Basically, what if you could get Unique Variants hit gave your weapons an additional chance to do a status effect.
They would be Low, Medium, High, and then capped out at Maximum. Additionally, these variants will give your weapon a damage penalty, and you can only have one status UV per weapon. Status UVs will not take up your variant slots, will instead be a new purple slot. Also you cannot roll the same status a weapon already has. For example, fire status on a combuster.
Ranks:
Low: Low chance to inflict Weak status - 4% damage penalty
Medium: Low chance to inflict Moderate status - 8% damage penalty
High: Moderate chance to inflict Moderate status - 12% damage penalty
Max: Good chance to inflict Strong status - 15% damage penalty
Possible UVs:
Fire
Freeze
Shock
Stun
Poison
Curse - would also have a chance to curse you on charge attack, wouldn't recommend having this on fast weapons.
How to Acquire:
These UVs are special. You cannot acquire them by crafting or normal rolling. In order to get one of these UVs you need to get the corresponding materials and craft a special Unique Variant Ticket. Dubbed the Imbuement Variant Ticket. Take this to punch and you'll get a random status UV.
Crafting Recipe:
3 Eternal Orbs
1 Flame Soul
1 Everfrost
1 Storm Chaser
1 Shadow Steel
1 Sun Silver
1 Plague Essence.
20kcr
Multiple statuses on a single weapon can break the game, so I'm against it also that'd make the pure damage weapons without statuses always superior to their status-inflicting siblings. I suggest something else, that we can increase the intensity or the chance of a status not by rolling but completing certain missions that give you tokens of a certain status effect that you can trade for a ticket for that status. There would be 2 kinds of tickets; status chance and status intensity, each would increase their respective stats by one level regardless of what chance or intensity the weapon currently has except for the max which they cannot exceed (good chance and strong status). That'd make it not rely on RNG to get and would make weapons like Furious Flameberge and Daring Rigadoon waaay more fun and actually viable, and can make the haze bombs inflict stronger statuses which would also make them more powerful, Plague Needle would be used more as well. However, the damage shouldn't be affected. This wouldn't make people stop using the pure damage weapons in any way since pure damage scales better with the damage bonuses resulting in higher overall burst damage but not sustained damage compared to like a fire status inflicting weapon.
Examples:
Plague Needle after applying poison chance increase ticket: FAIR chance of causing STRONG poison instead of SLIGHT chance of causing STRONG poison.
Ash of Agni after applying fire intensity increase ticket: GOOD chance of causing MODERATE fire instead of GOOD chance of causing MINOR fire.
You can't apply these tickets to weapons with already maxed intensity and chance like the status brandishes for example as they have a GOOD chance of inflicting STRONG status.