discipline’s Merit gives you a Tennokai attack every 4 seconds guaranteed.
But if you want to use the Zenistar’s disc without having to constantly build up combo so the disc lasts for more than 10 seconds, then you’re out of luck. Sure, one can use Corrupted Charge (which adds a x2 combo count by default) but that does take away from valuable modding space, and, for what? A little extra disk time? You still gotta build up that combo, and it’s hard to do with such a slow-swinging weapon, while also having an annoying downside that makes it harder to keep your combo up. You have to dedicate 2 mod slots to get the Zenistar back to how it used to be, and you HAVE to use a Riven Mod to do so, one with +initial combo. Which, in my opinion, is kinda a bit of a waste of a stat on a Riven Mod.
I suppose, on the plus side, the Dominion Blade giant sword skin bug still works on the Zenistar, making it look huge. But what’s the point of using a cool skin if the weapon itself is so weak?