Can somebody explain how Ailments work?

[Yuvs]

Title and thanks!

[LaughAndReload]

Each type of damage has a chance to cause a status effect. So if you have an ability or a weapon that does a certain damage type (say Rend) you will always do that damage with that attack, but you also have an Ailment Status chance, in this example,Rend can cause bleeding which is a damage over time effect. Under your character sheet you can mouse over each type of damage type to see the chance of causing it's corresponding statuses.

Here is the breakdown from the Wolcen wiki

Material:
Physical Damage, is the default Damage type for Weapons.
Toxic Damage, has a natural chance to inflict Poison which deal Toxic Damage over time to its target.
Rend Damage, has a natural chance to apply Bleed to their target.

Elemental:
Fire Damage, has a natural chance to apply Burn on their target.
Frost Damage has a natural chance to Freeze their target.
Lightning Damage has a natural chance to Shock their target.

Occult:
Aether Damage has a natural chance to inflict Stasis on its target.
Sacred Damage has a natural chance to inflict Weakness to its target.
Shadow Damage has a natural chance to apply Cursed to its target.

[Yuvs]

So ailments are basically DOTs right? What about stacks? Can I get 10 stacks for the same ailment or does it have to be different types?

Is the optimal way to go about ailments to focus on one or a few types or is it better to cover alot of ailments?

[gringoboy70]

Originally posted by DeathRow:

So ailments are basically DOTs right? What about stacks? Can I get 10 stacks for the same ailment or does it have to be different types?

Is the optimal way to go about ailments to focus on one or a few types or is it better to cover alot of ailments?

No, open your character sheet to see what all ailments do. And you need to understand various builds before you can decide if you want to stack ailments. Some builds require several ailments to be stacked. Others dont require ailments to do damage. Max ailments through passive tree is 30 and there are 8 ailment types I think, but you can check that. Meaning you can stack at most 240 ailments on 1 target. Or 30 times whatever the correct number of types there are if it isnt 8.

[LaughAndReload]

Originally posted by DeathRow:

So ailments are basically DOTs right? What about stacks? Can I get 10 stacks for the same ailment or does it have to be different types?

Is the optimal way to go about ailments to focus on one or a few types or is it better to cover alot of ailments?

You can only stack one ailment status on an enemy, but you can upgrade it through the passive tree to do a second ailment type. Unfortunately there isn't anything in the hud to display what ailment type an enemy is being afflicted by, or how many stacks they have. I think by default you can get up to 10 stacks (again, you can upgrade this in the passive tree).

In the ability screen, you can see what damage type the skill does, ailment status, and the ailment status percent chance, all listed on the right side of the mods.

You can see what ailment status will be applied with your weapons under the more details section of your character sheet (and if you mouse over them, it'll show the percentage chance).

[Greyhound]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys46_DxyBL4

[Bill]

Originally posted by IntheCoconut:

Each type of damage has a chance to cause a status effect. So if you have an ability or a weapon that does a certain damage type (say Rend) you will always do that damage with that attack, but you also have an Ailment Status chance, in this example,Rend can cause bleeding which is a damage over time effect. Under your character sheet you can mouse over each type of damage type to see the chance of causing it's corresponding statuses.

Here is the breakdown from the Wolcen wiki

Material:
Physical Damage, is the default Damage type for Weapons.
Toxic Damage, has a natural chance to inflict Poison which deal Toxic Damage over time to its target.
Rend Damage, has a natural chance to apply Bleed to their target.

Elemental:
Fire Damage, has a natural chance to apply Burn on their target.
Frost Damage has a natural chance to Freeze their target.
Lightning Damage has a natural chance to Shock their target.

Occult:
Aether Damage has a natural chance to inflict Stasis on its target.
Sacred Damage has a natural chance to inflict Weakness to its target.
Shadow Damage has a natural chance to apply Cursed to its target.

What I don't get is that for Bleeding Edge if I check the skill in the 'S' window it says the ailment is poison which kind of makes sense since my two handed sword has poison. What I don't get is the BE description says it converts damage to rend, but no rend shows at all for the full stats of BE.

[lopschi93]

So maybe this can clear things up a bit. Which dmg type does which ailment was allready covered.
So let's assume you got a weapon with
100 phys dmg
100 poison dmg
40 fire dmg

If you hit an enemy the phys dmg can stun (which is no ailment) and then the only ailment which could be applied would be poison. If you don't have any talents you can only apply one stack of one ailment per hit.

Now let's use any skill and it will do pretty much the same. Now we convert 50% phys dmg to. let's say fire

50 phys
100 poison
40+50 = 90 fire

Your skill would still only apply one poison stack per hit (if the ailment chance procs ofc). If you take the note, that you can apply two different ailments per hit, it would get the ailment chance for both hits seperetely but it would do so in the first example too.

The rule behind this is: The skill will apply the ailment of the dmg type which does the most dmg (and the 2 highest if you got the note)

Which means if you would buff your fire dmg with some rings or so to a +20 for example it would be like this

50 phys
100 poison
40+50+20 = 110 fire

Which would mean you would loose poison chance but would get fire chance.
Hope this helps :)

Edit: Just so you know frost and stun chance don't count as ailment stacks and are only for cc purposes. Bleed and poison do more dmg but are singletarget. Fire and Lightning tick for less but hit multiple targets. How they work exactly can be read online, ingame or you ask here.