Sitting and thinking about this, I realised most of my favourite frames essentially all buff weapons to the point that there are no “not powerful” weapons. Banshee, Nyx, Zephyr, Sevagoth, Frost, Limbo, Ivara.

Some of my standout niche or “hidden boss” weapons are:

• Basmu: the cooler Nukor. Has a lot of different elemental builds. Has a cool corr-cold-blast build due to its primary fire having split elements between direct electric and radial heat. I’m still playing around with getting a good altfire build.
• Staticor: has the niche of being fairly weak on paper, but with an absolutely phenomenal radius and fairly good status chance. I’ve been running it on Frost and it performs way ahead of what it “should” according to my spreadsheets, so I don’t know.
• Alternox: I don’t care what anyone says, I love running this on Gyre because of how good it looks. With a riven and a bit of love, it’s quite functional as a crowd clearer, range extender, and bubble popper.
• Sibear: kind of a bad reputation as the most meh incarnon, but even if that were so it’s in the context of incarnons. Still hits like a truck, high range, stacks slows, readily stacks large amounts of cold, and combo racking that would make any gunblade blush.
• Redeemer Prime: Melee Afflictions gave this one new life. I run it on Stealth Xata builds as a nuke weapon.
• Pathocyst: people sleep on this one. Has the highest raw damage of any glaive, so it’s a great Afflictions carrier or Duplicate nuker. Still playing with a Crescendo build for heavy blast spam.

And an honorable mention to the Kuva Karak. Has a niche as a mag/blast weapon with good hybrid stats. I’ve actually found it outperforms the Tenet Flux as a Blast carrier, which was surprising. Great with Nautilus since it stacks IPS quickly to refresh Cordon.

I mean, my Soma Prime is probably only powerful because of its riven. Does that count? I really enjoy guns that spew bullets but just keep firing.

My favorite melee that, albeit AFAIK well respected, you don’t actually ever see in the wild is Stropha.

The style definitely does not suit everyone, but my Volt, Zephyr, and Mag can take crazy advantage of it.

It was only a few days ago I took Corufell off Mag and replaced it with Stropha. Should’ve done that wayyyy earlier.

I use a lot of off-meta melee (if there is such a thing, since most melee can be made powerful). I guess the ones on my list that count as “mediocre” are Mios, Ninkondi, Prisma Dual Cleavers, Guandao Prime, and Twin Basolk. If we’re counting hidden gems, I’d also add Caustacyst, which I liked even before I had a riven for it, and now use on my Kullervo loadout as well.

I generally try to use anything that isn’t meta, and is really like weapons with a unique trait/gimmick. The Hystrix is a secondary I’ve been using a lot more because you can cycle through an element to force proc heat/cold/electric/toxin, which is really useful for different setups like heat if you want to use Cascadia Flare or cold if you’re trying to boost crit damage/slow demolysts without interfering with your modded elemental combos. It does have a fairly small magazine,so it can be harder to use without some form of ammo efficiency/infinite ammo.

Twin Krokuhr simply because they look like a pair of pirate swords, they also happen to have very cheap rivens which makes up for their mediocre stats a bit.

Quellor is just a nice high capacity rifle to go blasting with, internal bleeding also makes its alt-fire incredible at deleting tough enemies.

Prisma Dual Decurions, definetaly one of the lesser archguns but still capable of steel path with the right modding and its just fun to have a pair of gigantic machine pistols.

I have a set of hikou prime that are modded for concealed explosives, fire rate, multishot, and negative accuracy. It throws 5 stars a shot, 15 shots a second, and if you pull the trigger and aren’t in archwing over an open world you’re on your back. It can be kind of viable at sortie level, but it’s absolutely hilarious to give to defense targets.

As a meme, I have it named “Clan Invitations” and use the playing card sentient skin for it because I’m the main recruiter for our clan.