element gem sharding

Cosoc - Sanctuary
Cosoc - Sanctuary Posts: 99 Arc User
edited September 2009 in General Discussion
ok so i was going to put immac mag att gems in my tt90 glaive but i was thinking maybe i could shard with earth damage gems and be an earth nuker cos my sutra combo will eventually be SR MS SS SR + earth stones r cheep
but
my friend tells me earth gems only effect malee damage and resistance...
is this true or will earth shards increase my earth att on earth spells???
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Post edited by Cosoc - Sanctuary on

Comments

  • Alerean - Heavens Tear
    Alerean - Heavens Tear Posts: 153 Arc User
    edited September 2009
    Element shards don't affect skills at all. Even melee skills are unaffected by element shards.
  • Alexeno - Sanctuary
    Alexeno - Sanctuary Posts: 1,006 Arc User
    edited September 2009
    elemental shards only affect normal attacks, period


    i think they affect normal bow/xbow/sling attacks as well, but unsure on this one
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]

    "Hell hath no fury like Alexeno trying to prove his point" -Mizuoni
  • Solandri - Heavens Tear
    Solandri - Heavens Tear Posts: 2,843 Arc User
    edited September 2009
    AFAIK, elemental shards make sense for only one sub-class. Heavy fox venos who melee. I play one. When PWE designed the veno fox skills, they were designed to give a low-str veno a little extra damage. When you give a veno a lot of str, the bonus damage does not compensate for the additional time needed to use the skills. So a heavy fox veno's max damage actually comes from using only normal attacks.

    But when I ran the numbers, for a 95 heavy fox veno, the elemental shards would need something like 4.6x the bonus of a garnet (phys attack) shard before you do more damage (4.1x if not Sage). Cost-wise, the elemental shards fall just shy of this. A perfect garnet runs around 4 mil and gives +40 phys attack. A perfect elemental shard will run you around 200k. Get 25 of them (for a cost of 5 mil) to make an elemental gem with +150 to damage. That's only 3.75x the bonus for slightly more price. So even for the one sub-class where elemental shards might make sense, they're inferior.

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