Elemental affinities Salt and Sacrifice are a bit like Pokemon types: each enemy has them, and their types will determine what kind of weapon is most effective against them. Unlike Pokemon types, there are only six elemental affinities (you have to mix them to form things like lighting and air), and no one element has an opposing weakness. You can use fire against a Cryomancer all you want, but it won’t hurt them any more than if you use poison - or try to hit them over the head with a hammer.
What an enemy’s elemental affinity determines is what it’s strong against. Fortunately, we’ve crunched the numbers for you and have compiled a list of what elements will serve you best when throwing yourself against the game’s famed difficulty curve.
6 Physical
In many Soulslike games, smashing your enemies with a sword over and over again until they die is one of the most viable options, not so in Salt and Sacrifice. While a physically aligned weapon will serve you well in Ashborne Village against its single element-based mages or relatively weak bosses, 14 of the game’s necessary bosses have some kind of physical alignment.
This makes physical type damage some of the least effective in the game. Fortunately, you can craft elementally aligned weapons fairly early in the game, but that doesn’t make it any less surprising when you come across the first boss that will shrug off your mace like a wad of paper.
5 Fire
Salt and Sacrifice’s mages come in every elemental combination, from the poison and light-based Neuromancers to the light and dark-aligned Bibliomancers. To progress in the game, though, there are only a few that you technically have to kill, and, unfortunately for you lovers of the flame, you’ll have to kill three mages with fire affinity along with two fire-aligned story bosses - the Hate-Cursed Matriarch and The Worm That Does Not Die. The worm itself is one of the last bosses you’ll face in the game, and your flames will barely touch it.
This is not to say that fire has no use. Torching the pants off a Skallin or two is a perfectly viable strategy, but you’re more likely to come across resistance to it than some of the others.
4 Light
In a world filled with murk, there’s no surprise that powers and weapons aligned with light can cut through the darkness. There’s only one light-aligned boss, the Hate-Cursed Matriarch, whose lightning attacks may dampen your hi-beams, but she’s only the third in the game and is fairly easy to take down.
Unfortunately, there are three necessary mages that you have to kill with light powers, and they’re all later on in the game when the difficulty curve ramps up precipitously. Both Parza Krass, the Kinetomancer, and Logostus Rime, the Bibliomancer, have partial light alignments, and they are two of the most difficult encounters you’ll face.
3 Dark
Instead of trying to light up all of the dark places in the world, why not embrace them? Out-dark the darkness? After all, you’ll be harnessing a powerful force in your dark-aligned swings, one only amplified by the shadowy world around you.
Only two bosses in the game - Marega Gredanya and the Sapblood Heart - have any dark alignment, and only two necessary mages share their resistance to your umbral energies. One of them is the aforementioned Logostus Rime, but hopefully, by the time you face him, you’ll have more tricks up your sleeve than your accustomed baleful spheres of oblivion to get the job done.
2 Poison
The world is corrupted, but can corruption bring an end to itself? That’s the question you’ll most likely be asking when you start casting glyphs aligned with venom. And, for the most part, the answer is yes. Marega Gredanya is the only poison-aligned boss, and you’ll only have to fight three mages with the same defences before you come face to face against the game’s final boss, the Undone Sacrifice.
Poison attacks also have another extremely useful benefit. While fire, ice, and the rest can inflict damage over time, poison is probably the best at it. This makes poison-aligned weapons and glyphs especially useful against bosses later on in the game, who you’ll be hard-pressed to hit consistently.
1 Cold
You wouldn’t think just making someone chilly would be a useful power, but in terms of enemies that you have to defeat to beat the game, sending a blizzard at their feet or summoning partially cold aligned blood flies to gnaw at their face could be the best choice. Not a single story boss in the entire campaign can handle subzero temperatures well, and all of the three necessary mages with cold-aligned powers are in the first half of the game. Granted, a being that wears the skin of a dozen tormented victims is no joke, but Corpumancers pale in comparison to a Dracomancer or Diablomancer.
Of course, if you plan on defeating every mage in the game, cold is just as useful as any other element, and many of the game’s more difficult, non-boss enemies have cold alignment. However, the large set pieces - the mage hunts, and grueling battles against impossible odds - are what Salt and Sacrifice excels at. If you’re looking to conquer the heights of the game but want to make it a bit easier on yourself, there’s no better way than cloaking yourself in subzero temperatures.