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.

Essence of Virtue

Essence of Virtue grants Virtuous Barrier, a Defensive skill that provides Defences, Life Regen, and Mana Regen scaling based on your equipped Skills.

Virtuous Barrier grants a random Attribute Mote every 2 seconds, up to maximum of 3 of each Attribute. The Mote Limit is increased based on your Equipped Skill Gems, based on it’s attribute requirements.

A Random Mote will be lost each time you are hit, but for each Mote of each type you gain the following benefits:

• Dexterity Mote – 5% Increased Armour, Evasion, and Energy Shield
• Intelligence Mote – 5% Increased Life and Mana Regeneration Rate
• Strength Mote – 1% increased maximum Life

By default, you can have up to 11 Skills between the 9 Skill Slots and two Weapon Skills from any equipped weapons. This means without any additional gear, you can have up to a maximum of 25 of a single Mote type, or 31 in total. This can be further increased with Unique Items that provide additional Skills, as well as Unset Rings to provide additional Skill Slots.

Of the three available buffs, this seems to heavily favor Dexterity Skills as the increased Defenses it provides is a far more valuable stat as a baseline. While these can be easy enough to get from the Passive tree as well, this does make it much easier to get far more Energy Shield on a Gemling Legionnaire than before, saving the need to trek all the way to the top side of the Passive Tree for those nodes.

The Maximum Life granted by Strength Motes can also be incredibly powerful, as there are very few ways to gain a percentage increased to Maximum Life currently. Combined with stacking maximum Life on gear, you won’t be able to quite rival the raw Hit Pool of Energy Shield, but it can significantly narrow the gap. Combined with the percentage regen nodes Gemling Legionnaires would have access to, this would be particularly strong if sticking to Strength or Strength/Intelligence Gems.

Life Regeneration has potential to be used alongside Blood Magic, as you’ll want as much Life Regen as possible when going that route. Alongside some the passive around the mercenary start that grant a percentage of Maximum Life as Regeneration, this can be a strong avenue to scale your recovery.

The Mana Regeneration would enable easier use of the Mind over Matter Keystone, or Damage Taken as Mana in general really. Much like Energy Shield, this is also a stat that the Mercenary start doesn’t offer any of, with the bulk of it found in the Intelligence section of the tree. This does also help with the Mana issues a lot of Gemling Legionnaire builds tend to run into, without having to rely on Leech for pretty much all mana recovery.

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 provides all skills with an secondary effect granted by increasing its Quality.

With hundreds of skills and thus quality effects, we won’t be able to touch on all of them. The example GGG has used to showcase this ascendancy is Fireball, which in addition to its normal quality of providing a chance to fire 2 additional projectiles, it now also gains a chance to fire 8 additional projectiles in a circle.

How powerful this effect is will rely on on how powerful these new quality effects are. In particular, you’ll want to pay attention to skills with already great quality effects and see if their secondary effect is a strong pairing.

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 3 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.