Tempest Flurry Gemling Legionnaire Build Guide
Welcome to the Tempest Flurry Gemling Legionnaire Build Guide, a build where attributes are your best friend! If you like smacking things lightning fast with a double sided lightsaber and ringing a bell over the sounds of frozen enemies exploding all around you, look no further! This is a build that starts off at an affordable budget but scales incredibly well with a steep power curve, getting noticeably more powerful with each upgrade!
Tempest Flurry uses your quarterstaff to attack rapidly, hitting multiple times in an area around you. Combined with Charged Staff, each of these attacks fires a lightning shockwave in front of you, increasing your reach. Against stronger enemies, you drop a Tempest Bell on their head, ringing it over and over with dozens of hits per second. Finally, any enemy dying to your attacks are frozen, resulting in their bodies exploding thanks to Herald of Ice, clearing packs of mobs in an intant.
This is an endgame build that utilizes the power of stats to increase its potential! You stack strength, dexterity and intelligence to scale your Pillar of the Caged God and Hand of Wisdom and Action (referred to as HoWA in short), resulting in rapid fast, devastating attacks with a large area of effect.
Note: You do not need resistances on any specific item, just get the required total resistances amongst all gear combined. You need to cap your Resistances at 75%.
This build guide requires the Pillar of the Caged God unique item to function.
Path of Exile 2 is currently in early access, this means rapid development including frequent changes to builds as there are balance fixes and we learn more. Pin this page to be notified of any updates.
This guide assumes you are at least level 68 and have completed Act 3 Cruel, to learn more about the leveling process check out our Gemling Legionnaire Levelling Guide.
Skills
- This build has a small amount of gems to make the most efficient use of support gems. It is focused around maintaining a low button playstyle for more relaxed endgame gameplay.
- Tempest Flurry attacks rapidly to take advantage of multiple of this builds mechanics. The final hit is incredibly large making for consistent ailment application.
- Charged Staff adds a large flat Lightning Damage buff. It also cause your attacks to produce a shockwave, this drastically improves the quality of life for your Tempest Flurry. Maintain this buff at all times.
- Tempest Bell should mainly be used against high Health targets. It can also be used when being swarmed by enemies to deal large AoE damage. Make sure to have at least a little of each damage type, because Tempest Bell scales its damage with each ailment that it is afflicted by!
- Combat Frenzy provides you with frenzy charges whenever you freeze or electrocute an enemy. These Frenzy Charges are then turned into power charges thanks to Resonance, so that you may use them with Charged Staff. After getting HoWA, freezing is made easy with The Three Dragons.
- Wind Dancer provides a powerful defensive buff by increasing your evasion and letting out a large area burst whenever you get hit, knocking back, blinding and slowing enemies thanks to support gems.
- Herald of Ice carries the clear on this build, exploding all frozen enemies you kill, drastically improving your clear speed.
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Skill Rotation
- Start by attacking the target with Tempest Flurry to generate combo stacks for your Tempest Bell.
- Place down your Tempest Bell, then continue attacking it with Tempest Flurry. This freezes the bell and generates a power charge.
- Use your power charge to cast Charged Staff. Once Charged Staff is activated, continue attacking the target with Tempest Flurry, replacing the Tempest Bell whenever it goes down.
The clear on this build is incredibly straightforward. Simply attack using Tempest Flurry, making sure to maintain Charged Staff for as long as possible!
Skill Leveling Priority
Passives
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This build makes use of several special mechanics that make it stronger. While much of the passive tree is going through travel nodes for attributes (since it is a Tri-Attribute stacking build), it grabs some powerful notables along the way.
Some generally powerful nodes taken at all stages of progression include:
- Polymathy gives you a large amount of attributes.
- One with the River increases your evasion rating while also letting your freeze build up faster for more consistent explosions with Herald of Ice.
- One with the Storm makes keeping Charged Staff up easier by giving it extra duration when consuming a single power charge since it counts as using an extra charge.
- Immortal Infamy is a nice boost to recovery by providing healing for killing enemies.
- Resonance is one of the core nodes in the build. It converts the frenzy charges gained from Combat Frenzy into power charges, allowing you to cast Charged Staff.
Additionally, there are some incredibly powerful nodes that define the different setups. These include the following -
Basic Setup:
- Blood Magic is used in the first two trees as scaling mana and handling mana costs is expensive while maintaining tankiness. This is a great keystone to avoid needing to solve mana costs.
After Howa:
- After getting your Hand of Wisdom and Action, Lightning Rod is an incredibly powerful notable that must be grabbed as soon as possible. Since majority of your damage is lightning damage at this point, with its large roll range, lucky damage is very strong.
- Flash Storm gives you more penetration, stacking with the Soul Cores of Topotante in your Pillar of the Caged God to deal more damage against enemies with high resistances.
Aspirational Endgame Setup:
- In the aspirational endgame setup, Eldritch Battery is powerful as it converts your energy shield into mana, making for a tankier build and assisting with mana sustainance.
- In the aspirational endgame setup, Mental Perseverance, Lucidity and its two small Damage from Mana nodes, alongside 6 jewels with '4% of damage is taken from mana before life' results in a total of '50% of damage is taken from mana before life.' These are what enables the aspirational endgame setup to include mana so heavily, because it splits all damage between your mana and life at a 50:50 ratio.
- Natural Immunity is pivotal in the aspirational endgame setup, ensuring that you do not get inflicted with ailments despite a smaller life pool when you switch to taking damage to your mana.
Ascendancy
Learn how to complete the Trial of the Sekhemas and Trial of Chaos to earn your Ascension passives with our Ascension Guide!
- Adaptive Capability can be useful early game, however later on this node is nearly useless due to the build stacking all three attributes. You only take it to grab the node behind.
- Enhanced Effectiveness is incredibly powerful. Due to how many attributes this build stacks, this node grants a massive amount of life early on, and also a massive amount of mana in the aspirational endgame setup. With about 500 strength, this node results in 1000 flat life, just as an example.
- Integrated Efficiency is unused by this build. Similar to 'Adaptive Capability', you only take it to grab the node behind it.
- Gem Studded is another incredibly powerful node. Due to how similar the skills in this build are to each other, without this node, the build runs out of effective support gems. Not only does this ascendancy point yield a large damage increase, but it also results in more satisfying explosions with Herald of Ice thanks to being able to apply damage support gems to it.
Gearing
Offensive Scaling
- Before getting Hand of Wisdom and Action, this build requires a large amount of flat damage on gloves and rings due to Pillar of the Caged God having no flat damage on it.
- After getting Hand of Wisdom and Action, you only need one roll of flat "# to # cold damage to attacks" and "# to # fire damage to attacks" to ensure that your tempest bell is afflicted with all elemental ailments.
- Being a Tri-Attribute Stacker, Strength, Intelligence and Dexterity are your primary offensive scalers. Strength gives you increased damage with Pillar of the Caged God, Intelligence gives you flat lightning damage with Hand of Wisdom and Action and Dexterity gives you a lot of attack speed between the two items.
Defensive Scaling
- Sufficient +#% to Fire, Cold, Lightning and Chaos Resistance to cap your Resistances.
- Note: Chaos resistance is less required because monsters deal less Chaos damage and this build has a large hit pool. About 20-30% chaos resistance should suffice.
- +# to Strength because it gives you more maximum life.
- +# to Maximum Life.
- Look out for items with high Evasion Rating to assist your survivability.
- In the aspirational endgame setup, +# to Intelligence is defensively powerful because it gives you maximum mana. This is combined with the Jewel mod for "4% of damage is taken from Mana before Life" and some passive nodes to give you a powerful defensive layer.
- If you are still struggling check out our Survival Guide for additional useful information!
Here's how you should gear your Tempest Flurry Gemling Legionnaire. Sorted mostly in order of importance
Weapons
- Contrary to most other builds, your weapon stays the same from start to finish in this build. Pillar of the Caged God is a cheap and common item, however there are a few things that can be done to improve its stats, such as:
- In early game, use Glacial Runes or Storm Runes to increase the flat damage output of your weapon, before you can get a lot of flat damage.
- After you have sufficient flat damage (flat damage on rings and gloves or HoWA), you socket Soul Cores of Topotante into your weapon to assist with penetrating monster resistances.
- One potential endgame option is to find a Pillar of the Caged God with 3 sockets as a corruption, allowing you to socket an extra soul core.
- The other endgame option is to find a corrupted Pillar of the Caged God with a 12% increased damage per strength stat instead of a 10% one. Keep in mind, if you follow this option, you will need to make up for the penetration you lose from missing one soul core!
Body Armour
Helmet
Gloves
Boots
Rings
Amulet
Belt
Jewels
Atlas Passives
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- This build excels at both mapping and bossing, performing well in all mechanics. However, some skillful play is required, as you cannot facetank and must leverage your strengths with multiple types of Crowd Control.
- Avoid the 'Monsters have (50–59)% increased Ailment Threshold' waystone modifier on maps as freeze is a very powerful defensive layer and this modifier can stop you from freezing when you have low damage.
- This atlas passive tree focuses on increasing your waystone drops to sustain your waystones, but also increasing the effect of map modifiers and corruption. This makes your maps significantly harder but also more rewarding.
Learn about the endgame activities available to you in Path of Exile 2 with our guide!
FAQ
How important is HoWA?
While HoWA is incredibly powerful, you can reach red tier maps without it. It is still a core piece of the build, however, so you should try to get one as soon as possible!
What attribute numbers should I aim for?
When should I switch to the mana setup?
What bonuses should I choose from relics in Act 2 and venom drought in Act 3?
How much penetration does this build require?
Video
Summary
- Tempest Flurry is a fast hitting Melee skill that triggers shockwaves from Charged Staff to deal massive damage to surrounding enemies.
- Combat Frenzy combined with constant freezing through The Three Dragons generates Power Charges to maintain your Charged Staff buff.
- Place Tempest Bell whenever available on bosses for a massive damage boost.
- Herald of Ice explodes all frozen enemies while Wind Dancer keeps you safe from whatever survives.
- Pillar of the Caged God and Hand of Wisdom and Action scale your character massively with attributes, allowing you to deal and take massive amounts of damage!