How do critical effects like knockdown, bleeding, freeze, incineration, poison and stun work?

On your character screen in the abilites section is a list of critical effects and your chance of inflicting them. At the moment it looks for me like this, with a depressing 0% for everything:

I have a sword that has a +X% for bleeding and poison, but equipping it does not seem to increase the chance of critical effects here. How does the calculation work, and how can I get an non-zero chance of inflicting any critical effects?

Solution 1:

As far as I can tell, critical effects in The Witcher 2 are like critical hits in most other rpgs. However, unlike those other RPGs, your base crit rate in The Witcher 2 starts at 0%.

What you are looking for are items or mutagens that directly increase your critical effects chance, such as the aptly named "Critical Effects Mutagen".

From there, your critical effects chance stack with whatever modifiers you have from your weapon to get your total effects chance on each strike.

It seems that it will take effects from your weapon into the total display calculations, but only when that weapon is not currently sheathed.