Priest gem tags: Support is a damage line, not a heal

✍️ Alice・愛麗沙

Updated 9/14: Taiwan’s 9/9 “gem alchemy revamp” (update log thread 3541097) merged gem promotion and cross-type synthesis into one menu and rewired the synthesis side; the tag ordering below is unchanged. Only Star Prism synthesis survives: the seven Crude S single-colour gems now fuse directly into a Crude Star Prism S (three coloured singles + obsidian + diamond), while plain Crude singles still need a Crude Dark Stone or Crude Triple Quartz. Elite-and-above gems that are not Star Prisms can no longer enter alchemy at all — an “item conversion” button turns them into Crude / Crude S gems plus gold. From Elite Star Prism upward the promotion recipe unlocks only after you have obtained six Star Prisms of Crude S or better (existing characters are credited retroactively). Auto-fill and a “synthesise all” button were added, and synthesise-all only fires when the result is a Star Prism — which makes “fuse several and socket the best roll” easier than before. Also for Priests: Holy Wings with the Wings accessory rune now deals +15% skill damage; no effect on the tag order.

Coverage: why Support is not close to second

A tag line pays out only on skills carrying that tag, so its value is the printed percentage times the share of your damage carrying the tag. For the Priest that multiplication is unusually flattering.

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.

Support is at 100% coverage, so one +2.0% line converts to +2.00% of total output with zero leakage — a rarity across the roster. Smash follows at 60% and +1.20%. Below that the numbers collapse; Summon is one skill and +0.10%, which is a rounding error rather than a priority.

Three independent Korean write-ups landed on the same ordering. We are usually reluctant to adopt someone else’s priority list outright. Here we will, because the reason is checkable against the skill tags rather than resting on authority.

Where “Support damage” actually applies

The instinct that stops people is easy to state: Support means healing and buffs, healing does not hurt anything, therefore a Support damage line is dead weight on a healer-shaped class.

That reasoning fails at the first step. The gem line reads, in effect, “skills carrying this tag deal +N% damage.” It reads the tag printed on the skill; it does not consult your mental category for it, and does not care whether the skill also heals. The Priest’s design stamps Support across the whole kit — including the buttons that exist purely to kill things. So here, the Support damage line is simply the universal damage line, wearing a name that sounds like a specialist option.

The converse deserves stating so nobody builds a wrong expectation: it will not raise healing output, shield values or buff magnitudes. Priest healing scales off attack power and restoration, a separate line. Nobody has published a controlled test, so we are reasoning from the line’s own wording and the stat page’s arithmetic — inference, not measurement.

The Priest has no Elemental and no Movement

This is the mistake most likely to cost you engravers outright: the Priest carries zero Elemental tags and zero Movement tags.

It holds a staff, it emits light, it reads as a caster, so a great many players chase Elemental. Chasing it yields exactly nothing. Two subtler traps sit alongside:

• Summon appears only on the placed sanctuary, a buff-and-heal zone rather than a damage source. It is the class’s headline trap tag.
• Survival appears only on the ultimate, and is not worth pursuing either.

Then the one that changes under you: Combo. The base cross skill carries it, but the mainstream judgement-line rune rewrites it from Combo to Smash. Follow an older listing, chase Combo, slot that rune, and your coverage halves the same afternoon.

Your gem plan is downstream of your rune plan. Pick the rune first. Then pick the tags.

One damage line against one cooldown line

Every tag line is a fork: damage or cooldown. On an Elite Star Prism that is +2.0% damage or −0.65% cooldown per line. The ladder runs 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 rather than three.

Now give cooldown the friendliest assumption anyone could ask for — every saved second converting fully into an additional cast. That yields about +0.65% more casts, on the same tagged subset the damage line would have covered. Against +2.0%, damage wins by about three to one. Real conversion is well below one, because pre- and post-cast delays and the boss’s action rhythm absorb the fractions you saved.

The Priest is one of the few classes where a cooldown line is not automatically absurd, since buff cadence matters to a support player. Even so: consider it for line three at the earliest, and only if you can name the buff whose cooldown is actually holding your rotation back.

Reading the “separate multiplier” correctly

Gem tags do sit in their own multiplicative bucket, distinct from attack power, damage-increase and crit. But within that bucket, lines add. Every Support damage line you own is summed into one number and multiplied in once. So “each 2% line compounds” is false; “1% of Support damage is about 1% of total damage, scaled by coverage” is true. Twenty-two sockets, three lines apiece, all one tag, ceilings at +132% by addition.

Keep skill-use speed separate too. It acts on the preparation phase — casting, charging — and on the use phase — animation, channelling, and neither formula contains a cooldown term. It compresses your rotation; it does not advance a single cooldown bar. The full comparison. And the “smash enhancement” printed on runes belongs to an entirely different system from skill tags.

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 into shape. 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. The consequence for you is immediate: a gem that rolled three matched lines of the wrong tag is no longer garbage, it is stock. Do not dismantle it and do not re-roll it.

What to do now, what to ignore, what would change this

Keep, in order: any Support damage line, whatever it is paired with. Smash second, covering the burst skill, and rising further under the judgement-line rune. Disrupt third, worth having but well behind the top two. Combo only matters if you are not running the judgement rune. Ignore Summon and Survival — a buff zone and a single ultimate, both single-digit. Elemental and Movement do not exist here.

Adjust against your own rotation: if your rune choices differ from the mainstream, count your tags in the skill panel before applying the table.

Three things would invalidate this page. If the Taiwan judgement-line rune does not convert the cross skill from Combo to Smash, Combo returns to third. If a controlled test shows the Support damage line does affect healing output, a heal-focused Priest needs the whole ordering re-derived — the section we flagged as inference. And if Taiwan opens a steady engraver supply or ships the tag swap early, hoarding for promotion stops being correct.