Weapon Type vs Elemental

[Agent]

I'm finally playing through Grounded solo and loving it. But one question with regard to which weapons to use against which enemies that I'm not sure of the answer to;

Are you better off matching elemental damage against enemy weakness, or weapon type? For instance the broodmother is weak to slashing and spicy and strong to everything else. I have a spicy weapon but it is a chopper, and I have slashing weapons but none are spicy.

Is it better to use a spicy chopper in a case like this if the enemy is weak to spicy and strong to chop or better to use a non-spicy slashing weapon? Leave aside relevant mutations and assume those are all equal.

Thanks!

[Nefai]

Pay attention to the percentages of damage increase and damage reduction as well.

Broodmother takes 25% more damage from Spicy, but she also takes 25% less damage from Chopping.

She takes 25% extra damage from Slashing.

So non-spicy slashing wins, I'd say. Unless the Slashing is Salty or Fresh, since she takes 50% less damage from those, lol.

Pretty much, use the wiki til you memorize everything. Look in the right hand sidebar and there are little green sections with white text that you can expand. Open the one called Weaknesses and Resistances to see the damage increase or reduction for each damage type. And paper rock scissors that @#$%.

https://grounded.fandom.com/wiki/Hedge_Broodmother

Eventually, you just know without thinking about it.
e.g. Fighting Termites? I want Stabbing Salty.

P.S. Open the section called "Inflicts" to see what type of damage they do, if you want to counter it with mutations and armor.

[weirdee]

There are other things to consider besides that. Sometimes a weakness to a specific weapon type doesn't necessarily translate to the best dps because each weapon type has its own animations and swing speed (plus associated perks), and some weapons also have additional effects, although some of the recent tweaks have improved the viability of weapon movesets. Experimentation is key to optimizing the tougher fights in the game.

Also of note is that in the current meta, the devs sorta made a boneheaded move where shields reduce your weapon damage, so if you choose to use one for any reason, you will have to practice hitting the shield hotkey to toggle it on and off between attacking and defending if you don't want your damage to suffer. It's an odd choice given that there was already such a divide between the raw power of the extremely reckless two handed weapons and the more balanced movement of 1 handed weapons that enforced this to begin with, but for some reason they saw fit to push this further.

[happygiggi]

Pick the type you want. As long you exploit one of the 2 weaknesses it does a good job.

You should d aim both weakness when you plan to fight a boss as the massive health pool justify the use.

[Mythily]

Originally posted by weirdee:

Also of note is that in the current meta, the devs sorta made a boneheaded move where shields reduce your weapon damage, so if you choose to use one for any reason, you will have to practice hitting the shield hotkey to toggle it on and off between attacking and defending if you don't want your damage to suffer. It's an odd choice given that there was already such a divide between the raw power of the extremely reckless two handed weapons and the more balanced movement of 1 handed weapons that enforced this to begin with, but for some reason they saw fit to push this further.

Any idea by how much? I usually resort to perfect blocking, but for some enemies the timing is really hard to get down so having a "failsafe" to ignore damage is nice on a failed perfect block. If its more than 10% I think I'll have to drop shields. Rather annoying the devs made this change, as I'm still using 2 handed weapons too depending on the situation. Like the coaltana for example, that weapon is just great.

[Agent]

Thanks for the info! I actually guessed that using a one handed weapon in both hands (without a shield) did somewhat more damage because for a while it was taking me two hits to bust certain types of rocks with a shield but only one hit without a shield! But its nice to see that theory was correct.

Like Mythlly I generally have moved to using a shield on stuff where I'm having trouble getting the blocking down otherwise but I'll practice the perfect blocking even more.

[BETMARK]

If you are a parry master, you have a lot of choices... and I can't help you about that, because I'm more a ranged type player.
So, my personal suggestion is:
AS SOON AS YOU CAN, RUN TO THE TERMITE KING, IGNORE HIM, PICK UP THE CHIP AND RUN BACK TO BURG.L
I literally use nothing but the SPICY STUFF, even against spicy resisting creatures.
And if if you wear a mixed armour set, that add poison/venom and bleeding to the burning demage... you become a monster.
I beat with no poroblem every boss with that staff only... beside the Infected mommy.

[happygiggi]

Staves is special, damage is extremely huge and zone is big. The main downside is it's VERY easy to kill your friends if you don't pay attention or destroy walls when defending. (tho the very recent friendly fire mutation they added remove this problem),
and you can't animation cancel into block like other weapons so you must stop casting early for defending.

Mage hat is OP tho, increased parry window + 40% damage buff after a perfect block, it's NUT.