fire vs chaos vs thunder.

ok i so I am wondering which one of these three elements is the best one to boost a weapon with. I am also interested in which is used more and why. I know chaos is better than fire, but I also know that not everyone carries 10 humanity on them at one time. So I am interested in everyone's thoughts on it and what they prefer. Also only interested in these three so please don't talk about +15 or divine or any of the others. Think of it as if ur character only has base stats to carry their weapon/use it.

I say use fire until you get lightning. Fire is available from the start while Lightning isn't available till much later.

Fewer enemies with lightnung resistance anyways.

The extra damage that chaos gets from humanity above fire weapons is so small that it's just not worth it IMO. As for lighting vs fire, you've got to think that you will face opponents that are more resistant to one particular elemental than the other. I have personally found fire weapons do more damage to most enemies than lightning though like I said it's going to be different for each scenario. It's best to carry one of each all the time so you can switch weapons where it's appropriate.

RedderAI wrote:I say use fire until you get lightning. Fire is available from the start while Lightning isn't available till much later.

Fewer enemies with lightnung resistance anyways.

technically chaos is available first if you have at least one att slot for flsh sweat to get the chaos ember. i always go chaos since its always been better for crits than lightning.

I chose Fire/Chaos. Generally if I'm making a weapon elemental, it's something I'm using as a support weapon, like a bow or CB, and by making it fire/chaos, as opposed to lightning, I can use my standard slabs for my armor and whatever my main weapon is, and still fully upgrade my support weapon

RedderAI wrote:I say use fire until you get lightning. Fire is available from the start while Lightning isn't available till much later.

Fewer enemies with lightnung resistance anyways.

I am slightly confused by all of what you just said. How do you get fire sooner? I know I generally have regular titanite way before I have Red Chunks. Also I always have a regular slab before I have a Red Slab. Am I missing something here.

If you are talking about the fact that you come across Vamos first then that is true but with out the titanite it doesnt really matter. Not to mention that i personally never go to Vamos before Giant as I do not see the point in going into Cata without being able to go all the way through to Nito.

Personally I guess if I had to choose I would choose lightning , but Chaos is a close second , very close.

^ well earlier in the game it's much easier to get a +5 fire then +5 lightning. Maybe he just meant before more full upgrades. I do that sometimes myself, depending on my build.

anyone know about how these affect poise? i'd like to figure this out. on the subject though, i prefer lightning to fire, as lightning has seemed to do more poise damage in my experience, and with a fast weapon, thats pretty much a stun-lock. fire is similar, but i din't think its poise damage is quite as good. hell, i may be hallucinating and they don't do any poise damage

Upgrade path has no effect on poise.

i'm not entirely sure thats true. in my experience elemental abilities have far more stagger than a +15. it may not affect poise, but that remains to my knowledge true. maybe not poise damage, but something about the elemental weapons and abilities cause a very notice-able stagger, and tanking through it is rare indeed, to my knowledge anyways. again, this may be entirely wrong though.

^ It is. Staggering effects are directly related to poise, and adding elemental damage doesn't change a weapons ability to break poise. Actually just indirectly tested that last night, when I was testing the poise breaking ability of the whips. They're all the same, at 20 poise per strike, and one of my whips happened to be elemental. Didn't change a thing. They're all uniform. The damage they do is definitely 100% affected by adding elemental damage, but the stagger isn't.

Breaking stability is a different story. Actually if anything adding elemental damage makes it more difficult to do this. Physical damage has the highest chance of knocking away a shield, which can be directly observed in the difference between Black Flame and Great Combustion, and when you add elemental damage it splits the amount of damage you're doing with a weapon, between physical and whatever element you're using. Because you're attacking 2 different res stats at once, each one is less affected.

i see. then maybe its just a mental trick, cuz i'm sure we've all had that point where we thought the elemental part was what caused the stagger. still pretty effective for mind games though

Fire in my opinion. The majority of enemies are weak against pyromancy, which deals fire damage (this is likely to offset the fact that pyromancy is the only magic that does not scale with stats) therefore more enemies will be likely to be weak to the fire weapon than the lightning weapon.

Although, personally I have yet to seriously use a fire weapon.