Path of Exile 2: Gemling Legionnaire Mercenary Ascendancy Explained

This guide focuses on the Gemling Legionnaire Ascendancy for the Mercenary, covering their Unique Skills and Skill Interactions.

Gemling Mercenary Overview

The Gemling Legionnaire heavily modifies their gems to suit their needs in combat, making them incredibly powerful and flexible.

Gemling Legionnaires are the only ascendancy that can exceed the normal Gem equipping restrictions, able to equip 3 additional gems and a second copy of all Support gems.

Gemling Legionnaires are also capable of empowering and enhancing their gems by granting them extra Levels and increased Quality. This alone is a huge boost of potential power, not even considering the added benefits that they can get from gems.

Crystalline Potential

Crystalline Potential increases the Quality of all equipped Skills.

While the effect of Quality varies from skill to skill, in most cases, this is a decent power increase. It’s a good all-rounder for just 2 points, which makes it very accessible.

Implanted Gems

Implanted Gems grants two additional levels to all equipped Skills that match a given Attribute: Dexterity, Intelligence, or Strength.

Compared to Quality, Gem Levels are often a much larger power increase, benefitting far more skills than Quality often will. Getting this will mean having Quality as well, which makes these two a very good investment.

Since we have to select an Attribute to empower those specific gems, we’ll want to target effects that will have more overlap with other skills. As an example, Crossbow Skill would be affected by selecting Strength or Dexterity; however, if we were to also use Herald of Thunder or Wind Dancer, we’d need to choose Dexterity for those skills to also benefit.

While many builds can benefit from Gem Levels, this pair notably well with the Hollow Palm Technique Keystone Passive, which will, to some extent, lack the same level scaling as a standard build but require more levels to keep up in damage.

Advanced Thaumaturgy

Advanced Thaumaturgy grants the Thaumaturgical Dynamism buff, granting one charge every 8 seconds based on the highest total Attribute requirement of Support Gems. DEX produces Frenzy Charges, INT produces Power Charges, and STR produces Endurance Charges.

This effect has the potential to be very strong, as passive Charge Generation isn’t common. Most builds currently lean on Combat Frenzy for Frenzy or Power Charges or other interactions to consistently generate charges.

Given the particular wording of “Highest total”, it’s very likely that keeping our Support Gems perfectly balanced, we may be able to generate all three charges every time it triggers. Thaumaturgical Dynamism linked with Profusion, combined with Charge Regulation linked to Perpetual Charge, may be enough to sustain all three buffs, granting a fair bit of power.

Integrated Efficiency

Integrated Efficiency grants our Skill Gems bonuses based on their socketed Support Gems. Strength Support Gems grant increased Damage, Dexterity Support Gems grant increased Skill Speed, and Intelligence Support Gems grant increased Critical Hit Chance.

While this passive has been moved to be placed after Gem Studded and requires 4 Ascendancy points instead of 2, it provides a good amount of late-game power to be worth considering.

Most skills have great access to support of each type, making this flexible in how its used. This opens up some unique synergy and power for those who are willing to plan out their Support Gems carefully.

Gem Studded

Gem Studded grants a different buff based on the most numerous color of Support Gem. Red Gems prevent us from taking extra damage from an Enemy’s Critical Hits, Blue Gems reduce the Cost of our skills by 30%, and Green Gems cause our skills used while moving to have 40% less Movement Speed Penalty.

This buff was added to compensate for Support Gems no longer having a limit in Update 0.3.0. This offers a lot of flexibility while also rewarding planning out builds properly.

The Reduced Skill cost buff used to be an effect tied to Advanced Thaumaturgy, but was moved here in favor of its new effect. This version is a massive improvement, as it also removes the increased Attribute requirement line.

Similar to the reworked Advanced Thaumaturgy, it’s likely all three buffs can be active at once if our Support Gems are properly balanced. It should go without saying that all of these buffs combined will make the Gemling Legionnaire a very appealing option for a variety of builds.

The Movement Speed Penalty reduction it offers finally gives a great alternative class to work with for builds that otherwise would have had to rely on Pathfinder’s Running Assault node instead for comfortable mapping. Nullifying Slows would need another solution in this case.

Thaumturgical Infusion

Thaumaturgical Infusion grants additional Maximum Resistance to a given element for every 4 equipped Support Gems of a given color. Blue is Cold, Red is Fire, and Green is Lightning.

Increasing Maximum Resistance can be very powerful, with this allowing us to easily get up to 10% Maximum Resistance, without having to sacrifice ideal links. Pushing it to the limit, it’s possible to reach 15% Maximum Resistance in a single Resistance, but that requires using almost entirely one color of support.

While this is very strong as a defensive upgrade, it doesn’t quite feel worth the investment. The arbitrary limit of Support gems also limits this heavily, making it far less impactful.

Adaptive Capability

Adaptive Capability allows our highest Attributes to satisfy Gem requirements, allowing us to dump everything into one Attribute if desired.

This is another one of those passive that’s incredibly strong, as it makes it much easier to use any Skill or Support we want with little worry for level. It’s something we’d want to take later into the game, but very worth having for the more flexible choice of both supports and what stats we want to get from Attributes.

Alternatively, this passive is a Stat Stacker’s dream, letting them freely stack their desired stat, only limited by their weapon. Taking Enhanced Effectiveness on top of this can allow for further stat stacking.

Enhanced Effectiveness

Enhanced Effectiveness doubles the stat gained from Attributes. This means 4 Life per Strength, 4 Mana per Intelligence, and 10 Accuracy per Dexterity. However, this comes with the downside of a 20% penalty to All Attributes.

While this cut the value of every Attribute passive on the passive tree to increasing our Attributes by 4 instead of 5, doubling the effect of our Attributes more than makes up for this downside. Gaining 16 Life per STR node, 16 Mana per INT node, or 40 Accuracy per DEX Node can allow us to stack these bonuses more efficiently.

We’ll only want to use this in the later stages of the game when our Attribute needs are reasonably met from the Passive Tree and Gear. Otherwise, the downside will only lead to less power overall and make it take more investment to reach requirements for Gear or Gems.