Healer gem tags: the heal button is a damage button
✍️ Alice・愛麗沙
Line one is Support, and not because “healers take the healer option.” It is that this class’s heal skills deal their damage in the same cast — the main one lists damage and total restoration side by side in its own description. So the Support tag is not attached to your healing number; it is attached to the damage you are actually dealing, at roughly 90% coverage. The order is Support, then Combo, then a fork between Summon, Smash and a Support cooldown line. Two corrections to the usual advice: Summon is not a trap here — the light crystal is one of your larger damage contributors — and Smash is near zero on the base kit but jumps once the meta rune rewrites the shield skill. This is also the one class where a cooldown line has a real case, for buff-cycle reasons rather than damage ones. And as everywhere: never spend a Gem Skill Engraver on a crude-tier gem.
Coverage: Support at ninety, Combo close behind
A tag line pays out only on skills carrying that tag, so it is worth its printed number times the share of your damage carrying the tag.
| Tag | Rotation skills carrying it | Share of output | One damage line, on total output | One cooldown line, best case |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Support | 6 / 7 | 90% | +1.80% | −0.59% |
| Combo | 6 / 7 | 78% | +1.56% | −0.51% |
| Smash | 2 / 7 | 30% | +0.60% | −0.20% |
| Summon | 1 / 7 | 22% | +0.44% | −0.14% |
| Disrupt | 2 / 7 | 8% | +0.16% | −0.05% |
| Survival | 1 / 7 | 3% | +0.06% | −0.02% |
Coverage is compiled from Korean skill-tag listings and rotation shares, not an official disclosure. The two right-hand columns scale one Elite Star Prism line (+2.0% damage / −0.65% cooldown) by that share; the cooldown column assumes the seconds saved convert fully into extra casts, which they do not — read it as a ceiling, not an expectation.
One Support line converts to +1.80% of total output, one Combo line to +1.56%. Those two are the skeleton of a Healer’s gem set; everything else is a second-tier decision and should be treated as one.
Where “Support damage” actually lands
The question every support player asks first: does the Support tag boost healing or damage?
Damage. The gem line reads “skills carrying this tag deal +N% damage.” It consults the tag printed on the skill and nothing else. And the Healer’s design fuses the two roles into one cast: the main skill is a channelled area attack that also restores the party, with both figures printed in its description, and the link-type skill applies damage over time to enemies and restoration over time to allies. The Support damage line collects on the half of that which hurts.
It will not raise healing output. Healing scales through attack power and restoration, a separate line. Nobody has run a controlled test, so we are reasoning from the line’s wording and the stat page’s arithmetic — inference, not measurement.
The upshot inverts the natural conclusion: even if you intend to do nothing but heal, the Support damage line is not wasted, because you deal damage whether or not that is your intention.
Summon is not a trap; Smash is rune-dependent
Two details run against instinct, and they are clearest side by side.
Summon appears on exactly one skill at just over twenty percent coverage — the classic profile of a trap tag. Except that the one skill is the light crystal, which the Korean wiki places among the class’s top damage contributors. Summon is the rare “few skills, high value each” tag, and ranking it level with a Support cooldown line in third place is a considered position rather than a shrug.
Smash runs the opposite way. On the base kit essentially one armour-break skill carries it, so coverage is close to nothing. But the mainstream halo rune rewrites the shield skill from Support·Survival·Disrupt to Smash·Support, and the halo’s damage share reportedly exceeds even the main channelled skill — so an output-leaning Healer running it wants Smash on the gems.
The same rewrite manufactures two traps in passing: Disrupt and Survival are precisely the tags the halo deletes. Your gem plan is downstream of your rune plan — decide about the halo first, then decide line three.
One damage line against one cooldown line — the one real exception
Each tag line forces a choice. On an Elite Star Prism: +2.0% damage or −0.65% cooldown per line, with the ladder running Crude S 1.7/0.55, Elite 2.0/0.65, S 2.1/0.7, Whole 2.2/0.75, and Triple Quartz 2.1/0.7 over two lines.
The general verdict is lopsided. Even assuming — impossibly — that every saved second converts into an additional cast, cooldown yields about +0.65% more casts against +2.0% more damage. Damage wins threefold.
But the Healer is the one class where the cooldown line deserves a hearing, and for a reason unrelated to damage arithmetic: what a support player optimises is whether buffs and heals land on the party’s rhythm. The Korean wiki places a Support cooldown line joint third, alongside Summon — a team-function judgement, not a damage model.
So the recommendation splits. The first two lines are damage without exception. The third depends on your role: pure output takes Smash or Summon damage; a dedicated party healer with a specific buff cooldown holding them back can defend a Support cooldown line. This is one of very few places on this site where we will write that sentence.
The “separate multiplier”, and skill-use speed
Gem tags do form their own multiplicative bucket, distinct from attack power, damage-increase and crit. But within that bucket the lines are additive: every Support damage line sums into one number and multiplies in once. “Each 2% line compounds” is wrong; “1% of Support damage is about 1% of total damage, scaled by coverage” is right. Ceiling at +132% by addition, not by product.
Keep skill-use speed separate too. It acts on the preparation phase — casting, charging — and the use phase — animation, channelling, and neither formula contains a cooldown term. For a Healer, whose main skill is channelled, speed feels enormous because the channel finishes sooner. It still does not advance a cooldown bar. The comparison, and the “smash enhancement” on runes is a different system entirely.
Crude gems are a trap, and not because they’re weak
The mechanism: promotion re-randomises the tag set. Fusing three gems into one rolls fresh tags on the result — unless you spend an extra 5 Gem Skill Engravers at promotion to carry the first-slotted gem’s tags across. So any engraver spent on a gem that is not your endpoint is wiped at the next promotion. Leave crude and Crude S alone, fill all twenty-two sockets by volume, and reserve engravers for tag carry-over only. Taiwan’s supply is the adventurer pass at ranks 23 and 24 — five per rank free, ten paid.
Cheaper still: fresh Star Prisms roll random tags anyway, so fuse several and socket the best roll rather than forcing one stubborn gem. Officially a re-roll is just “random”, and no odds distribution has ever been published — we checked namu wiki, Inven, arca, dcinside and the Korean gem simulators.
Korean-server lookahead: the tag swap, stated correctly
Korea added a tag swap on 2026-04-23, and most versions of it in circulation are wrong. It is not two gems trading tags. You pick two tag types, and every gem on your account — stored and socketed alike — has those two exchanged. Pairs compose into a single permutation within one operation, so three-way cycles are reachable, though the primitive is still a pair. 1,000,000 gold per permutation; different permutations for damage and cooldown lines means two operations and 2,000,000 gold. Hard limit: damage lines swap only with damage lines, cooldown only with cooldown.
Unlocked by a one-time quest from a bank NPC in one Korean-server town, then usable at any town bank. Korean-server only; not shipped on Taiwan, and no Taiwanese announcement has promised it. That last limit matters more here than anywhere else, since the Healer is one of the few classes likely to hold both kinds of line at once.
What to do now, what to ignore, what would change this
Keep, in order: any Support damage line — it covers the damage you actually deal, not your healing number. Combo second, since the main channelled skill and the link skill both carry it. Line three forks: pure output takes Summon, or Smash if you run the halo rune; a party healer bottlenecked on a buff cooldown takes Support cooldown. Ignore Disrupt and Survival, which the halo strips off the shield skill. Elemental and Movement do not exist here.
Tune this to your rotation and your seat in the party. A support Healer and an output Healer should not have the same third line.
Three things would invalidate this page. If Taiwan’s halo rune does not rewrite the shield skill to Smash·Support, the Smash option collapses. If a controlled test shows the Support damage line does raise healing output, the ordering for support-leaning players needs re-deriving — the passage we flagged as inference. And if Taiwan opens a steady engraver supply or ships the tag swap early, hoarding purely for promotion stops paying.
