I don’t remember if there was a tutorial for elemental infusions, but I would argue that they are a pretty fundamental aspect of the game and that there should be a tutorial that elaborates on what every elemental infusion does when it reaches max buildup and how to take advantage of it.
Imagine, for example, one of the early quests or bosses in the game drops a guaranteed gem, and when it goes in your inventory, you get prompted with a brief summary or maybe something like in poe2 where a brief video shows players what each elemental infusion does with in-game footage.
One issue I had when I was playing with cold imbue, I never figured out how to shatter an enemy i had frozen, and if what I looked up is true, it seems very odd that the shatter effect is only possible on weapon swap? Like you get the full effect of all the other elemental infusions immediately, but the cold infusion also requires you to have unlocked a secondary weapon by using a plague ichor…that just doesn’t seem like a reasonable requirement for maximum output. My suggestion would be to allow players to also shatter on charge attacks with the same cold infused weapon, just so it doesn’t feel mandatory to spend resources to utilize your full kit.
Also, I think gems should be rare and it should feel rewarding to find them in chests, but there should somehow be a guarantee of getting a certain kind of gem. For example, if you could get a specific gem drop from completing the weekly bounty/challenge, that would solve the RNG aspect while not contributing to item bloat. I’d rather have this than have the gem drop rate buffed making finding a gem less exciting.
Yeah I agree that there should definitely be some kind of tutorial. I ran into the issue of elemental infusion overrides that completely bricked a weapon I had. To explain: I had a Proud Lance that gains electric infusion after sprinting 4 seconds. I tried using cold enchant to give it cold infusion and then when sprinting it still switched to electric but then I infused a cold infusion gem in it and it can never get electric infusion again. A simple explanation would have prevented destroying the build I had invested so much time in.
I’m desperately trying to figure out how infusion system is working and am having hard time to find that information even on the internet.
How does it affect the weapon damage? I wasn’t able to find any kind of stat overview with the final damage output.
Does it stuck with runes, enchantments, consumable? If not, what is the actual behavior?
What happens when different infusions are used together?
Basically I have no idea what I’m doing and wasting my time and resources when trying to figure that out. It would be nice to have a functional training dummy that would at least provide some numbers. Those in Scrament doesn’t seems to work for now.
Ideal solution would be some kind of in game wiki similar to what BG3 or POE2 implemented. But anything is fine as long as the information could be found in the game.
Infusions do not stack. If you got a weapon that natively applies frost build up like the Endless Winter staff, and apply a fire or plague infusion, it overrides the frost infusion.
The damage also changes to the elemental type, being affected by resistances.
More importantly, infused weapons cannot benefit from the shatter bonus on frozen targets, because it only affects physical damage.