upgrading with gems

[Ansakura]

i been reading up and was curous and a little confused..the gems you find..both raw..fire and the other gems..wht gems would be best to upgrade with for ranged weapons like bows and melee weapons like swords....the confusing part for me is the scaling..some gems remove it while others buff...what gems would buff melee weapons and ranged that dont remove scaling

[Shard of Manus]

You can't infuse Bows.

It depends entirely on your stats, but for melee, your best bet is almost always Heavy, Sharp or Refined.

Raw if you have low (below 20) Strength AND Dexterity, though some weapons benefit more from Raw at moderate stats, and some weapons suck with Raw even at low stats.

Blessed for Off-Hand weapons like parrying tools.

Lightning, Dark, Chaos, Crystal are usually not worth it. If you run a Faith or Intelligence build you'd do better with Heavy, Sharp or Refined and a Weapon Buff for damage.

Poison, Bleed and Hollow for their respective weapons, they scale with Luck. Bleed and Poison are great with certain weapons, terrible with others.

Hollow is usually only worth it if you have high Strength, Dexterity AND Luck, otherwise it's not worth it; or just high Luck but really low Strength and Dexterity.

[Ansakura]

so for a 2 handed weapon..would heavy gem be best? or refrined

[Aryend]

Originally posted by shadowkin22:

so for a 2 handed weapon..would heavy gem be best? or refrined

TL;DR: Depends, there's no definitive answer
It really depends on the particular weapon and your stats. heavy is for str builds, refined for quality (str/dex) and sharp for dex.

Only thing I disagree with Shard of Manus is the notion that lightning, dark, crystal etc... Are useless, I kinda like them and the AR can get decent depending on the weapon without having to rely on buffing and spending mp. have been rolling crystal Astora and Lothric SS on my int build and they are quite effective.

[icoN]

Originally posted by shadowkin22:

so for a 2 handed weapon..would heavy gem be best? or refrined

Which weapon do you use exactly?

[SeekerScorpio]

General questions inherits general responses. Should try being more specific if you want narrowed answers.

[Ansakura]

the two handed weapon im thinking of useing is either the exiled greatsword droped from the swamp in the road to sacrifice area or the butcher knife weapon..the bow im going with when i can get it is the pheris bow from farron keep area.....sorry for not being spefici on qestion :)

[Aryend]

For both Exiled and Butcher's Knife you want heavy infusion and high str. Bows as stated are not infusable so...

[Vinyltavia]

Originally posted by Aryend:

For both Exiled and Butcher's Knife you want heavy infusion and high str. Bows as stated are not infusable so...

Can't infuse butchers knife

[Ansakura]

so if i want to infuse i should use the exile greatsword...i was curious about butchers knife cuase i watched a youtuber play ds3 and used it cuase of its health return per hit

[Ansakura]

as for bows..would the pheris bow be good or is there another bow i should try to find/use

[Aryend]

Originally posted by Vinyltavia:

Originally posted by Aryend:

For both Exiled and Butcher's Knife you want heavy infusion and high str. Bows as stated are not infusable so...

Can't infuse butchers knife

Right, mixed that up, my bad.

Yeah, Butcher's Knife weapon art gives you some health steal, and it's a str weapon that gets S scaling anyway. Regarding bows... Again, depends, if I remember correctly Pharis was a dex bow, so if you wanna stick to str and want to have a bow anyway try Millwood.