This guide will explain the interaction between the different elements as well as theory-craft potential builds.
Water
- Neutral – Applies “wet” status
- Wet – nothing
- Frozen – nothing
- Inflamed – Removes “inflamed” status
- Poisoned – Removes “poisoned” status
One potential way to use water is to unlock the Pistol later in your run, and only use it for it’s wet properties – allowing you to do massive damage with other weapons by turning their elemental statuses off. By upgrading the Downpour ability you could potentially get to the point where your other weapons do 500% damage for 20 seconds, and then after the 20 seconds you could just swap back to the pistol and do it all over again.
Another way could be to use the Pistol solo, while unlocking the Elemental buildings along the way, making all of your water damage do significantly more – although you will be walled off my the Water Immune enemies, so you will want to heavily invest in crit chance/damage and the Bandit Beamer upgrade.
- Neutral – nothing
- Wet – applies “frozen” status
- Frozen – nothing
- Inflamed – applies “wet” status
- Poisoned – applies “frozen and poisoned” status
One potential way to use ice is to unlock the Shotgun alongside it, and cycle between the weapons, allowing you to repeatedly get off the %HP damage from shattering the ice.
Another way to use it is by unlocking both the Shotgun and the Knife, and freezing a poisoned enemy. That will put them in “poisoned ice”, which can then be detonated for 5x the amount of poison stacks + the %HP ice shatter damage – which is very good for dealing with bosses.
You could also use it with the Pistol, and go for huge damage 1 shots versus “wet” enemies – allowing you to bypass the “ice shield” mechanic.
Fire
- Neutral – applies “inflamed” status
- Wet – removes “wet” status
- Frozen – applies “wet” status
- Inflamed – resets timer of “inflamed” status
- Poisoned – removes “poisoned” status and detonates, doing damage equal to the poison stacks x5
One potential way to use fire is to chain the ice shattering effect, by swapping back and forth between the Sniper and the Shotgun. Once you have Double Barrel or Buckshot upgraded you’ll be able to bypass the wet stage of the interaction, so every other shot you can cycle weapons for big %HP damage.
Another way is to wait until late game to unlock the shotgun, because at that point it’s elemental effect will be doing way more damage comparatively to the base damage, and it will continue to scale better than most weapons. Getting the Knife early could be good for this build, as it would allow you to unlock the Elemental buildings along the way without wasting any of the stats.
Poison
- Neutral – applies “poisoned” status
- Wet – removes “wet” status
- Frozen – nothing
- Inflamed – removes “inflamed” status and detonates
- Poisoned – resets timer of “poisoned” status
Early game with the knife you want to invest more into the base damage because the DPS increase far outweighs the benefit of the Poison, but once the base damage upgrades become unaffordable, pouring money into all poison upgrades, as well as attack speed and critical chance will get the ball rolling very quickly. Because the Knife is so reliant on crit chance, you may want to upgrade it a couple times before unlocking an additional weapon.
The Knife also has a lot of effects that are benefited by using weapons in conjunction with it, and some of those effects are disproportionately good for the Shotgun when you have multiple bullets hitting at once – so transitioning from a Knife build to a Shotgun build, or even using them in conjunction late game allows for a lot of elemental flexibility and damage.
Thanks to Cohn for his great guide, all credit to his effort. you can also read the original guide from Steam Community. enjoy the game.
