Status Effects Explained — Heat, Lag and Infect in AVS03

The confirmed status effects

Demo Update 1.2 is the official source for this mapping:

Weapon	Applies	Confirmed in
Firewall	Heat	Demo Update 1.2
Paint	Lag	Demo Update 1.2
Bubbles	Infect	Demo Update 1.2

All three are official, developer-named status effects — they are the game’s confirmed damage-over-time / debuff vocabulary, and the rest of the 24-weapon roster likely feeds them too. Each confirmed applier has its own page: Firewall, Paint and Bubbles.

What each status actually does — pending

Here is the honest part: the exact combat effect of Heat, Lag and Infect has not been published in numeric detail. The names and the weapon mapping are official; the per-second damage, slow percentages or spread rules are not. You will find plenty of confident numbers on other sites — none of them cite a source. This page fills in as soon as full-release testing can produce evidence, from September 28, 2026.

How status effects fit a build

Status effects are the reason the weapons, drivers and plugins systems matter: a build is weapon choice, driver attachments and plugin modifiers layered together. Whether Heat-stacking or Infect-spreading wins runs is exactly the kind of question that needs the full 62-plugin pool to answer — see the builds hub for how we’ll approach tested builds.

FAQ

Can enemies inflict Heat, Lag or Infect on me? Unknown. The official materials describe these as weapon-applied effects on enemies. Any enemy side of the system gets documented after launch testing.

Do all weapons apply a status effect? Not confirmed. Only the Firewall/Heat, Paint/Lag and Bubbles/Infect mappings are official — the remaining 20 weapons’ status behavior is pending verification.