Bane of the Stricken

Bane of Stricken is a Legendary Gem in Diablo III, originally scheduled to be added in patch 2.2.0, but later moved to 2.3.0 instead. It can only be socketed into Amulets and Rings, and drops from Greater Rift Guardians. It was cut from the 2.2 release, replaced with Mutilation Guard. This gem was only available to players participating in Season Four, but drops for normal characters as well since that Season's end.

It increases damage taken by enemies from the player, increasing with each successful attack made the character, stacking infinitely. It has a small internal cooldown tied to attack speed. Each attack made by the character will always apply only one stack of Bane of the Stricken, to one enemy, no matter how many enemies are struck. This makes Bane of the Stricken mostly only useful when attacking a single, solitary enemy, such as a Rift Guardian. Upgrading increases the damage bonus.

At rank 25, it also adds a multiplicative damage bonus against most powerful foes: bosses, including Rift Guardians. This bonus has no effect on players and all other types of elites.

This gem was introduced as a way for area damage and high attack speed oriented builds to deal efficiently with tougher enemies, which would otherwise take too long to defeat via lots of weaker attacks. For builds with strong but slow attacks, it is considerably less efficient.

Stats


''After the defeat of Malthael, Diadra the Scholar wandered the world. She studied the gem cutters of Xiansai, and brought their secrets back to Westmarch. Bane of the Stricken is the first gem to come out of her Westmarch workshop.''

Development
Originally, this gem worked a little differently: it increased the weapon damage of attacks by 1% per stack (for example, from 200% to 201% as Physical per cast), and rank 25 bonus allowed it to affect attacks of allies (including pets and followers).