The Ailment mechanic in Last Epoch provides players with the opportunity to place status effects on an enemy. There are a lot of Ailments in Last Epoch, each with a Unique effect. This variety means that every build can find value in using some combination of Ailments. In this guide we cover the basics of Ailments, provide a list with descriptions of all the Ailments available and explain how to scale them.
What Are Ailments?
Ailments are a debuff that is applied to the enemy (or yourself). It can cause damage, weaken the enemy in some way, or both. Example: Bleed causes damage, Shock weakens and Frostbite does both (Descriptions: Bleed Chance, Shock Chance, Frostbite Chance).
The effects from Ailments are wide ranging. Many are DoTs but they can also cause a Hit. They can reduce movement speed, lower resistances or even reduce damage. Many Ailments provide more than one effect including both damage and weakening the target in some way.
The number of Ailments in Last Epoch is large and growing. The sources for these ailments are just as varied; some show up only on a single Unique while others are found in many places throughout the game.
The mechanic as a whole provides players with a broad range of options and many builds will use multiple Ailments to great effect. Some builds will rely on them as their primary damage dealers while others will use them only to weaken their enemies.
You can see a visual display of the ailments you currently have on a target and the number of stacks that are on them under the enemy HP bar at the top of the screen. This is a great way to track how efficient you are at applying ailments as well as checking to see if they have the valuable damage debuffs that help keep you alive!
Ailment Types
There are three different types of ailments. Damaging Ailments cause damage to the enemy. This is usually as a DoT but not always. Debuffing Ailments weaken the enemy by making them more susceptible to damage, reducing the damage they do, or inhibiting their ability to move or perform an action. In this section we list and describe all of the major Ailments in the game (There are many ailments that are too niche to justify being on this list).
Damaging Ailments
Debuffing Ailments
Hybrid Ailments
Scaling Ailments
Ailment Damage
Ailment damage scales similarly to other damage types with some exceptions:
- There is no added damage for Ailments that are DoTs.
- Ailments can build up multiple stacks, which effectively increases the damage they do.
- Your chance to apply stacks of an ailment can be increased through skill nodes and affixes like Chance to Poison on Hit that increase the chance to apply that ailment. This number can go over 100%, resulting in the chance to apply multiple stacks at once.
- Ailment DoT damage can be improved through Increased Duration (This is also true of DoT skills).
- Ailments cannot apply other ailments. Example: Ailments cannot apply shred. Shadow Daggers seems like an exception to this, but the actual hit from Shadow Daggers is not the ailment itself. The Shadow Dagger ailment (the four stacks that are built up) cannot apply ailments.
Increased and More Damage work the same way for Ailments. If a skill that is used to apply ailments has a More Damage node that does not specify on Hit (or any other wording that would exclude it) then the Ailments applied by that skill will also gain the multiplier. This same principle holds true for sources of Increased Damage. Example: You apply Ignite and have a weapon with Increased Melee Fire Damage. Because the Increased Damage specifies Melee it will not increase the damage of Ignite. If the source was just Increased Fire Damage then it would count.
For more information on Damage Scaling See Damage Explained.
Non Damage Scaling
Scaling components other than damage on Ailments is often largely determined by the Ailment itself:
- Some Ailments like Fear can typically only be scaled through ailment chance and can only be applied once.
- Ailments like Frailty can be scaled with multiple stacks but typically have no other scaling options.
- A few have special ways of scaling:
- Several Ailments (i.e. Chill, Shock) can get Increased Duration.
- Armour Shred: Along with Chance to Shred Armour, also scales with Increased Armour Shred Effect and Armour Shred Duration
- Freeze: Can be scaled in two unique ways: Through the Freeze Rate Multiplier stat and through stacks of Frostbite
- Stun: Scales with damage (higher damage hits have a greater chance of stunning) as well as Increased Stun Chance and Increased Stun Duration.
Summary
- Ailments are debuffs that you can apply to an enemy or the enemy can apply to you.
- They can be damaging, weakening, or both.
- There are a lot of Ailments in Last Epoch and some are very niche.
- Ailment damage scales similarly to other kinds of damage with some exceptions
- Non damaging Ailments scale on a case-by-case basis.
Video
Credits
Written by McFluffin.
Reviewed by Lizard_IRL, Aristotelian.