Mercenary
Gemling Legionnaire
Cluster Grenade 
Mortar Cannon 
Gemling Legionnaire. The Smoothest League Starter I Have Ever Played
*Update 9/6/26 - Currently level 75 pushing through endgame. Will make an update POB once I reach tier 15+ maps and will update for high end build once I have gear. POB at time of recording: https://pobb.in/aUN3tW89p-c6
This build was able to quickly and easily go through the Campaign and blast through early and mid tier maps! I will be updating this build as I go along and make updates and changes to it.
PLEASE NOTE THIS BUILD IS NOT MINE, I DID NOT CREATE THIS BUILD OR PIONEER IT!
A big shoutout to @LazyExile for putting this together! This has been absolutely fantastic. The leveling paths and early game progression have been top tier! I played Lazy Varient through the campaign until where I am now!
A link to her video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFI08cBjUTs
My plan with this build is to start to adjust it more to my playstyle. I am currently debating on how I want to approach end game gearing. There are a couple of avenues we can take the build one of them being 
Chaos Inoculation utilizing a few cool gems from Atziri. We can also do some fun 
Queen of the Forest shenanigans and honestly I would love to get a 
Headhunter and mess around with it and see how it feels!
Leveling This Build
****While leveling keep an eye out for any Gemcutters Prisms you will need these for later save them!****
From the start of character creation until the high end of end game will be using a crossbow!
In Act 1 we will start with 
Fragmentation Rounds and 
Permafrost Bolts these two skills will carry us all the way until level 52.
The shots will get faster as you level up and get more Reload Speed.
When you get your first crossbow make sure that you lock it to both Weapon set 1 and weapon set 2!
Personally I like to have Fragmentation Rounds on left click and Permafrost Bolts on right click. The whole gameplay loop is literally Freeze the enemy with Permafrost Bolts then blast it in the face with Fragmentation Rounds.
Leveling in Act 1 will start a little bit on the slower side and will pick up drastically once you get 
Herald of Ice this will improve your clear a ton and speed things up!
Act 1 is mostly walking in a straight line and upgrading your crossbow and picking up iron rings where you can. You just want the highest damage dealing crossbow you can find! Your first crossbow is a 
Makeshift Crossbow that you get a level 1. You should find a 
Tense Crossbow in the Red Vale you can upgrade to and then at level 10 you will find a 
Sturdy Crossbow which should carry you until act 2.
Once you get to act 2 and hit level 20 you will want to keep an eye out for a 
Dyad Crossbow this allows you to load an extra bolt into your crossbow and fire multiple shots! This will be huge and make leveling a lot smoother. During Act 2 you will be able to ascend and become a Gemling Legionnaire, we will be taking the nodes 
Essence of Virtue as are starting passive!
Essence of Virtue allows the Gemling Legionnaire to create motes that provide us with some crazy buffs. Those being More Life and Mana Regeneration, More Maximum Life and More Defenses! This is done by equipping skills that require specific attributes. You will notice that we have a bunch of random skills setup like 
Arc and this is the reason why.
PLEASE NOTE YOU WILL ONLY NEED TO USE Fragmentation Rounds and Permafrost Bolts UNTIL LEVEL 52. THE REST OF THE SETUP IS FOR 
Virtuous Barrier
Once you get to Act 3 you will be able to ascend again and grab 
Advanced Thaumaturgy this is the biggest reason we take Gemling Legionnaire. This allows us to have Alternate Quality along side the regular quality of our skill gems! This will be our biggest bread and butter once we hit level 52 and make the swap to Mortar Cannon
Also while you are in Act 3 keep an eye out for a 
Bombard Crossbow this will be the base we use for our Cluster Grenade swap and how we will be doing a ton of our damage! You want to pack this thing with as much physical damage as possible!
Also make sure you start saving your extra Uncut Support Gems for the swap at 52!
Once you are in Act 4 you can hit level 52 towards the end of Act 4 or early in the interludes. This is now when the game really starts to explode.
NOTE BEFORE YOU MAKE THE SWAP HAVE THE FOLLOWING READY!
1) A Greater Jewels Orb!
2) 4 Gemcutters prisms for Cluster Grenade
3) A Bombard Crossbow with huge damage!
Once you make the swap you want to make sure that you use the 4 Gemcutter Prisms on Cluster Grenade this will allows it to have alt quality thanks to Advanced Thaumaturgy. The alt quality here lowers the detonation time of the mini grenades allowing the primary grenades and mini grenades to explode on top of each other!
Once you complete the swap , the entire game becomes holding down right click , placing your Mortar Cannon and blasting! Any extra Gem Cutter prisms can go into Mortar Cannon
Now you are absolutely smooth sailing! The only thing you want to do is keep an eye out for Cannonade Crossbow at level 59 so you can upgrade your level 33 crossbow. Then upgrade your bow again at level 79 with a Siege Crossbow. All of these bows need as much physical damage as possible on them!
Ideally you will get a Magic Base Siege Crossbow that has %Physical damage on it and any suffix. Then you will use an Essence on the magic base to give you # to # physical damage. This will give us a 3 modded rare crossbow! With this we want to desecrate a prefix for Ulaman and unveil Maximum Number of Summoned Ballista Totems. This will give us an extra ballista and take our damage essentially to the moon!
