Gemling Minionaire - 1-Button Army Swap

Introduction

This build, the gemling minionaire, boasts two minion builds in a single character, without having to swap gems or anything. It’s a single button press to get a mapping setup, and another button for you bossing setup. Super easy, and a lot of fun. I think it’s a great template for even more exploration.

Pros & Cons 

Now that you have some idea about the build in general, let’s look at the pros & cons. Starting with the pros.

Pros:

1. You get the best of both worlds with basically 2 builds in one, without having to swap gems or anything else. Just press a button for your mapping or bossing setup.  
2. Visual clarity, as Skeletal Sniper don’t use screen wide fire attacks, compared to Skeletal Arsonist or Raging Spirits.  
3. Scaling a minion build is easy and straightforward.
4. A summoner playstyle allows you to focus on the boss mechanics, loot gear, just enjoy the scenery PoE 2 offers, while your minions are doing the work.  
5. The voice lines of the gemling legionnaire are a lot more bearable than those of the witch, which is definitely a pro. This guy has a fun personality, while the witch is just annoying, in my opinion. 
6. This extensive guide is a pro, with a path of building for the twink levelling, the initial swap for early mapping, and endgame, with loadouts for every stage of the build.  

Neutral points: 

1. Minion AI isn’t great, but skeleton snipers AI is a lot better than Arsonists. I don’t know why exactly, I think because they have much more range, but it’s a lot less clunky. 
2. Defences are okay. It’s not great, but you’re not a glass cannon either. 

Cons: 

1. You need 2 uniques and 2 good sceptres for the weapon swap tech 
2. You can’t level a gemling legionnaire with minions, unless you use a lot of twink gear, which is exactly what I did.  
3. The build is still quite slow. The minions clear well, but you're moving slowly. There's little movement speed on the tree, and I'm not really a fan of using movement skills so far, plus we’re not using a shield so I’m not shield charging either. 

Resources

Loot filter (use at your own risk): YouTube Gemling Minionaire filter found at https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/ThyWorm2-0364/item-filters

Regex Strings

Regex Strings I am using with this build (include the " when copy pasting):
Tablets "quantity of items|al bre|pack size"
Maps "burn|mum pl|less rec"

Playstyle

The playstyle is very straightforward. In the mapping setup, you just cast Pain Offering. It seems since patch 0.1.1C you don’t even need to aim anymore, you can just click it and it sacrifices a random minion, sometimes even off-screen. I think that has to do with the controller update, but it’s great quality of life. That also makes it a one button build while mapping, because all you do is cast pain offering. 

For bossing, you’re also casting pain offering, but you’re making sure you cast Flame Wall too, as you want to summon Raging Spirits to break the bosses’ armor. But that’s it. 

For the swap, you just press whatever button you bound the Mace Strike to. In my case, when I reach a map boss, I press E, or I cast flame wall, and then my bossing setup spawns. When I'm back to mapping, I press Q. Super simple. 

Deliberations

This part of the guide is called deliberations, because these are things I thought about and tried, but ultimately didn’t like. Doesn’t mean you can’t put it in though, so here we go. 

1. I tried using Eye of Winter, to increase critical weakness , or whatever it’s called. I think the skill is too clunky however, it doesn’t fit the build at all, and it’s another button to press during bosses, which are all bad things to me. So after a bit of testing, I decided bosses die fast enough as it is, I don’t need to cast this, although it is technically more damage. 
2. I tried different minions when bossing, most notably Skeletal Arsonist. The main issue is that arsonists synergize much more with fire and elemental scaling, and not with physical damage, so I would have to make a lot of changes to make that work. A different raging spirits setup, probably requiring a 6-link, a flammability curse, maybe weapon swap passives, that sort of thing. I thought about it, theorycrafted a bit, but decided against it, to keep the build simple and clean. 
3. Weapon set passive points. You might think, you’re weapon swapping already to summon the other minion army, why not allocate specific points for that army. I tried this, but because you’re likely swapping also attributes around to get to all the nodes, it gets incredibly messy with all the skills. If you swap, and you lack attributes, your entire army won’t show up. It was very frustrating to deal with, I wouldn’t want to do that to you guys, and more than that, I really didn’t see that many opportunities that would significantly increase the bossing damage, for example. Minion nodes are generically good, for the most part. So again, I decided against it, and I just have 1 simple passive tree.

Minion Army Swap Technique 

The weapon swap technique enables you to swap armies with a single button. What you must do is set your mapping snipers and grim feast to weapon set one. You set your bossing snipers, flame wall, raging spirits and storm mage to weapon set 2. And all other abilities, like pain offering and skeletal cleric, to both weapon sets. You can do this in the skill overview. 

In that same skill overview, as we’re wearing 2 one handed unique maces, you have a skill called Mace Strike. It just makes you melee, with a mace. You can use it, even when there’s no enemy around, and depending on which mace strike you use, you swap to a weapon set. All skills that are connected to that weapon set, including minion armies, are then summoned and usable. So by using 2 different mace strikes, which I bound to E and Q, I can swap my entire army with a single button. 

You can use the weapon swap button of course, but I found that less reliable, as it can be hard to tell which minion army you summoned. They do not differ all that much, after all.  

At the start, setting this up can be a little bit annoying, and once you get new weapons, or more or less spirit, or a gem upgrade, or many of those things, you are likely to have to redo the setup. But it’s worth it, in the end.  

Minion Stats 

Let’s talk about minion stats for a bit. In short, minions scale greatly with levels. Their health, base damage, and accuracy all increase by gaining a level. The minions in this build are relatively squishy, because I don’t cap their resistances, and they take 20% increased damage. I found they really don’t die much in events like breach or ritual, in high tier maps, but if you feel they die too much, just swap some of the minion crit nodes towards minion resistances and health.

15 February 2025: Initial Version