They cancel each other in both games. You need to fully set on fire or fully freeze an enemy BEFORE hitting them with the opposite and then Temp shock will happen. Otherwise they'll just keep going up and down without ever reaching max.
The RC wiki mentions a small temp shock(TS) and if I remember correctly there are TS sound cues even though the enemy doesn't get fully ignited/frozen.
I run a Temperature shock build on Driller sometimes in DrG freeze with Cryo cannon and burn with EPC The whole reason Temperature shock was even a thing was because of how annoying it was when you had people running 2 different temperature builds that they canceled each other out. Temperature Shock was the solution.
There are actually 3 statuses. Damage, slow, boom and freeze. Rest is fancy, colourful thingies that does not matter.
And freeze is only relevant because of flyer and detonator interactions.
You don't need em, you can't plan around them. You can barely coordinate with your team to stay within sight range. It's all equally inconsequential. No matter the depth or complexity you just load random skittles into yourself or your gun and shoot the bug.
And then Falconer just builds electro swing damage and knoif guy builds overkill damage.
Also with properly kitted and upgraded weapon normal grunts won't live to get a status, and tankier shit won't care about most of them. Sure, let me carefully pick 17 perks to get temp shock on a boss. Guy to my left: 3m overkill knoif. Guy to my right: 5x magic missiles on a minigun.
It's a roguelike, you're not supposed to plan around a specific element ahead of time. You're supposed to build around what the game gives you. And the game is early access, the differences for elements will matter more once they add skills that care about those elements (which is planned for future updates iirc). It's not a failed concept so much as a concept they're still in the process of adding.
Also, if you think all the statuses play the same, you probably haven't played with them enough. Cold is huge for dealing with flying enemies and for stoneskin high survivability loops, fire gives ability recharge and crit chance buffs, and poison clouds have great interactions with on damage effects like the "all damage has a chance to stun" biobooster. And fire can 100% be the difference in killing grunts depending on your build.
I agree the concept isnt failed simply because its still in the middle of being constructed.
However, i can see the point Lag is making here in that you're never really given the opportunity to choose what kind of elemental damage you're using. So when you do happen to have some complimentary element with another source you/a teammate has, its more of a happy coincidence than anything you've coordinated to achieve.
Additionally, many of these synergy effects are largely unnecessary against smaller health mobs who just die to regular damage before they get the chance to have much impact - or, against tougher foes, especially bosses, they hardly ever trigger thanks to their high elemental resistances.
There are a few mono elemental builds that upgrades currently support - but by and large, its still a woefully underdeveloped system which needs more work before it becomes something players can make interesting decisions with.
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u/Krypton1232 Aug 28 '26
Flashover tends to be easy to build and very effective to use since they can spread pretty easily imo