Why is Condition Overload considered preferable to Primed Pressure Point on so many builds?

Three main reasons:

1. It's a cheaper mod. Easier to access, easier to max rank.

2. Applying three or more status effects is a lot easier than it sounds. A typical melee has impact, puncture, slash, and some kind of modded element. This means CO will beat other options after a few swings. Some enemies will die before CO reaches its full effect, but you didn't need the extra damage on them anyway. CO is far more effective than Primed Pressure Point against the biggest and strongest enemies, which are where you need the most help.

3. With a status primer like the Epitaph or Kuva Nukor, CO can produce a far higher damage multiplier than Primed Pressure Point. You can easily get 5+ statuses if you build right, which is a huge damage increase.

Likely because most making those builds are assuming you are running a primer, or are using weeping wounds. If you aren't using the combo-counter or a primer it's as you said, just inferior (in almost all typical use cases for melee).

The main reason is that you get more damage out of CO than PPP and that's why it is preferred. Statusing enemies is a natural and common occurrence in Warframe missions. In order for PPP to be better most of the time it would take an environment where status procs are less frequent to the point that the flat PPP bonus is higher more often than the CO bonuses and this simply isn't the case unless you can craft this theoretical environment (by playing solo without a companion and also ensuring that you have very low status chance on your weaponry). Or you could just play CO which is fine on its own but scales up (hard if you lean into it with priming).

In Warframe, flat bonuses are fine until you reach harder content where your build will need to ramp up to keep up.

There's a major divide between comfy builds where you only use a weapon and advanced builds that utilise up to the entire arsenal.Primer + melee is somewhat convenient tho.

co allows weapons to scale higher (due to the nature of co and allowance of other mods instead of elemelons on weapons) while requiring additional effort to use, that's the tldr

Honestly for most content you can stick with Primed Pressure Point over Condition overload, even in Steel Path. You probably wouldn't notice much of a difference unless you're doing an endurance run.

Pretty minor but if you're dealing with status resistant enemies, you will want a primer that proc's status that the enemy isn't resistant to. (Deimos enemies are immune to viral). *You will have to try to mod for the statuses that the enemy isn't resistant to or you will probably be doing a lot less damage than if you just took some variant of Pressure Point. Other than that, the only enemy I can think of that has status Immunity (most of the time) would be a Juggernaut, or enemies protected by something like an Ancient Healer.

Also for generic heavy attack builds, you are generally better off using Sacrificial Steel + Sacrificial Pressure for their set bonus.

The main benefit of Primed Pressure Point is that it uses a regular forma to match its polarity instead of an umbra forma, and hits slightly harder against regular enemies than Sacrificial Pressure, even with its set bonus.

The way i see it pressure point is worthless unless your status chance is like sub 15% If you are spamming E for attacks + warframe abilitys and pet you almost always have 3 effects within the first second or so. At that point its better than pressure point, if the enemy dies before it hits 3 stacks it doesnt matter cuz they are dead anyway. So for steel path etc overlaod will almost certainly be better.

You're usually spreading status effects around you with your abilities and your companion, which all help stack Condition Overload.

Example: I'm a Volt main who uses Shocking Speed and Nourish. My melee weapon has IPS and Corrosive. My Sentinel has Verglas with Cold and Gas. This means I'm inflicting up to 8 different status effects on the enemy, assuming it can even survive all that, which translates to up to 640% damage increase.

You can take things even further quite easily with a primer weapon like Epitaph.

For status weapons, it will generally scale higher, because you'll usually be splatting 1-3 from the physical types, + 1-2 elemetn statuses, plus whatever lifted or other less recognized ones.

For crit weapons, you use the Sacrificial mods anyways.

PPP basically only exists as a weird bandaid on the fact that Pressure Point didn't get a full 10 rank treatment to begin with, but its use case was basically gone once the Sacrificial version showed up later.

(in context of a stand alone weapon build. There are various otheer modifiers that apply in full-loadout builds, but most of those also diminish PPP either by applying even more status, or adding flat damage modifiers that make having any +Damage on the weapon semi-inconsequential)

The one scenario that might make it have any use would be some sort of melee incarnon that like the Laetum/Phenmor perk relies on being neither a Crit or Status weapon.

Basically you are spreading way more statuses than you realize.

Normal weapon usually have 4 to 5 different statuses, but it also counts stuff like: disarm, knockdown, lifted, silence...

Because 3 statuses=240% damage boost

I only use PPP on statsticks now, even when not using a primer, the procs on the stance itself or the weapon it self is sufficient enough