Are Corrupted Machines' Blaze canisters immune to explosions?

I've encountered a bunch of corrupted zones, so I tried to exploit classic elemental weaknesses to defeat them.

Corrupted Scrappers can explode if I shoot an electric arrow to their Power cell, but Blaze canisters seem to be immune to fire. I shot several fire arrows to a Corrupted Charger and nothing happened.

Is this true or was that a bug?

Solution 1:

You are likely facing machine evolution.

This is not affected by your level. Once you kill a fixed amount of machines of a given type, they start spawning with extra armor. This usuallly covers blaze and chillwater canisters. You can knock out the extra armor with tear damage, and this causes the canister to become exposed.

The amount of kills needed for the evolution of each machine type to take place is in the table below, which I got from this fandom wiki.

Solution 2:

From personal experience, a corrupted machine's blaze canister should be just as susceptible to fire arrows as their regular counterpart.

This guide backs this up:

One thing the corrupted robots have in common is their weakness to fire. No matter the tactic, you should always use fire weapons and ammo against them. Other than that, they basically have the same weak points as their non-fouled counterparts. For example, the grazers have canisters on their backs. All you have to do kill a corrupted grazer is shoot a fire arrow into its canister. Similarly, killing a corrupted watcher is quickly done by sticking a fire arrow into its eye.

Solution 3:

Just an addition to Vemonus' answer.

I'm playing as well, and I noticed that when Aim Assist was on in the Settings menu, sometimes the arrows would change their course mid-flight and hit something else. You may be aiming for the Blaze canister, but right before it hits it may change course and hit the body instead.

Another thing that I noticed is that the higher I leveled up, the more armored the enemies became. When I first encountered a Snapmaw I was able to hit the Blaze canisters near its head pretty easily. But after I got up to around level 20 or 30, I noticed that the Blaze canisters were now armored, requiring me to shoot off the armor before being able to trigger an explosion with a fire arrow.

I don't know if this coincided with my level increasing, or getting a Carja/Shadow Sharpshot/Hunter Bow, which gave me new ammo types that are better at shooting off pieces of armor, or even if the difficulty of the machines increases as you go farther away from the Sacred Lands.