Thoughts on Weapon Types and Purple Gems

Mini follow-up to the articles about Increasing DPA:

Those of you that have read that series of posts will know that I made a big deal out of:

1) sticking gems that enhance your primary weapon's damage type into every purple socket you can find and

2) extolling the virtues of gems that enhance your primary weapon's damage type over using Heroism.

I've had a bit of a re-think about this, based on game experience since I posted those articles over a month ago. Specifically, one of our Guild members was wondering if Soul damage could be boosted, and it was pointed out by others in ENN (Thanks to Dracul and to Sutekh) that yes, Soul damage could be boosted by Bloodbane. At the same time, the awesome Stormblade build that I successful use in PvB was coming up short in PvP and PvE (against the Primal Vampire).

This got me thinking about maximizing damage against specific creature types and I have come to the conclusion that to maximize your damage against bosses, ALL your purple socket gems from your primary PvB/PvCB build should have Heroism.

Let me explain: I feel that there are two types of weapons/sets in the game. One type for PvB, and one for PvP. The PvB weapons, items, or sets, will boost your Heroism in some way. The PvP items do the same for Bloodbane. No PvE specific weapons in my mind, but BOTH types can be tailored for PvE use.

So a strategy that works might look like this:

1) Early in the game, when you only have one or two good weapons, you don't really have a choice and even if you are a PvB or PvP only player, it might make sense to stick purple gems that enhance your primary weapon damage type instead of using Bloodbane or Heroism gems. This way, your shiny death-to-all weapon would deal a decent amount of damage in PvE, PvB, and PvP.

2) Later in the game, when you collect better weapons, it would make sense to have 3 different builds: one for PvE, one for PvP, and one for PvB, so you can maximize the damage you do, especially in PvP or PvB. Therefore, my thought here is that PvE builds would work best with purple gems that enhance your weapon's primary damage type, PvP builds with Bloodbane gems, and PvB builds with Heroism gems.

3) This works because "bane" powers modify ANY and ALL damage types done by you, and not just that of your primary weapon type. Bloodbane is obviously a "bane," and I have belatedly realized that Heroism counts as a "bane" as well. Which is why Soulshred 3 can do over 1000 points of damage for me when using it against Coven or Epic bosses (I have Heroism 42 for that setup), and only 50-100 or so when used in PvE (unless I have an item that targets a specific creature type, I have no damage modifiers at all).

Bottom line: if you can afford to do so (because you have good weapons that do different types of damage), you should stick Heroism gems into purple sockets for your primary PvB/PvCB build!