I’ve seen some players debate which is better. Condition Overload is better in the majority of cases. It basically matches primed pressure point if the enemy has 2 different statuses on them. Many melee stance mods have attacks that guarantee a status effect, your companion can apply status effects, the people you’re playing with can apply status effects, and so on.
The only situation where primed pressure point is better is if the first attack can kill the enemy with primed pressure point and condition overload can’t and you are playing solo while not applying any statuses yourself.
This is not a post about what the best build is for any specific weapon or a hard and fast rule. Just a general rule of thumb if you are choosing which one of the two to put into a slot.
Edit: a general rule of thumb for a standard melee weapons. As pointed out below condition overload may not work with all exalted abilities.
Heavy attack builds would favor pressure point, though chances are these builds use the umbral version with the critical mod instead. Otherwise high critical spam builds that do not have enough status to reliably get the damage out of CO, but I think these are currently a bit of a small niche. I don’t think I’ve used critical spam build since DE changed the combo counter to not affect the base damage. Something like Avalanche Frost could make use of a setup like this, but CO build would probobly pull ahead if you have decent status on the melee.
Looking at a random smattering of stances the heavy attacks often have a 250% to 500% chance of applying some of the physical status effects. In those cases even 1 status would tie it with primed pressure point and given how many statuses are usually flying around I don’t think you’ll find many enemies that aren’t being accidentally primed for condition overload.
Side note, my best melee weapon, fastest time to kill 20 max level steel path heavy gunners in simulacrum averaged over 10 tries only using the melee weapon, is a heavy attack spam crit and speed zaw dagger with condition overload. It’s fast enough that the time it takes to cast abilities to put more status effects on enemies actually increases the time it takes to kill them.
The pressure point mods are usually more useful against status immune enemies, some enemies are only immune to certain status effects, so CO could be better depending on what elements you have. CO also doesn’t work with every pseudo exalted ability, so if you’re lazy like me and don’t want to check if it’s compatible, it’s easier to just grab a weapon with pressure point.
Depends on status proc
I pretty much always roll CO because I always want more combo stacks.
