There are four kinds of Elemental Damage that can be added to a weapon, or is already inherent to a weapon. Most crafted weapons can have customized elemental chambers while others have a limited set of elemental choices available. Some reward weapons come with elemental damage, and some do not.
Heavy weapons have restrictions to the available elementals. None of these elemental damage types refer to Damage over Time specials that can be applied by professions such as Commando, Officer and Jedi. These effects are seperate from DoT Stacking and work with another stacking mechanic.
One of the benefits of elemental damage is that it is calculated differently than Kinetic and Energy damage. In PVP, your typical player will have over 10k Kinetic and Energy armor values (65% Mitigation), while their elemental values will be around 6k armor values (48% Mitigation). Granted your elemental damage is not a large value like your Energy and Kinetic damage, but every little bit helps.
Heat Critical[]
- Duration: 6 seconds
- Effect: Adds a Heat DoT attack that will tick 3 times with 2 second seperation for 750 damage per tick before armor mitigation.
Acid Critical[]
- Duration: 3 seconds
- Effect: the Acid Elemental effect is a Critical Chance increase to all attackers on that target. The target will have a 75% chance to be hit by a Critical Hit for the duration. If you are stacking Critical Chance on top of this, you will likely hit every attack with a Critical. Very useful and probably the most popular elemental type.
Cold Critical[]
- Duration: 6 seconds
- Effect: the Cold Elemental effect will increase all damage being dealt to the target for the entire duration. The % increase in damage is dependent on your cold elemental value. Basically, your cold elemental is divided by 5 and that value is the % increase in damage your target will see. This increases all incoming damage by all attackers to the target. Useful and underrated mod since this will stack with Critical and Strikethrough attacks.
- Examples:
- 36 cold elemental on the weapon x 0.2 = 7.2% Damage Increase.
- 100 elemental value on the weapon = 100 x 0.2 = 20% Damage Increase.
Electricity Critical[]
- Duration: 6 seconds
- Effect: +75% Glancing Blow increase debuff on the affected target.
- Note: While the tooltip will state that 'Trivial Hit' is the one being modified, Trivial Hit is a 96% damage reduction and a remnant from an old combat system, while Glancing Blow is a 60% Damage reduction. The correct modifier is Glancing Blow, the tooltip is incorrect. The combat log and skill mod character sheet will confirm this.
- Note 2: The effect of this element is regarded as being most useful in PvE, due to the benefits of Glancing Blow in PvE.
Special Note: Different Elemental Procedural effects can be applied to a target at the same time. After an elemental critical has been applied, the target will gain the 'Recovered' buff that will give the target an elemental crit immunity for 5 seconds.