Which weapon-triggered effects are worth using?

[NotDumbEnough]

Unfortunately, Deadfire has a very bad habit of being quite vague when it comes to weapon-triggered abilities. e.g. "Do freeze damage in a cone on crit", with no mention of penetration, area, damage, etc. I've found that some of these abilities are quite powerful, such as Voidwheel's triggered Necrotic Lance, which receives bonuses not just from your Might, but also weapon upgrade, sneak attack, deathblows, soul whip, etc., easily doing hundreds of damage. But not all effects follow this rule, such as a lot of raw damage DoT effects, e.g. Three Bells Through simply applies a 5 dmg/3 sec DoT for 12 seconds, affected by intellect and might but nothing else.

Which abilities have you found to be actually useful?

[Boeroer]

Afaik all direct damage spell-like and attack-like effects that get applied by weapons/are enchantments of weapons scale with the weapon quality.

For example Chilling Grave (Grave Calling), Extinction Event (Sungrazer), Thunderous Report (Kitchen Stove), Run-Through (WotEP) etcpp. and especially all those 1/rest stuff enchantments that are on several weapons but nobody notices because they are "only per rest". But since they scale with weapon quality they can become really impactful.

[Not So Clever Hound]

On top of what Boeroer just said, you might want to reference this thread:

and this thread too:

 

[Not So Clever Hound]

In addition to those discussions and as @Haplok has illustrated several times, Assassin/Blood Mage wielding Engoliero do Espirs and tossing things Minoletta's Precisely Piercing Burst from stealth/invis can be very nasty and powerful.

4 hours ago, NotDumbEnough said:

Three Bells Through simply applies a 5 dmg/3 sec DoT for 12 seconds, affected by intellect and might but nothing else.

I particularly agree with you about Three Bells Through. On paper, the relatively vague description makes it a prime candidate for very strong metagaming but in practice, it's basically a low damage arquebus. The biggest letdown is that special attack effects don't carry over the additional targets.

[Haplok]

In reference to the above, one important distinction is that if a weapon has an effect on kill, does the kill need to be done with the weapon (most cases, for example Grave Calling) OR can it be a kill with any means (like Engoliero de Espirs, cascading kills off spells/abilities and its own effects).

[Boeroer]

Three Bells Through (and other similar "narrow line AoE" weapons like that one bow - that looks a bit like a harp which I forgot the name of - that fires a straight line on crit or x% hit or something) have a weird implementation.

They don't carry weapon effects properly and don't work correctly with Driving Flights and Twinned Shot. And that one bow is extremely funny with Tinned Shot because if the "line" proc happens the two arrows that would normally fly in an arc to the target just go off to both sides in a straight line (hitting nothing).

Edited October 19, 2021 by Boeroer