Infusing a Weapon

I've gotten a greatsword up to +10 but I'm predominantly strength focus with 6 in int and faith. It sounds like the elemental infusions scale off of int, faith, or a combination of the two. Is my sword doing the most damage it can do or is it worth taking it to Macduff for anything?

Really depends on your stats and different weapons benefit from infusions in different fashions; a weapon with no scaling for example will benefit immensely from infusing.

If you are a pure melee, its not worth it. Unless you want to want to go raw and increase the base stats. But that also nerfs the bonuses. If you have a good dex stat you could do bleed or poison. But the others are based off the fire/lighting/dark/magic BNS stats, and since your INT and faith are so low, those multipliers for the BNS are so low it wont be worth it for you.

I have one mace that is regular and one "magic" mace, although not enchanted. The regular mace still does a lot more damage - I'm a STR build with almost no points in either faith or int.

My greatsword+10 is currently an A rank for str and (I think) C for dex. Will adding bleed or poison mess with those at all and make it do less damage?

@radish: It will decrease those bonuses, yes. All infusions decrease the weapons bonuses. What I mean is your actual stat in dex, so the BNS stat for bleed and poison are higher. If you have a decent amount in that along with str those should be fine. But if you only have like 14 dex or something it might not be worth it.

Ok thanks guys. Sounds like for all strength builds there's no reason to infuse weapons at all.

On my first char I also ran a strength-build and infusing my +10 Grym Axe with fire did end up being more damage. In practice though the damage got more unreliable as mobs have different resistance to fire. I also added raw to a +10 Malformed Skull and eventhough it had less overall power than my naked +10 axe it did WAY more damage.

What does raw do?

Has anyone tried infusing mundane? It scales off your lowest stat, meaning you need to level all your points evenly. But is the scaling worth it?

@radish: I think it's a higher base damage with lower scaling damage.

@turambar:

It could be. For example if the weapon had no scaling at all before, giving the weapon a way to scale might make it better than it was previously when you get your stats up to a certain level.

Does anyone know where I can get faintstone? I have at least one of every type of stone except that one.

@turambar: I have not. Every weapon I looked at it on, it basically halved everything and made it seem pointless.

@radish: It increases the base damage, but lowers the bonus scaling.

I have 40 Dex and decided to turn my unused halberd +8 into a poison halberd +8. So far it seems like I am killing stuff before the poison takes effect. Maybe It'll be more useful in NG+. For now I'll stick with my BKH +3.

Since OP's question has been answered, I figured I'd list a couple interesting uses for infusions.

A faith build could take a weapon that already has and scales with lightning damage and infuse it with a boltstone to increase its lightning damage and scaling while decreasing its physical damage and scaling. This works especially well when you factor in weapon buffs (in this case, Sunlight Blade). Sunlight Blade adds 50 lightning damage to your weapon and increases all lightning damage that weapon does by 30%. When applied to a lightning infused Defender Greatsword (which gets a faith/lightning scaling of S) or something similar, you end up doing large amounts of damage. A high intelligence build could do the same thing and have great success with a magic infused Moonlight Greatsword buffed with Crystal Magic Weapon. This idea has made me want to create a Strength/Dark build that uses the Crypt Blacksword which I think is a really cool weapon.

Another interesting infusion is Mundane which scales based on your lowest stat. If you have an incredibly balanced build, you can end up doing very strong damage with this infusion depending on the weapon. A perfect choice would be the Avelyn crossbow (or better yet, power stance two of them though this would require a lot more strength). Since crossbows don't normally scale, you'll do about 40% more damage with a Mundane Avelyn +10 (with 20 as your lowest stat) than you would with a regular Avelyn +10. With 24 as your lowest stat, your Avelyn will do over 100 more damage than a regular +10, resulting in what is fairly broken amounts of damage coming out very quickly. This infusion is very situational and certainly more suited to very high soul levels, but it's definitely an interesting infusion. (For the Avelyn, you could also do Raw +10 as an alternative to having balanced stats. It'll do a bit less damage, but still more than a regular +10).

I've been less excited about some of the other infusions, bleed in particular. It reduced my Blacksteel Katana's damage significantly and the bleed damage doesn't make up for it for PVE and it doesn't bleed consistently enough to be useful in PVP. My poison Ricard's Rapier +10, on the other hand, is unreal. One R2 instantly poisons just about everything.

Depends on the weapon. I'm using a Blacksteel Katana +10. It has S scaling in DEX standard. I infused it with lightning and it still has S scaling. The scaling did come up red when I prompted the infusion, so maybe there are gradations of scaling within each rank?

Anyway, it depends on the weapon. I've also seen weapons that go back two steps in terms of scaling when you infuse them. A to C. Not worth it I'd say.

However, I've got a bunch of katana's now. I'm going to get one of several types for NG+. That way I can use the one suited for the enemies I encounter at any point in the game.

@zevvion There definitely were gradations in DS1, and scaling seems conceptually unchanged, so it probably scales off DEX a miniscule amount less than before.

I've as of yet held-off infusing my weapons. I've got an obsolete set of Bastard Swords +10 (I upgraded to Mastodon Swords +10), and I'd like to check out some infusions. How many stones do I need to fully-upgrade an infusion? I'm assuming there's multiple levels for infusion too.

Also - for a relatively pure STR build, I guess the only infusion worth something would be Raw Stones on weapons with weak scaling. I only got 25 DEX, and I've read Poison and Bleed are not worth their salt. While I haven't tried it yet, from what I've read, I'm super disappointed in the infusions, since none of them seem to make sense for my build, and in general, I prefer weapon buffs to be something additive, rather than transformative. As is, it seems rather pointless for me and my playstyle.

Possible, infusions work great with my build. High DEX high faith and lightning infused Blacksteel Katana which scales S in DEX and now also scales with faith. It's pretty murderous. I kind of want a bit more STR so I can dual wield them though.

You only need one stone for an infusion. If you have a +10 weapon and infuse it, it will remain +10 with the infusion. If it is, say, +7 when you infuse it, you can still upgrade it to +10 at regular material cost. It seems infusions are just a separate thing now from upgrading, unlike in the first game. You can also remove the infusion if you want and then add another. It's a friendlier system I think. Allows room for experimentation and adjusting mistakes.

Bleed and poison aren't worth it on high damage weapons, but they are outstanding on fast weapons. With a rapier or maybe the claws, you can get hits in pretty fast. Remember that poison and bleeding take affect per hit, not with the amount of damage you deal. 3 rapid hits will instantly bleed or poison a target, which you can do in one exchange with some fast weapons. If you're using a greatsword, no, that's not worth it. You're too slow to hit 3 times and you'll probably need a fourth or even fifth hit because the effect wears down faster than you can swing to make them count.

I'm not using it myself though. I use my arrows for that. Well, for the poison anyway. I can't find where to buy those damn lacerating arrows.

@crembaw: It's not very minuscule, actually. I haven't tested it with the poison infusion, but at 40 dexterity the Blacksteel Katana +10 with the bleed infusion is still an S rank, but its damage is 172 + 91 (263). A regular Blacksteel Katana +10 is 190 + 175 (365).Of course, the bleed effect balances it out a little, but not enough to make it worth it to me.

Assuming the Blacksteel Katana +10 with poison scales the same as it does with bleed (which I am pretty sure it does, but I haven't checked), you may as well use the Manslayer which does 230 + 117 (347), still get the poison (at 100 + 71) and has what I consider a better moveset.

@hsghsghsg: ive been usign the manslayer for a bit , feels like its the slowest of all katanas :/

@seppli: It only takes one stone per weapon. It's sort of just a modifier, while the +X you have stays with the weapon no matter what infusion you do. As far as what infusions go with strength, using raw on any weapon with decent scaling seems like a bad deal from what I've seen. However (as already said) with only 50 fire bonus rating my axe (that had A or B scaling before I think) still got a significant damage buff when I infused fire on it. I can only imagine how good infusing will be if you have both stats going for you.

I only use my chime for casting miracles, so infusing it with lightning was a no-brainer.

@ares42:

Thx for clearing that up. Will check things out on my greatbow and bastard swords.

There are some weapons with no scaling that are great for infusing, like Raw for more physical damage, or elemental to add some of that. Crossbows, especially Aveline, benefit greatly from this, or Mundane if your lowest stat is around 20 (unlikely, but still).

I've found it's very situational. I have a +5 lightning pursuer greatsword and a +10 regular greatsword, and each one fares better against certain enemies. I can kill Syan knights with 2 hits of the lightning sword, while it takes 3 hits with the GS. I'm at endgame and I'm experimenting with it since I have plenty of infusion stones and you can always undo it. I only wish I had more Petrified Dragon Bones, but they're fairly hard to come by.