As for damage taken, what are you wearing? Normal Defense doesn't apply to all damage, just Normal Type damage inflicted. So if you're taking Elemental Damage, and don't have any defense against that, then you'll be taking more damage.

In addition, on T1- all damage dealt is Normal type only. On T2, half the damage dealt is of the type indicated by the attack- Red for Normal, Green for Elemental, Purple for Shadow, and Yellow for Piercing. However, the other half of damage dealt is always Normal type damage. So a Retrode shooting its eyebeam at you will deal half Elemental and half Normal type damage, and a Retrode swiping at you with its claw will deal all Normal damage. On T3, my understanding is enemies will generally deal only the damage type indicated, so all Shadow, or Normal, or whatever. Your shield and armor resist each damage type separately, so sometime only Normal defense isn't enough. Though you're generally screwed on any Tier without any Normal Defense type at all.

Check the wiki pages on Monsters and Dealing Damage to get a better idea of how damages types work. Maybe that'll help you with weapon choices. Lastly, personally I like the Avenger. Yeah, it's slow. But against the right enemies, like Constructs or Undead, it tends to hit like a truck. On T3, where you usually should only swing once, and be shielding all the rest of the time, hitting hard and knocking things back is really useful.

Hope this all helps a bit.

As they've said, the avenger depends largely on what you're fighting. The annoying late game enemies I've faced are weak to shadow and strong to element (gremlins) so I prefer the faust. But constructs and undead are push overs for elemental, so if you plan on facing those more often, have at it. The faust is faster to swing and recover, but the divine avenger does a three prong ranged attack.

Likewise, just as some monsters are strong/weak to particular damage types, they do different damage types as well. If your armour doesn't list a bar for a particular type (such as shadow being absent from the wolver set normally) then you effectively take damage as if you weren't even wearing armour. This makes the most popular sets more or less useless in the face of a lack of piercing damage enemies. Since late game most enemies do normal and elemental, with the odd shadow opponent (one of the gates has an almost solid shadow back end right now!) the current "ideal" armours are those like the skelly set, magic set, and angelic set.

With the seraphic gear, I'd have thought going for the faust was a given, since you've got high curse resistance. There's no reason you can't get both, eventually. But keep in mind, unless you're blocking, the elemental resistance your shield offers doesn't help you at all. So you've got decent normal and shadow resistance, but no elemental resistance.

@Ozymandius,
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As for damage taken, what are you wearing? Normal Defense doesn't apply to all damage, just Normal Type damage inflicted. So if you're taking Elemental Damage, and don't have any defense against that, then you'll be taking more damage.

In addition, on T1- all damage dealt is Normal type only. On T2, half the damage dealt is of the type indicated by the attack- Red for Normal, Green for Elemental, Purple for Shadow, and Yellow for Piercing. However, the other half of damage dealt is always Normal type damage. So a Retrode shooting its eyebeam at you will deal half Elemental and half Normal type damage, and a Retrode swiping at you with its claw will deal all Normal damage. On T3, my understanding is enemies will generally deal only the damage type indicated, so all Shadow, or Normal, or whatever. Your shield and armor resist each damage type separately, so sometime only Normal defense isn't enough. Though you're generally screwed on any Tier without any Normal Defense type at all.

Check the wiki pages on Monsters and Dealing Damage to get a better idea of how damages types work. Maybe that'll help you with weapon choices. Lastly, personally I like the Avenger. Yeah, it's slow. But against the right enemies, like Constructs or Undead, it tends to hit like a truck. On T3, where you usually should only swing once, and be shielding all the rest of the time, hitting hard and knocking things back is really useful.

Hope this all helps a bit.
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That was fantastic. Please repost in the New Recruit thread :)

Piercing defense right now only really helps with spike traps. So unless you intend to fight enemies while standing on spikes, don't need it. Besides those, the only actually hostile that does piercing is the odd lichen (either colonies that grow large enough to send out spikes, or already spikey lichen like the poison variety). So no, you really don't need anything with piercing defense. A pendant won't be enough to cover for your weaknesses.

To be fair, curse is actually an over inflated affliction. It prevents you from using two of your items and one of your weapons. As long as you don't go down into a "I absolutely must use my faust and never my " situation you're fine. For example, I run with a faust and winmillion in tier 3 (sometimes). When one gets cursed I simply don't use it.

I suggest using both the faust and avenger and switch it up when you encounter enemies strong against one of them. Chances are they'll be weak to the other, given the current gate arrangements.