ok, all this will be to the best of my knowledge stuff, everything im gonna say MIGHT be wrong, but from playing a few ailment builds and watching/talking with other players doing ailments this is my current understanding.
the ailments corresponding to each type of base damage have a % chance to be applied on hit. Theres stats on gear and passives you can get to scale this, theres:
+# Status Ailment Chance Score
+% Status Ailment Chance Score
Wisdom
wisdom I think grants % increased damage and % status ailment chance score. Each hit can apply 1 stack of 1 ailment, and they can all stack up to 10 times on a monster. You can increase the amount of ailments you can apply with a hit to 2 on the passive tree, you can increase the amount of stacks you can apply up to 30 and theres passives, gear stats and skill runes that allow you to apply more than 1 stack per hit.
the type of ailment that will be applied is taken from the largest amount of damage the hit did, if you can apply 2 then its also gonna apply the second largest. the ailments themselves have their own base damage that seems to be scaled from player level. So if you hit with toxic damage it will apply a poison stack, it doesnt matter if you hit the mob with 1 point of toxic damage or 5000, it will still result in a poison stack that deals the same damage over time.
there seems to be a few rare exceptions, but in almost all cases this means you simply need to make sure the 2 highest damage sources on your skill are the ones you want to apply. If you want to poison with infinity blades you can go the route of taking the nodes that convert some of ur elemental and occult damage to physical and then only let you deal material damage, then convert some of the physical damage to poison. that works, and its easier because you dont then need to worry about having flat ele damage to spells on your gear etc messing up what ailment you apply. BUT, its not the most effective way. A better way to do it would be to let your blades deal their normal damage and then get a bit of + toxic damage to spells somewhere, example you can socket a weapon with a green gem in an offense 2 slot. if you have the 2 ailment ability and the toxic is the second highest damage type on the skill it will apply stasis from the aether damage and poison from the toxic damage.
the node that lets your ailments crit is bugged, it doesnt work is the word on the street so dont take it.
next thing to note, you can apply 2 ailments per hit, but if you are hitting with multiple skills you can apply more ailments via those. If your only damaging ailment is poison it might be a little weak. if youve already invested into chance to apply ailments then theres nothing stopping you applying more if you can, its just free extra damage. So youve got base aether from blades and base toxic from the poison skill, if instead you add say flat lightning damage to spells in somewhere then you will apply stasis and shock from the blades and poison and shock from the other skill. if you then use a catalyst and a dagger/pistol rather than a staff you could also use the autoturrets skill which would let you dump out fury back into wisdom, but also have the benefit of being an attack. this means it wont get the flat lightning damage to spells you added, so if you can get flat fire and rend damage to attacks on the dagger or rings etc then the turrets will shoot away apply bleeding and burning stacks while you apply shock and poison from your spells.
Thats gonna result in a lot more damage overall. thats the best way to get the most out of purely ailment damage afaik, try and get the most amount of skills dealing different sorts of damage ailments as possible that can all be hitting and stacking at the same time and also try and benefit from the direct hit damage of these skills as well. the game doesnt really have focused damage type specialisation so you dont really benefit by sticking to a given damage type exclusively. But its your build, a build is all about you doing the thing you wanted to do, its partly what is most effective and its partly i have this idea of doing this thing, and that might not be the most effective thing but its what i wanna do so im gonna min/max it but only within the parameters of the concept im building around. so dont let me tell you how to do your thing, im just throwing ideas out, feel free to put a big red line through the ones that dont sit with what is inspiring you to make the character.
