Spreadsheet for Infusion comparisons

Borderlands 3 Amara the Siren
#1

This might interest @Pibrac and @mrfedia3000 . Special thanks to @mrfedia3000 for starting the thought train and providing a template I could follow.

Anyway, here’s a link for a spreadsheet that tells you how much difference Infusion makes when shooting different types of enemies:

LINK (hope the link works)

How to read it:
Each outlined section is for different types of enemies (flesh, shield, armored). The left-hand column is what type of gun you are shooting with, and the row above is what element you are infusing it with. Damage required is self-explanatory: higher percentage means you need to shoot more.

Example:
Shooting a fleshy enemy in NVHM with a kinetic weapon, with no infusion, requires “100%” damage. If you want to find out what happens if you shoot it with a fire weapon infused with shock, find “gun element - fire” on the left, and “infused with shock” at the top. You’ll see that you only need to do 60.61% damage.

The interesting bit is the “Comparisons” section on the right. This divides the damage required from a non-infused gun with the damage required from the infused gun, and subtracts one from the result - i.e. how much more (or less) damage you are doing by infusing with X element. A positive number is good, a negative number is bad.
For example: if you shoot a shield enemy with a fire gun without any infusion (in TVHM), you need 153.85% damage, but if you infuse it with shock, you only need to do 52.91%. (153.85 / 52.91) - 1 = 190,77%, i.e. you are doing almost triple damage. (still not as good as a full shock weapon but hey)

At the bottom you’ll see similar tables for enemies with mixed health types.

TVHM is on a separate worksheet.

Things you can do if you make a copy to edit for yourself:

  • You can change the value of the Infusion and Tempest skill at the top, the table will update accordingly
  • You can play around with the mixed health-type enemies, and change how much armor they have compared to shields, etc. Remember, it’s the comparisons section that really matters.
  • (You can also change the elemental multipliers, if it becomes necessary at some point)

What this spreadsheet doesn’t do:

  • It doesn’t take into account the radiation status effect, which increases further damage. I haven’t seen definite info on how much this effect is, some enemies might be immune to it, and I don’t know if it multiplies other radiation damage
  • It doesn’t take into account Forceful Expression, which adds Amara’s attuned element on top of regular damage

Impressions I got:

  • Amara will be doing some pretty bonkers elemental damage.
  • We’re probably still better off switching weapons to match elements, except maybe in the case of very trash mobs (where their time-to-kill is comparable to weapon switch speed - probably comes into play with mixed health types most). The benefit of Infusion seems like being able to apply two status effects at once (which you can do with just one point); and infusing kinetic, cryo, and especially radiation weapons.
  • If you have Forceful Expression, it’s probably worth leaving Infusion empty and just switching weapons accordingly, unless you really want to rock some Jakobs or radiation goodness.
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#2

Amara is shaping out the be the most complex simple character in the game.

#3

Wow thanks for this. I’m thinking calculating for Forceful Expression may be hard depending on how its calculated. Does it do the best element damage type or is the fact its 18% not coincidental as there are six element types, i.e. 3% of each?

Eather way infusion looks pretty good as long as you have all three elements. Unless you use it before level seven on Pandora where most mobs are flesh.

#4

Forceful Expression uses the same element as Infusion: her action skill element.

#5

#Ops… helps if I could read. Thought I had worked out why it was a strange number.:slight_smile:

#6

Let’s just hope the florentine returns.

#7

I think it is a bad skill to place as tier one as it will reduce your damage vs Pandora mobs by 6% at four points. By far the worst first four points you could invest in the game.

#8

Who knows, if they follow BL2 and TPS’s precedent, the early drops will likely be non-elemental.
You’ll get to do extra shock DoT and some enemies might have shields. But yeah, I see what you mean.
However, once you reach level 7, you get fire, definitely good to infuse non-elemental guns with against flesh.

#9

I think I would have one point while leveling just for the DoT and try to find elemental weapons, (made easier now with Maliwan having two elements), to double DoT.

I also think you are right about not taking it if you have Forceful Expression especially as Amara builds are so tight on skill points. She seems to have so many good skills to spec into.

#10

Do we have confirmation that we can inflict dot with infusion?

Because for now I’m on the boat of switching weapons and only use infuse if I have a radiation weapon

#11

Haven’t heard it stated explicitly, but it’s a safe bet. I saw footage Zane’s bonus cryo damage applying a DoT, for instance. I reckon you could sift through Amara footage as well and find someone using Infusion.

EDIT: Check this video at 5:40. Infused fire did indeed ignite the enemy.
An interesting question is: what is the effect chance for the infused element, and the DoT value? Does it inherit it from the weapon card somehow? What about with non-elemental weapons?

#12

A single point of “Infusion” and “Forceful Expression” together might have a use: 2 additional chances to inflict a DoT of your action skill element instead of 1. As “Infusion” converts your given gun damage and “Forceful Expression” deals 18% of the damage dealt, we should get 2 instances of damage, one from each of the 2 skills. This makes 2 chances to inflict a DoT.

#13

I doubt it works that way. It should just do one instance of damage, but instead of 18% from Forceful Expression it will be 26%.

Overall I don’t think Infusion is worth if you skill all the way to the capstone.

#14

But that is my point: Infusion should be an additive portion of the base gun damage where “Forceful Expression” from the wording of the skill is multiplicative. It is possible that both instances get summarized as one damage instance, but I doubt it. Or at least I hope that we get the 2 different instances of damage. Anyway, another thing to figure out once the game is out.

#15

Please correct me if I’m wrong but I can’t see any point in infusion unless I’m running kinetic, cryo or maybe radiation weapons. I switch to matching elemental guns as needed and if I’m shooting flesh then I don’t want part of my fire element converted to anything else and fire infusion on a fire element wep doesn’t do anything. Might throw 1 point in to see if I can get 2 dot chances but overall it seems like a pretty useless skill so much that I would rather have spread chance or even gun handling than wasting points here.

Edit: wow, I just necro’d the hell out of this post. oops

#16

I agree with you, it basically makes your element-matched guns worse, and shooting with element matched guns is easy because I think the swap speed is globally faster in BL3, and Amara has a tier 1 skill for 3 points that boosts it even further.

However: cryo guns are good for melee. Kinetic guns have Jakobs, with all that damage, and Amara has a pretty good reload speed buff in the mystical assault tree, also great for Jakobs. I fully intend to give that a try later on, and I reckon I’ll have craploads of fun.
Thanks to Tempest, you can set your element to shock and do extra damage with kinetic against most enemies (with a classmod that boosts them, you’ll do bonus damage against every enemy).
Still, it would be nicer if we could have augment loadouts and an input to switch between them on the fly.

EDIT: Played with the numbers a bit, best you can get is 11/5 Tempest, and 10/5 Infusion (at least if class mods work the same as they did in BL2), and kinetic weapons do 29% extra damage to flesh enemies in TVHM. The bonus is even higher on shields and armor.

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#17

This is very true, but for me, it’s been a great investment. Hyperion SMGs are my go-to weapon, and most of the ones I’m getting are non-elemental. Infusion gives me Elemental damage easily. Given that I’m mostly specced into Mystic Assault, 5 points for Elemental damage and to unlock the Fire element for her Action Skill is a win. Once I have more points to invest into the Fist of the Elements tree, I’ll drop Infusion, but for now, it’s a great skill.

#18

thanks for the responses, they were beneficial and gave me ideas I might try later. As for me, I’ve been mostly using big DoT elemental shotguns and reasonably high DoT SMG’s mostly. I did try 1 point for an extra dot chance and it seems to work out so I’m going to keep 1 point in for now. I really do wish there was a better choice to get up the tree though. Also, it seems 1 of my big DoT shottys got nerfed bad while I was asleep. It did do 440 corrosive /sec and now its down to 130… donno wtf thats about. Thankfully, my lvl 36 fire shotty is still at 800/dps. The interloper I used from lvl 20 till about lvl 35 also got nerfed… from 350~ down to 90~… feels bad. that gun was the best lvl 20 gun