New Player with question about support gem skills.

Hello fairly new player enjoying the game so far. One thing I am trying to understand about support gems is how some of them work. Just wanted to ask do support gems like envenom or pin require you to do specific type damage in order to active like does envenom require you to be doing chaos hit damage in order for the support gem to activate and pin does it require physical damage hit to activate because I'm playing a sorceress and its allows me to equip the gems on my spells that have the on hit but I never see it activate so just wondering if that's the reason why. Thank you for any information.

Support states in blue

"Supported Skills have 60% chance to Poison on Hit"

And the yellow/brown text says "Supports any skill that hits enemies, giving it a chance to poison enemies."

The comma makes me think it gives anything that hits enemies a chance to poison.

I have this on my shockwave totem and I can tell you I see enemy health bars turn green when they come into its vicinity and get hit.


I am also new this this game, but not to ARPGs, so if there is something in that based on "how POE1 worked" I would not be aware of it. But I see my totem poisoning enemies....unless green health bars mean something else :P


Pin seems like it is worded the same, you are losing stun, and gaining the ability for Physical Damage to cause pin buildup. I don't use this one.

Poison damage procs off of the combined physical and chaos hit damage.

Pin replaces stun buildup.


There are some restrictions like this and in game you can hold 'alt' on keyboard to keep a skill information card active and mouse over the underlined keywords for a deeper explanation on how they work.

well thanks for information that explains why frostbolt a hit type spell and similar spells doesnt work with these gems even though i can socket them into the skill since its not a chaos or physical damage type skill.

I think there is an ascendancy on blood witch that gives percent damage as physical for spells and there are probably + physical damage to spells uniques so you can technically get those off damage ailments to proc with the right setup but you usually want to stick with your native element.