Bow of Want infusion help (other infusion questions aswell)

[RavenRonien]

So my build is currently at 45 str 40 dex 50 faith

before you ask this is mostly pve SL of 195 and i leveled up as a quality build mainly using a +10 sun sword / havels shield (to explain the str and dex) after seeing the epic zeus spears of badassery i wanted to dabble in miricles and have since moved to a faith build so now my dragon rider bow+5 is equal to (actually slightly less than) my new bow of want+5 (just beat NG)

question is this, with my high dex, is lighting infuse still going to way outpower a normal bow of want? i'd imagine yes but i wanted to confirm as my character stats are fairly strange and probably ridiculously sub-optimal

as for other questions i literally haven't infused a single weapon yet, because early on a Red npc killed the infuse NPC (after i gave him a dull ember though) so i just never got around to reviving him and dabbling in it. i know for sure my sun sword shouldn't be infused as im told every version of it does less damage if you have 40/40 str/dex but my santiers spear+5, mastadon halbard +10 and other weapons i gather remain uninfused because i really dont get it all.
Now i've done alot of reading/research but the one thing that bugs me is, the leter grade scaling system is very ambiguous, as a math person i'd prefer to know the actual multiplier of each upgrade per so i can definitivly know, but the only way to do that is to infuse, look at AR then reinfuse which is a hassle and honestly i dont have asmany infuse stones as i would like to run comprehensive tests. So with my build in mind what should i infuse my weapons with?

[RavenRonien]

bump?

[Groen90]

If you want to look at numbers you could check the bow's page on the wikis... I've used that bow a lot on my strength/faith build, got it lightning infused and it's great, seeing as you have more faith than strength and dex (like me) I'd say infuse it. Besides all you need is a boltstone, then if you don't like it you can just uninfuse it, where's the hassle?

[cooperman]

bow of whant infused with lighting useing the lighting cluch ring with 40 dex and 60 fath useing lighting arrows gives me near 600 damage a shot thats better than great bow damage.

[Merkava]

In order to explain this you first need to understand how elemental damage works in this game. Let us say, for arguments sake, that you decide to fire a Magic Arrow at an enemy with the Bow of Want (without infusion). The Bow of Want (at +5) has 100 Physical Damage and 130 Lightning Damage (I'm ignoring scaling bonuses for the sake keeping this simple) and the Magic Arrow adds 50 Physical Damage and 160 Magical Damage to the weapon. In total you should be doing the following damage...

100 + 50 = 150 Physical Damage
130 Lightning Damage
160 Magical Damage

As you remember, via your status screen, every type of damage has its own defense rating, the same logic applies to the enemy. The Physical part of the damage will be applied to their physical defense, the lightning to their Lightning Defense and the Magic Portion to their Magical Defense so this attack will be up against THREE defense stats.

The thing about Elemental Defense tho is that it's actually a percentage. For arguments sake let us say that the enemy has a Lightning Defense of 450 (this is actually a 45% reduction) and a magical defense of 752 (this ends up being 75.2% reduction). This means that the lightning portion of the attack will do... 130 - 45% = 72 damage (I'm rounding up) while the magic portion will be doing... 160 - 75.2 = 40. The elemental damage will round to around 112 damage (not including the physical reduction, that isn't a percent).

What does this all end up meaning? Elemental weapons are just really powerful when up against enemies with low resistance to that particular element. If an enemy has REALLY high resistance then no matter how high your elemental damage is, it will be insignificant due to percentual based reduction.

Elemental Infusions (in this case lightning) can easily outdamage non-infused versions of the weapon but this depends purely on the enemy you are attacking. Overall it's a good element since relatively few enemies in the game have extremely high lightning resistance but you will bump into them from place to place. The unifused version has the advantage of having more "reliable" damage output (as it depends less on the lightning part of the attack). Same logic applies to all weapon infusions.

It is worth nothing that weapon buffs (Crystal Magic Weapon, Dark Weapon and Sunlight Blade) at 50 points of elemental damage to a weapon and then adds a further 30% to the total. If, for example, you buff a fire weapon with a base lightning damage of 150 with Sunlight Blade it will gain 50 points (totalling 200 damage) and then THAT would be increased by 30%, giving a total of 260 damage. So you can do some massive damage with weapon buffs. Bows cannot be buffed.

It is also worth keeping in mind that there is RAW infusion, this lowers the scaling of your weapon but increases base damage by 15%. In the case of Santiers Spear (which has no scaling) then RAW is a free boost to damage, do it ASAP.

This was a long post but I hope you found it helpfull...

As for the weapon scaling part? It's a bit confusing but here are the basics.
Scaling goes from E to S (worst to best) and Str Scaling is roughly 1.5 times better than Dex scaling, that much you must know. What I can tell you beyond that is based on personal observation, I can tell you that I've noticed the following:

- When infusing the amount of bonus you gain from scaling seems to take a huge dip, even if you have an A ranking in a particular element (or stat) expect to gain roughly HALF of what you would normally gain, this affects the melee portion too. So even if you infuse a Chaos Blade (which keeps an S ranking in Dex) expect a HUGE dip in dex scaling bonus after infusing it.
- The only exception to the above seems to be when the weapon already has an innate elemetal damage. If you infuse (for example) a Bow of Want it will actually INCREASE its scaling bonus. In this case you can expect a MUCH higher bonus from scaling, even if the weapon scaling bonus is low.

This explains why say... an infused Chaos Blade just gains a few points in scaling even tho it has a B ranking on the proper element while a Heide Knight Sword gains a MUCH higher scaling bonus to lightning even with a C ranking.

But overall? Scaling in this game is insanely incosistent.