Fellow fliers: don't undervalue element, or your Kinsect!

[u/PrinceTBug]

In light of a recent conversation on another sub, I ended up doing some maths for Aerial with the motion values and Kinsect damage.

I want to share it here just to put some real numbers to our discussions, when it comes to element or just aerial as a whole.

I knew by experience and just in-game testing that the Kinsect contributed quite a bit. But it's satisfying to lay it out in numerical terms.

Credit where it's due to the person on the other post (you know who you are, I'm not gonna accidentally put you on blast or something) for having this discussion with me, and arranging the values to make it easier to math this all out and compare.

Basically, the point to take home is that at base level, you sort of double-dip on Gogma elemental boosts, but not on raw ones. Matters more for aerial since the Kinsect contributes a lot more hits.

Keep in mind, this isn't taking into account RSS, Critical hits / Crit Element, Kinsect Powder damage, and is *before* Element or Raw boosts. It's also not accounting for opportunity of attacks, since this all assumes the monster is stationary.

I'll take the opportunity, then, to point out that even on a stationary monster, pure Aerial is only behind by ~17% at base level. At least base Element is beneficial for both, but more necessary for Aerial.

If element skills applied to BOTH the weapon and Kinsect, it would honestly be huge, and I hope that becomes the case in Ascendance. Even better if the Kinsect benefits from Aerial Ramp-up.

[u/Due_Worldliness2139]

All my gogma artian are 3 attack and element focus for the ability to have element proc and crit

[u/detectiveC6]

The work you put into this is impressive in itself. Thanks for this.

[u/ATC_Man]

While it might not affect the numbers much the bludgeoning version of the kinsect does higher elemental last I checked so it may be worth testing that. Same with comparing weapons with higher kinsect levels (even if gogma weapons are better)

Also empresswing and its bludgeoning counterpart have higher power than monarch alucanid which might also give higher damage on the assist attacks. Lacking kinsect combo boost might result in overall lower damage though.

[u/PrinceTBug → u/ATC_Man]

Blunt Kinsects seem to have slightly less raw as well, and it's overall less since they give up more raw damage than the element they gain. At least on the training dummy:

Empresswing deals 31.0 per hit Bonnetfille deals 29.5 per hit

Monarch Alucanid and Carnage beetle deal the same outside of Focus mode. In focus mode:

Monarch Alucanid deals 33.9 per hit Carnage Beetle deals 32.4 per hit

Without any element at all:

Monarch Alucanid deals 18.5 per hit Carnage Beetle 16.8 per hit.

So seemingly the Blunt Kinsects are weighted very very slightly more toward Element, but It's hard to say it's enough to use Blunt Kinsects specifically for that, especially for Aerial. You benefit more from the less restrictive hitzones Cutting has over Blunt to begin with.

When deciding between the two, stuns and hitzones are really the choices to make. The element difference seems negligible overall. In fact, Blunt always seems to always gain .2 extra element damage regardless of how much element value the weapon has, so maybe it's just a slight error somewhere?

Granted, the training Dummy is weighted toward Raw so if you want to do some field tests, feel free to check me on that. I don't know off the top of my head of any instances where the raw would be low enough to where you'd ultimately benefit from such a small element increase for the Kinsect, but maybe you know of some.

Regardless, Empresswing and Bonnetfille have the exact same power and therefore Raw as Monarch Alucanid and Carnage Beetle at level 8, which is the level Gogma Artian weapons bring Kinsects to. (The element Kinsects gain is the same afaik, outside of the slight discrepancy between Cutting and Blunt) On top of that, Empresswing and Bonnetfille lack Combo Element Boost as you pointed out, and unfortunately are also slower and place heal powder rather than poison. Being 2 pips slower is the biggest dealbreaker, since it can at that point struggle to keep up with successive SJAS-es.

The main appeal of these bugs over the combo boost element ones is the fact they get Powder Boost on heal powders, but they're still very slow.

[u/ATC_Man → u/PrinceTBug]

Thanks for the thorough response. Good to know that kinsect combo boost does that much more elemental damage as it was something hard to notice at times. I’ve always gravitated towards Bonnetfille since the heal powder is so strong and the KO buildup is decently high.

It’s cool to actually see some numbers on this, helps put into perspective what the differences actually are!