I just checked the leaderboard and I found that Firebird wizard is using Essence of Anguish shard as their primary weapon. Considering that the shard only works with the class with poison skill, which Wizard doesn’t have, so…I assumed that those wizard players are simply using that shard for its stat over the poison affix?
If the follower has a poison weapon weapon it procs your anguish shard.
Sword has poison damage rolled. This proc Essence.
Classes that don’t have poison skills can proc it by having poison damage rolled on their own or on their follower’s weapon. This is one of the extremely rare cases where the damage element on the weapon itself matters.
All build guides do mention this also.
That explains on why some FB wizard profile in leaderboard doesn’t even have poison damage rolled in their weapon because most likely it was their followers that will proc poison damage for them.
The elemental damage on the weapon is so underused to the point I forgot that elemental damage weapon is a thing. Totally slipped from my mind when I made this thread.
Understandable imo. As already stated by some others, in most cases the damage element on the weapon matters very little.