Purge vs Burn, Shock, etc.

[Royal]

My typical rotation for DD use to be Burn II to lower the resistances and then Profundity II + Fire II for mega dmg. Then I would use Shock II + Thunder II (u can see the pattern) to lower resistances for each respective nuke ability. I am wondering how the burn, shock, etc type spells compare to purge.

Burn II (RNK 36) states "Lower the resistances"
Purge (RNK 22) states "Rendering the target's elemental alignment neutral"

I am interpretting "neutral" to mean 0 resistances for any school of magic. If that is true why did they develop a Purge II at 46 which I haven't gotten. It can't be 0 because you would never need another ability rank above Purge I.

If purge is better, it would free up alot of abilities on my bar if my rotations could be:

Purge, Prof + Fire II, Thunder II, Aero II, etc
instead of
Burn II, Prof + Fire II, Shock II, Thunder II, etc.

I don't have time to do a controlled test on the same mob over and over again and was curious if anyone else had already investigated this?

[R0ssdaddy]

Dont drop burn and shock, etc. They do pretty good DPS like poison, and they can stack up to supereffective, especially against big hp mobs like Deepvoid slave.

Aside from that, sorry idk Purge.

[DeadRiser]

I use Purge if my enemy has a resistance to a certain spell that's already on my bar.

What I'm thinking is that when you use Purge the Shock or Burn, it lowers their resistance to it even more... kind of like going on the negative side of a number line, thus dealing more damage? I don't know, we can't really test this until we have better reliable stats.

[Estellios]

Purge makes it so the target's elements all even out to a "neutral" state based on its level, where your spells will act as though you were casting on an enemy at the same level that neither resists or is weak to them. Burn/Shock etc lower enemy elemental resistance, and I've seen a significant increase to spell damage when the enemy is already weak to that element.

Basically Purge is a "failsafe" for when you come across something that resists what spells you are using, like was mentioned. The elemental debuffs are better used when you can plan ahead to maximize damage.

[Royal]

That makes sense. Thanks both of you.