Elements Cheat Sheet

A cheat-sheet for new players to quickly understand elements at a glance.

The Sheet

Some notes on various aspects

Elemental Damage doesn't have an effect by itself but it confers a +50% damage increase to the correct defenses. Fire is strong against health (red health bar), Lightning is strong against shield (blue health bar), and Corrosive is strong against armour (yellow health bar).

Scrolls and Ascensions that give an increase or decrease to elemental DMG are affecting the damage dealt by these weapons and skills.



Burning enemies steadily take damage over time. It's straight-forward enough, but this makes fire particularly beneficial for groups of fodder enemies without shields or armour - a single proc of Burn can deal a great deal of damage to a target without you even needing to put yourself into line of sight of it.
It's worth mentioning that Burn damage is distinct from Fire damage - scrolls, inscriptions and ascensions that increase "fire damage" are referring to weapon damage from Fire weapons, not the damage over time from Burn. However, Crown Prince (that's the cat boy) Pyrodominance ascension doubles both Burn and Explosion damage at level 3.


Shock hits the target with a small area-of-effect zap and inflicts them with a debuff that causes them to take 10% more damage from all sources.
10% is more than it sounds, that's roughly equivalent to your weapon's damage being +1 level higher against Shocked targets.


Decay decreases the target's movement speed by 50% - the immediate observation is that this is particularly good for melee targets that rush you down - keeping them away from you and keeping the pressure off.
Another important part of Decay's value is any target at all that moves - even if it's not particularly fast - will be much easier to track when slowed, indirectly boosting your damage by making it easier to hit crits on them. This is especially apparent on projectile-based corrosive weapons such as Aura of Venom and Prism.
Crown Prince has smoke grenades that deal powerful Corrosive damage that makes for a very easy way to proc Decay in a small area. To make the most of these benefits, prioritize Ascensions such as Acidominance and Elemental Rage to greatly improve your effective damage from smokes, Backpack Expansion to boost how often you can spam them, and at least one rank of Hex Smoke to further debuff targets.



A target inflicted with both Burn and Shock suffers from Manipulation. Manipulation, at least on paper, turns the target friendly and makes them start attacking their allies rather than you. The AI doesn't exactly seem great for this - sometimes they don't attack at all and I don't really tend to notice much damage coming from them. It'd be easy to write this off as a pretty useless fusion, but the key words to pick up from its effect would be the words 'rather than you'.
The power of Manipulation comes not from them fighting their allies, but from them not fighting you. This gives a great reprieve from more threatening foes and buys you precious time to clear fodder, reposition, or just rinse through their health without needing to worry about dodging their attacks.
Qing Yan (the bird) doesn't benefit nearly as much from elements as the other heroes, but his feast-or-famine playstyle makes Manipulation a decent choice. If you get his Elemental Power ascension for either fire or lightning on your Leap, and use the other element on a decent close range weapon, you can inflict enemies with Manipulation as you leap into them, giving you ample time to reposition or keep up the assault and preventing them from attacking back.


A target inflicted with both Burn and Decay gets hit with an Explosion. Unlike all of the other effects and fusions, Explosion is not a status but rather a single proc of an area-of-effect damage tick.
The power of Explosion, Burn being particularly effective on groups of unshielded and unarmoured targets and Decay having an AoE proc right in Crown Prince's kit with various associated buffs means that combining fire and corrosive damage is incredibly strong when dealing with groups of enemies. Acidic Explosion and Hex Smoke are Ascensions that add even more damage and AoE, allowing fodder to be cleared far far into the game even with scrolls and weapons that aren't ideal for it.
Ao Bai (the dog) has one ascension that directly impacts Explosion damage - Mad Bomber. This affects weapons like rocket launchers, Concealed Ammo, his own grenades, and this fusion. It doesn't appear to affect the unique traits of Glimmering and Scorching Rounds, though. It can be tempting to put all your eggs into the dual-wield basket as Ao Bai, but don't sleep on taking at least the first rank of Mad Bomber if you're pairing Fire and Corrosion.


A target inflicted with Shock and Decay is inflicted with Miasma, and Miasma is the unparalleled king when it comes to straight damage per second.
Miasma deals a relatively low damage damage-over-time effect on its target, which spreads to nearby enemies and gives them an even lower damage over time effect. However, this damage stacks - you can repeatedly apply Miasma on a target and its friends over and over (I've read that it caps at 9 times). And once you've stacked Miasma a few times, it is an absolutely ridiculous amount of damage that utterly shreds through health.
Many players prioritize their builds to proc Miasma as much as possible - a common goal as Crown Prince is to find a reliable Lightning weapon to combine with his corrosive grenades and taking whatever scrolls, inscriptions and Ascension that maximizes the chance and effect of getting both Shock and Decay onto as many targets as possible.

Miasma is almost a better version of fire - on top of inflicting both Shock and Decay, it deals greater damage over time than Burn and frequently better area-of-effect output than Explosion. While the playstyle you should prioritize depends heavily on both your weapons and the various ascensions and scrolls made available to you, setting your sights on Miasma early on is rarely a bad idea.

[Jeff Fralpin Mojan]

500 hours and i dont think i realized miasma spread lol

[Emvee]

Thanks!

[坏人]

good

[Kelovar]

25 hours in, and I did not know about the combo effects...

[cactussy]

its also easy and quite satisfying to apply all status effects at once with the lizard that alternates between fire and corrosive, a shock weapon in the other slot, and the gemini effect to share elemental effects

[General Tyresius]

New player here. Great mini-guide. Thanks.

[Jerubius]

Do note that the damage of burn and explosion are based on the hit that procced them. To really maximize the use of them, you want high single shot damage over high fire rate. This is a big part of what makes fire tower a very solid weapon, despite the shortcomings of sword weapons in general, as it has very high damage per hit, so the burn effects it procs, and explosion if you happen to hit an enemy in decay can chunk hits out of enemies.

This is very different from miasma, which does a percentage of the enemy's total health per stack. You don't really care about how much damage the weapon deals, and instead only care about proccing miasma as fast as possible.

If you're building fire/explosion, prioritize damage per shot. If you're focusing miasma, prioritize rate of fire and proc chance.

[red⋆mits]

Ah this explains why elemental orbs are so OP
This is really useful, thank you!

[Vanessa]

Absolutely, yes. If you had a Fire and Lightning weapon alongside Crown Prince's corrosive grenades, for instance, it would be more than possible to inflict every single effect at once.

[sandwich]

do fusion effects stack? can i hypothetically trigger both miasma and manipulation?