The only alternative that comes to mind are Exodia Contagion zaws. On bullet jump or double jump your aerial attack while aim gliding will ‘throw’ a projectile shaped like your weapon in the direction you’re looking.

The projectile travels in a straight line but is affected by gravity, so it’s not homing like a glaive and falls down eventually. It also explodes on contact in a very generous AoE and can embed itself into an enemy if it hits one to deal DoT after the initial explosion.

There’s a 400% damage bonus after the projectile flies for over 30 meters.

It’s a bit weird to use at first but it is extremely powerful. We’re talking possibly millions of damage here, especially if you use the distance bonus.

Edit:

Here’s a quick example I made in Simulacrum against lvl 190 Gokstad Officers without the distance bonus.

While not exactly what you might be looking for:

There are tenet melees that pause combo when you sheathe them. You would still be relying on combo but could put it away and save the multiplier for when you’d like to engage in melee.

Innodem is good as a combo weapon or heavy attack weapon and would be my suggestion. With a heavy build, corrupt charge, and covert lethality you can always activate the incarnon mode (with the proper evolution) via heavy attack without starting a combo in order to get the running speed bonuses and additionally the forced slash procs on the heavy dagger attacks will make mincemeat of SP enemies (since slash DOT ignores armor.

The Vastilok can get a 12x combo within 1 or 2 regular attacks (double shot from High Noon stance) using the Quickening mod while applying slash and stripping armor extremely fast. So while it does rely on 12x combo the combo is basically free. This works well for frames that can’t deal with armor and don’t want to play Unairu.

That’s my 2 cents.

Good luck Tenno.

“Good” for mid star chart? For Sortie 3? For starting the steel path? For level cap? Please explain what “good” means to you.

Another way of phrasing this is, are there weapons that dont want a 3x multi and access to strong mods. To which the normal answer is why would i give up free damage?

I need more context, is this for steel path? Or do you just have trouble maintaining combo duration? if its the latter mods and arcanes can fix that.

The mods that make melee good scale with combo. Assuming you mean not using heavy attacks: My Telos Boltace and Nikana Prime can shred enemies in the right circumstances using status/crit hybrid builds. Any weapon with good crit and status stats could work. Use a frame like Wisp who has a lot of survivability and easy access to blinds for the damage bonus. You could replace Wisp’s tickle beam with Nidus’s helminth ability to group enemies up if you’re not using the Telos Boltace.

They don’t even come close to my Glaive Prime though.

Only valkyr’s claws and excal’s blade i guess and that’s just because you cant abuse the gladiator mods like on Baruuk and cant use combo mods

Light attack spam weapons to get you through the regular star chart? You’ll want anything with big range and high damage, so like slide attack whips, light attack and slide attack heavy blades, polearms.

Some picks:

Stropha is the highest light attack DPS weapon in the game, and it has punchthrough, and you can build it as a heavy attack weapon or a 12x heavy hybrid later on when you have mods.

Broken War is free and strong, and a Corrosive build will carry you all the way to SP. Run and slash, things die; very good.

You can do regular Circuit for the Duviri melees. Edun is great right out the gates.

Kuva Shildeg is a gigantic meat mincer and good all the way into SP.

Other than heavy attack weapons like gunblades and glaives

There goes my suggestions, uhh i use the skiajati with a killer riven and it works okay without combo, mainly because its pre-umbral formaed and would be a waste to madurai to get the combo mods on it