There are various ways to use special skills and upgrades on your character and weapons. For weapons, you will have to increase their affinity to be able to use these special skills. In this guide, we will see more about what affinities are and what they do in Elden Ring.
Elden Ring Weapon Affinities Explained
Affinities are special skills that you can unlock and upgrade on your weapons. It can help deal elemental damage or status elements on your enemies. Upgrading the affinity can also alter with the scaling value, so you can set it accordingly. Here we will see more about affinities and what they are in Elden Ring.
Read More: Elden Ring’s Weapon Upgrades Explained
To upgrade your weapon’s affinity, you will need Ash of War. It is an item that is dropped from bosses, or you can find them in the Lands Between, or purchased from merchants. But to apply the Ash of War, you will also need Whetstone. Various Whetstones give bonuses along with the stats from the Ash of War. There are different types of Ash of War to collect in Elden Ring as well. Fortunately, you can get one Whetstone Knife early in the game and you can probably get your hands on the Storm Stomp Ash of War first.
Now that you have your Whetstone and Ash of War, you will need to know what affinities it will imprint on your weapon. There are 12 affinities in total in Elden Ring, and below is a list of all of them.
- Standard: No affinity, default weapon stats.
- Heavy: Increase in Strength scaling, decrease in all other attributes.
- Keen: Increase in Dexterity scaling, decrease in all other attributes.
- Quality: Balances Dexterity and Strength scaling, decrease all other attributes.
- Magic: Increases Intelligence scaling with split in physical/magical damage, decreases all default scaling
- Sacred: Increases Faith Scaling with split in physical/holy damage, decreases all default scaling
- Fire: Increases physical/fire damage, decreases all default scaling
- Lightning: Increases Dexterity scaling with split in physical/lightning damage, decreases all default scaling.
- Cold: Increases Intelligence scaling with Frostbite attacks, decreases all default scaling
- Blood: Increases Arcane scaling with Bleed attacks, decreases all default scaling
- Occult: Increases Arcane scaling and prevents undead enemies to auto-revive, decreases all default scaling
- Poison: Increases Dexterity, Arcane, and Strength scaling with Poison attacks
That’s all there is to know about weapon attributes in Elden Ring. If you liked this guide you can check out our other guides as well.