Fire vs. Chaos and Guard Breaking

I just noticed something, and I thought I'd post a thread about it to bounce it off you guys and see if my logic here makes sense:

I'm in the process of upgrading my Guardian Tail right now, which, if you've been talking to me about pvp at all over the last week or so you'd know, I've been using it as a secondary weapon to both poison and break my opponents guard when they're trying to parry my Zweihander so I can open them up for a more serious Zwei attack without fear of being parried. So my original plan was to just go Chaos, because the Guardian Tail doesn't scale very well with my current stats, and I figured I could do the most damage possible that way, not really considering the Fire upgrade path because it's mostly considered obsolete once you've opened up the Chaos path, due to the Chaos, with 10 humanity in hand, generally providing much higher AR. So I was standing with Vamos, looking at my +5 stats and then looking at both the +6 Fire and starting Chaos stats, and I was trying to figure out what a possible benefit of going Fire could be. Then I went and looked at some other weapons that have complete charts for both Fire and Chaos on the wiki and noticed something. At +10 Fire weapons generally have a lower total AR than at +5 Chaos with 10 humanity, it's pretty uniform that way, generally coming in at around 50ish more total damage, but at +10 Fire every weapon ends up with around 30-40 higher physical damage than at +5 Chaos with 10 humanity. So it's sort of like Magic/Enchanted. Fire ends up with higher physical damage, and Chaos ends up with higher Fire damage, but with the inclusion of humanity scaling Chaos ends up with higher total AR every time, which I think is what leads most people to just write off Fire as not being as good. But, and correct me if I'm wrong here, haven't we also established that physical damage is much more effective than any other kind of damage at breaking through stability and knocking shields away? So, considering that logic, wouldn't Fire, even with a lower total AR, actually be better to use for a weapon that you're using as a means to break guards? For example the way I'm using my Guardian Tail? Sort of like the way Black Flame works in comparison to Great Combustion? BF does uniformly less damage with a fully ascended/upgraded pyro flame, but has a much better chance at breaking guard and leaving your opponent opened for another kind of attack. If this is sound logic I can think of some other scenarios where it would be beneficial over a higher AR attack also, for example if you're using a smaller hammer weapon, something like the mace or the morning star, where it's generally more beneficial to constantly be interrupting your opponent than it might be to just be doing the most straight damage possible.

Anyway, what do you guys think?

Oh I also wrote down some numerical examples for you guys to check out, just to back up my theory.

Halberd: +10 Fire: Phys/Fire - 308, +5 Chaos/10 Humanity: Phys - 291, Fire - 332
Spear: +10 Fire: Phys/Fire - 224, +5 Chaos/10 Humanity: Phys - 211, Fire - 242
Great Club: +10 Fire: Phys/Fire - 378, +5 Chaos/10 Humanity: Phys - 357, Fire - 411
Uchi: +10 Fire: Phys/Fire - 252, +5 Chaos/10 Humanity: Phys - 236, Fire - 272

See what I mean?

Holy wall of text :shock:

But anyways, this is really great information. I never took into account the differing amounts of split damage fire and chaos upgrades had. I think you're spot-on with the idea that fire weapons would have higher ability to poise-break compared with chaos but does that little physical AR make a big difference? I guess it would be hard to tell but I agree with all of the things you've mentioned. More physical damage would eat away at more stamina if someone is blocking.

Appreciate your work for all this info I never knew! Jeez I keep learning new things about this game after more than a year....

Revoltage wrote:Holy wall of text :shock:

I know right? Part of the reason I wanted to make a thread about it was to see if as I wrote it out it'd start making more sense to me or not.

I'm not sure if those small amounts will make a difference or not, but there's only one way to find out. I'm going to go lop off another Guardian Tail and make one Chaos and one Fire and upgrade them both as high as I can without slabs and then test it out.

It's never made sense to me for any of the upgrade paths to just be useless in the face of another. It seems to me that we've slowly been unraveling what edge each of them might have over another, like the whole magic/enchanted, divine/occult thing. It just never sat right with me for fire to just be useless. Although I guess Raw is the exception to the rule.

It could be. I think a shield's stability drain depends more on the weapon type though. Example a MLGS breaks the same stability as a Claymore, etc....

WyrmHero wrote:It could be. I think a shield's stability drain depends more on the weapon type though. Example a MLGS breaks the same stability as a Claymore, etc....

I would agree with that, especially considering some of the poise breaking tests I've been doing with whips recently, but I've heard SO many times from SO many different people here that physical damage is the most effective type for, not necessarily poise breaking per se, but cracking through shield stability. Although I'm not sure that that's the same thing or not. Does poise directly apply to the amount of stamina damage you take when you're hit by a weapon with your shield up?

Regardless the numbers speak for themselves, the whole stability thing is just my theory. I guess the real question is: what are the benefits of having a higher physical damage output than elemental damage, with an elemental weapon?

I don't think so Rage. However if you're up for stability testing the best weapon would be a MLGS or the horn, which don't have any physical damage.

Yes, I agree his whip has a capped poise break potential because it's in that weapon class, but to whether fire will do a little more guard break damage than chaos that's entirely possible I suppose but I still take chaos just because it usually does more damage and I prefer more fire damage than physical damage.

Well I definitely have some testing to do regardless. I have to go get and make myself 2 of the same weapon, one fire and one chaos, to really know for sure, for my specific theory.

As far as the other, more broad question goes, the first thing that's coming to my mind is the leo ring, which only enhances physical damage. Which, I guess in most cases it would just be better to have a +15 standard weapon if you wanted to make the leo ring a primary tactic, but with a setup like you might have doing low SL pvp, it could possibly be beneficial to do it with a fire weapon. I don't really know. I guess that's another thing that would require some tests.

Although I guess if you're going to do something like that at low SL it might be just as beneficial to do it with a Raw weapon. Again I'm not entirely sure. All in all, what I'm really trying to prove here is that Fire isn't just a useless upgrade with Chaos available. I just refuse to believe that that's the case.

Raw is useless for PvP because normal +15 has higher AR, even at base stats. In the case of the Leo Ring I would go normal or crystal, since the pure physical AR will be higher than the physical AR of fire (may vary by weapon though). In any case fire is better off for PvE since you can lose humanity easily and fire keeps your AR constant.

WyrmHero wrote:Raw is useless for PvP because normal +15 has higher AR, even at base stats. In the case of the Leo Ring I would go normal or crystal, since the pure physical AR will be higher than the physical AR of fire (may vary by weapon though). In any case fire is better off for PvE since you can lose humanity easily and fire keeps your AR constant.

Yeah I didn't think about Crystal. You have to consider though, that you'd be doing both the damage from the leo ring enhanced physical as well as the fire damage, which normally is a bad thing, but I'd think at low SL with crappy armor it might actually be a good thing to be attacking different res stats. Again I'm completely speculating.

I don't think it's as simple as that. I would have 100% agreed with you 2 hours ago, but finding out that fire has a consistently higher phys split really makes me think there's more to this. At it's core that's essentially the difference between magic and enchanted, with the inclusion of scaling, and that can make a huge difference in damage. Obviously because of the scaling, but I'm motivated now to figure out how this could be situationally beneficial.