Affinities | Elden Ring Wiki

For everyone out here who do not know this.
You can Infuse the poison stingers with a BLOOD infusion. Making it a 2 affiniti weapon. Its one of the very small number of weapons with wich already posses a passive afiniti wich you can infuse with another. The other 2 that come to me are the Rotten Battle Hammer and Rotten Greataxe. Both have passive Rot but can be Infused AND buffed.
You can check each weapon on this wiki or ingame for the complete list.

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Affinities have been considerably retooled from their workings in Dark Souls III. Let's look at the Uchigatana across each game as an example.

In DS3, 66 strength two-handed was hardcapped Heavy scaling - functionally 99 strength, and heavy scales only with strength. The Uchigatana was a poor choice - at 66 str, +10, two-handed, it achieves 389 attack power. A Sharp uchigatana with the same stat investment (+57 levels from Knight start) reaches 431 - a roughly 10% difference for the same number of stats. This kind of difference made it clear that the uchigatana was meant for dexterity builds, while not outright preventing strength characters from using it.

Now let's compare the performances in Elden Ring. We'll use the same numbers to start. At 66 strength and minimum dexterity (1 point lower than DS3), max refinement, two-handed, and heavy, the Uchigatana has 610 attack power. But at 70 dexterity and minimum strength, maxed, two-handed, and keen, the Uchigatana has 571 attack power. This is a ~7% loss in power for similar stat investment. Furthermore, strength can continue to scale past 99 in Elden Ring while two-handing. Keen uchigatana does not catch up to 66 strength Heavy until 91 dexterity.

Now, it is true that From Software gives us no guidelines on when to stop leveling up, and we players decide that on our own. But the typical player will finish the game between levels 100 and 150, and as such are unlikely to have any attribute at level 91 or higher, and most players stop playing the game after completing it once / obtaining all achievements. It's hard to conceive of a reason *not* to play a strength build if you primarily use infusible weapons - you just get so much more bang for your buck.

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Crazy that the sanctified and black whetblades are really out of the way when the iron, glintstone and red-hot whetblades are available early game.

At least the sanctified whetblade's affinities have alternatives (flame art for holy, keen for lightning), but black whetblade? You got nothing.

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I still think occult infused weapons should be buffable.

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Why is this locked behind Ash of War?
What if i want a Heavy something but no current AoW is to my liking?
"Yeah you can have a Heavy Club, but only with the option to roar like a Troll."

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Why is this locked behind Ash of War?
What if i want a Heavy something but no current AoW is to my liking?
"Yeah you can have a Heavy Club, but only with the option to roar like a Troll."

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I have a level 30 character who started prisoner and levelled nothing but Vigor. I thought Lightning would end up being the best infusion because Radagon's soreseal raises Dex, but even at just 14 int, Cold does about the same or sometimes more damage. Trading the bonus damage in water for frost buildup is almost always worth it.

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hopefully theres a Frost for faith and Blackflame/Godslayer in the upcoming dlc.

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Does frost buildup depend on damage output or amount of times hit?

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Rest in peace, raw infusion.
You will be missed

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"A weapon can inflict multiple status effects as a result of having an Occult Type Affinity applied to it, e.g. a Blood Infused Venomous Fang will inflict both Bleed and Poison with each strike and both buildups will scale with Arcane."

I don't understand, if Venomous Fang is blood infused, then how can it benefit from Occult Affinity? Doesn't blood infused mean it's already been "assigned" the Blood Affinity, and therefore can't also be assigned Occult Affinity?....Asking for a friend.

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FromSoftware please make it easier to understand. This feels like reading technical literature.

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Cold infusion is so insane to me. I thought it was crazy enough that Fire and Lightning infusion have scaling at all (in DS1 they didn't, in DS3 Lightning had high Faith scaling but we had Deep as a zero-scaling infusion instead) but oftentimes Cold will compete with or outperform them, even with starting intelligence. The base damage values are just insane to also have a status effect aux, AND retain good scaling. Imagine if Blood infusion was exactly as it is right now but added 40% base damage as Fire. It would be insane, right? But that's basically Cold.

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I would like for a int/fth infusion but I also don't want a repeat of DS3 meta, where a lot of people ran dark weapons with a pocket chaos dagger. Maybe make it as "bad" as the quality infusion, where you don't do as much damage as you would on a dedicated build, but the amount of weapons you can have (in this case spells) opens up a lot for you.

Alternatively, they should give more weapons int/fth scaling. For example, the Death weapons should have some kind of int/fth scaling, because their respective spells require int and fth to cast.

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Occult Affinity has to be my fave even as a Faith main, it's fun as hell without any need for Bleed or Poison and does more damage at lower levels with a single stat than Quality does with both Strength and Dexterity combined. Taking AoW's like Sword Dance and RkR, putting them on weapons like the partisan or estoc, and slapping the occult affinity on them is one of the best builds i've tried.

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Need an affinity that gives weapon both magic/fire damage and scaling from INT/faith. Also people who think that we need scarlet rot Ash of Wars and corresponding affinity don't understand that it will utterly ruin the balance, because everyone will just switch from poison to rot. Unless the rot buildup per hit will be extremely low and doesn't scale with anything, then you may actually add that to the game.

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cold might be the most overtuned infusion of them all. you get a negligible base damage reduction, access to magic damage, a status effect, and in most cases INCREASED physical scaling. its like the accidentally flipped the parameters for quality and cold in the code

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I refuse to stay at a meta level where Quality isn't viable

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quality can be good if you're trying to balance between weapon art damage and AR, since some weapon arts like bestial roar or thunderbolt notably scale better with dex over heavy, even if your str outweighs your dex.

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The Blood affinity usually gives the prefix "Blood", but on only a few specific weapons it instead changes the name to "Bloody". This includes, but may not be limited to, the Longsword, Lance, and Twinblade. If I put Bloody Slash on my Lordsworn's Straight Sword, it becomes Lordsworn's Blood Straight Sword, but my Longsword becomes Bloody Longsword. I wonder why that is. I think the Bloody prefix makes for better names.

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I appreciate the apparent effort to make more weapons viable for more builds, it precludes a lot of build identity. In DS3 strength characters had no business using a katana, and faith players could not just put Lightning infusion on whatever and expect it to work well.

Heavy is straight up too efficient in this game. Considering Str also scales up your physical defense, if you're planning on making a dexterity character, critically ask yourself why. Run damage calcs and see if heavy wouldn't do more damage or if occult would be comparable but with far more bleed, etc. Unless you're planning on using hand of malenia, you might be surprised at how much better heavy is for virtually everything.

Dark Souls as a series had weapons good for certain builds and ones that weren't, and sometimes the lines crossed a bit and that was interesting. Big heavy Ultra Greatswords would surely be a strength character's thing, right? That made the Astora and Lothric Knight Greatswords so much more interesting: they weren't. Katana, like I said, were not great for strength, but the Black Blade could uniquely compete under heavy infusion unlike the others. It still did better Sharp, but the gap between Sharp and Heavy was lower for it.

Point is, there's no such build identity or fun little outlier weapons in ER. Watch the pvp content creators' videos. Faith build, sacred cleanrot sword, dismounter, claymore. Str build, heavy cleanrot sword, dismounter, claymore. Dex build, keen or lightning infusions on the same stuff. Watch Chase's weapon showcases and see how often he uses heavy even on katana and curved swords, the very symbols of dexterity builds. Weapons should be more responsive to certain affinities and less so to others, I think. Limitation invites creativity.

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the base damage hit that you take when infusing quality is just too high on most weapons to be useful, which is a shame. thankfully other innately quality weapons are good

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Wish hybrids had infusions. In an ideal world, I'd have weapons allow 2 infusions--so you put 2 heavy infusions to get A scaling, but rather than "quality", you'd infuse heavy/keen, or heavy/magic for a str/int build.

On the other hand, if that makes the game too complex (we already have a lot of numbers to juggle), they kind of missed an opportunity to make fire into a str/faith "quality" infusion, and lightning into dex/faith infusion. Turn cold into a dex/int infusion, and replace flame art with something like a "magma" str/int infusion, and it starts to feel pretty balanced. Give me something like a 'ghostflame' int/faith infusion, and the hybrid builds at least have SOMETHING that doesn't waste their stats.

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Quality infusion honestly needs a buff. On most weapons with relatively balanced scalings, even at 50/50 str/dex going quality over the standard infusion only gives you an extra 15-40 AR, which is absurd.

If you're playing quality at low levels or before 125, you're pretty much forced to use the few decent quality-ish somber weapons, because the infusion itself is absolutely worthless at that point.

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It would be nice if the occult infusion had some extra effects on charged r2. Like, a physical wind-like wave attack on fully charged r2, or poison/rot/bleed/frost wave depending on the innate aux of the weapon infused on occult. Thought it would make sense, since arcane seems most related to the likes of mohg, godwyn, etc.

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Plz From, make the DLC have a Lightning affinity scaling with Faith ! I wish to be grossly incandescent again !

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Fire and Flame are different affinities? Did Dragonforce come up with that idea?

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I must be missing something. Cold just seems to be far and away the best infusion- it has a very minimal reduction effect on a weapon's base damage and STR/DEX scaling while also adding a HUGE amount of flat and scaling magic damage as well as the Frost effect. Aside from losing the ability to buff, I can't see ANY negative to it. Does split damage cause the DPS to be a lot lower than the flat numbers would suggest or something?

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At 50 INT, 22 Dex and 19 STR which is better ? Cold or Magic ?

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Curious... Does the Heavy Affinity Add any additional Poise damage to the weapon?

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Just on stream I've noticed that on the current ps5 version, the price for upgrading a weapon changes depending on the affinity applied. Is this normal? Heavy halves the price of at least a +10 Greatsword. If you want to see the specifics, look up the vod for FelixKatt's stream on 1/11/2023 at roughly the 3 hour mark. I've been looking this up for a bit and I can't find anything on this.

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apologies for the wall of text on my idea for the sacred infusion, I had it formatted but it deleted it once it was sent. I was originally going to just reply to it for this but none of my replies seem to go through

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sacred infusion should scale with int/faith like the golden order spells/seal, as it stands now flame art and sacred do the same thing, which makes it kind of redundant

either that or they should add a new affinity that has int/faith dual scaling, as right now the only weapons that can have it are

1. cold/magic erdsteel dagger, which isn't good

2. sacred/flame art clayman's harpoon, which also isn't good

3. sword of night and flame, which has a good ash of war, but the sword's stats itself aren't good

the main thing holding all these back is the fact that you're locked into using 3 way split damage, so you're going through so much defenses that the damage you get out of it is pitiful, despite the higher listed ar

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Could have just put in a ghost flame affinity and made it do quality int/faith scaling.

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For a STR/FTH build should I use flame art or sacred for my normal weapons

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Try putting Ash of War: Blood Tax on the Antspur Rapier with the Poison Affinity.

It makes it scale with Dex as usual, dealing piercing, poison, scarlet rot and bleed all at the same time. Very useful for high dex PvP and PvE

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Is it worth upgrading any of the starter weapons?

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So everything but Standard affinity decrease base Attack Power?

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Whay is the closest to mundane in the game?

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Why this have to be so complex?

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What are Guard Boost and Guarded Damage Negation?

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maybe it's just me, but occult doesn't really seem to have a use.

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Heavy affinity decreasing guard boost makes no sense.

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Why can't I apply occult affinity to elemental ashes of war? It just adds arcane scaling, for God's sake. It feels like you're getting locked out of some many options for no real reason.

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I think we can expect new infusions with the DLC'(s) to come. Obvious ones are missing, E.G. spell quality (INT+FTH) among other dual infusions that would be very much welcome for interesting builds, and alternative damage sources from mono scaling (like INT physical damage scaling or the obvious lightning FTH). Wouldn't say that the system is worse than DS3, it's different in that choices are worse but their use is more flexible.

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I'm just gonna call them infusions because they are still as lack luster & nearly identical as they were in DS3. All they really do is change the flavor of the damage type you are dealing. Nothing creatively or functionally different about the elements.

Powerstancing is its own can of beans, but the status effects are 'mixed' to say the least, in spite of being easier to proc. Poison is still pathetic. Frost's debuff balance-checks its instant damage. And Bleed is OP because it doesn't have a balance check is just straight up damage.

The exact same stingy cons still apply; lower defensive performance and guard boost/stability. They did give us guard counters, but they aren't all too useful in PvP. And because of the cons, shields can't be anything but standard infusion, because their guard boost gets crippled otherwise.

2-handing gets a raw deal too. In DS3 people 2 handed a weapon because the wanted to use the skill, But since skills are easier to access(quality-of-life, under the hood changes, where DS3 prioritized the skill of the left hand weapon, while Elden Ring prioritizes the skill of the Right hand weapon), and weapon defense was already lackluster, people just go for the offense with powerstancing instead. There is no strategical advantage to 2-handing, even in weapons where it makes sense to 2-hand them like twin blades.

They could have avoided some of this and at least made sense of 2-handiing, if only they removed the defense performance trade-off of infusion.

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Blood and Poison Affinity DO NOT improve Strength and Dex scaling, on any weapon. they decrease physical scaling

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sad that magic affinity doesnt replenish FP like simple infusion in DS3

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Kind of a shame that there is not a dual faith/int scaling infusion, akin to DS3's Dark Gem. Really limits the options for those builds to Sword of Night and Flame and... yeah sword of night and flame. Potentially a Sleep affinity could be such an infusion?

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when it says can't be buffed by spells that would be spells or incantations that buff the weapon itself, like bloodflame blade yes? but a weapon given blood or cold affinity would still do more damage after golden vow was cast, is that right?

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I've been playing for a while now, but there is still something I'm having some trouble understanding. What I want to know is, does every player using a melee build or a hybrid build of melee and FTH, and have changed a weapon to the cold affinity, just accept the hit they see in damage output by using an affinity that scales to INT, an attribute they wont have invested points into? or is it the same as it is with the weapons, where certain weapons will only be viable for certain builds and players have to make a choice in terms of which weapon they want to use then put points into the attributes needed to get the most out of it? so it would be a case of certain builds not using the cold affinity at all, they would use freezing grease instead? I haven't put a cold affinity on any weapon I've got yet because of the massive difference in damage output I see. I always think that even if an enemy is weak to frostbite, it wont make up for the massive drop I get in base damage. Is that right? or does the damage a cold weapon does to enemies vulnerable to it make up for the drop in base damage?

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Can I use a weapon buff on an occult weapon?

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why on earth does lightning scale with dexterity?? Or at least not have a faith equivalent like fire + flame art

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I've been looking everywhere, and I haven't found an answer to my following question:

Does anyone know of you can buff an Occult Affinitied Weapon, or does it turn off the capacity to use Greases like a large portion of affinities (i.e. can't buff a weapon set to Blood or Flame Art, etc.)?

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Hey Im trying to apply the sacred affinity to a weapon but the option doesnt appear despite the fact that i have the wetblade for sacred. Is this bc some weapons can only take certain affinities or can ALL weapons take ALL affinities. Just to clarify, the weapon can take affinities however it only has the option of Standard, Keen, Heavy, Quality, and Fire. Sacred Magic and whatnot arent shown at all.

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Just wondering is their any cases to use fire affinity over flame art or in turn as flame art is better for fire builds as fire incantations usually use faith and flame art, in my experience, gives higher damage than basic fire affinity. Any reason why someone would just use fire affinity? Outside of a dex build which lighting affinity would work better for it seems kinda pointless.

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Fire/Flame & Lightning will add some flames or sparks when you attack an enemy, is that just visual or actually some DoT/debuff

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Occult affinity doesn't prevent skeletons from respawning.
Also cold affinity doesn't lower all non-int scalings, on hammers at least it also slightly increases strength scaling. (more than standard, less than heavy of course)

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Occult affinity doesn't prevent skeletons from respawning.
Also cold affinity doesn't lower all non-int scalings, on hammers at least it also slightly increases strength scaling. (more than standard, less than heavy of course)

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Dumb question but I'm a little unclear on this, if I use, for example, a flame ash of war with a heavy affinity, what will the special fire move scale with? Will it scale just as well as it would if I kept it as flame affinity?

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Cold adds int scaling and some magic dmg, but does the frost buildup amount scale with arcane?

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