What is the point of weapon elements?

[akathecoolist]

I have recently picked up where I left off with PSO, after years of my disc gathering dust. Thankfully, it was still playable and the characters of mine were still intact. Bored of nuking all of ultimate on my FORCE, I decided to make a RAmarl, because of all the RANGE weapons I've accumulated. Most of these weapons have an effect such as: Burning, Tempest, Blizzard, etc.

It seems that my normal hits, hit higher than these so called special hits. Why is this? I understand the effects of Chaos, or Arrest, and I seldomly freeze or shock enemies with Blizzard/Tempest. However, the damage output of the special hits compared to normal make them obsolete.

So to recap.
-What purpose does a Burning weapon serve?
-Is it supposed to hit embarrassingly low?
-Is the damage amount affected by anything other than atp?

Thanks for reading my post, I tried to be a clear as possible.

*I found some use with these taking down a whole pan arm/dark gunners*

[Dhylec]

http://www.pso-world.com/sections.ph...icle&artid=326
Burning, Blizzard, Tempest are highest fire, ice, lightning elements, respectively. They are the least useful of the available element bonuses. (The rest of the elements are more useful, though Drain elements depend more on situation.)

Unlike PSU & later games, vanilla PSO only have native, altered, machine & dark enemies, so fire/ice/lightning elements don't have as much elemental advantage over them.
Special abilities always have lower chance to inflict their effects. So always start out with normal attack, to improve accuracy, then the chance to hit with special.
Damage can varies from hit to hit, if the weapon has variable Atp.
http://www.pso-world.com/sections.ph...cle&artid=2267

[Slidikins]

A burned creature will lose percentage-based HP on intervals, which becomes more and more useful at higher difficulties.

Freezing or Paralyzing monsters is very very useful for a Ranger, moreso if you're playing in a group. In group play the Ranger (especially RAmarl) does not exist for damage, but for support. Inflicting these special statuses make it much easier for the Hunters to clear out the room with their high damage. Rangers have high ATA by nature, so even with the accuracy drop they are able to inflict the status fairly regularly.

[Mystic_Nessly]

A burned creature will lose percentage-based HP on intervals, which becomes more and more useful at higher difficulties

Are you sure you're talking about Phantasy Star Online? From what I remember that only applies to Phantasy Star Universe.

[Slidikins]

Are you sure you're talking about Phantasy Star Online? From what I remember that only applies to Phantasy Star Universe.

I know it does in PSU and PS0, I was fairly sure it did as well in PSO... but you're right. Fire-class weapons don't burn enemies in PSO so it's just fire damage, which isn't all that great.


Ice/Frost/Freeze/Blizzard DOES freeze, though, and is very useful for crowd control.

Shock/Thunder/Storm/Tempest is the same, except works wonderfully on Machines.

Panic/Riot/Havoc/Chaos is also useful. Since confused enemies can still attack the Hunters, I'd not ecstatic about it. But the damage enemies do to each other can't be ignored.

Bind/Hold/Seize/Arrest paralyze, which is also great crowd control.

While they don't seem to be great damage wise, a good party Ranger would have these weapons handy simply to disable monsters from across the map. A RAmarl might also like a Heart/Mind/Soul/Geist weapon (preferably Mechgun) to recover TP when needed.

[Dongra]

The elemental attacks are completely useless. Burning specials have little use outside of damaging Falz three while he is invincible, and Gush still outclasses it, and both Tempest and Blizzard specials deal such low damage and have such a low chance of freezing or shocking that you might as well not even bother. If you want crowd control, you'll want to use an arrest weapon, frozen shooter, or freeze/confuse traps.