Attribute stacker gemling vs Invoker for mid for quality of life and tabkiness.

People on these forums (myself included) often talk with the base hypothesis being you can get all the pieces you need for the build.

If you don't have a high enough budjet, Invoker is probably tankier, especially with acrobatics/protect me from harm/spectral ward all having insane synergies

200-250 divines is crazy tho. Gemling defenitly outscales with that.

Ingenuity 60 div

Grand regalia - can get a spirit one for 15 div or ele 60 div

Astramentis - 100 div

good corrupted pillar staff - 1-2 div at most?

With what's left you can get everything you need, good breach rings potentially being the more expensive parts

i had 12% mana + 150 mana with all attributes and str/int amul,et. 18-19 div instead of astramentis. had close to 6k mana and decent tankiness. recover mana on kill + unique flask and you are basically immortal. my build was totally 100-130 div with 78% ingenoutiy . wind dancer gets you up to 50% evasion which is more than enough for that build
+ random skills socketed with mostly red supports to give me 83/79/79 max res.

If you are going tanky. I wouldn't build around astramentis. I would build around energy shield. Starting with everlasting gaze amulet.

And try to get energy shield on everything you can. The regalia chest with 5 socket and resistance is a must. I can have anywhere from 6k-9k base energy shield. Which means running with 12-18k ES with CI and no need to use MoM. So no mana issues (unless you go deadeye, as they may be the best version of the howa, but the speed means more mana). All while doing 200-300k base dps on tempest flurry.

Crit based seems to have much higher dps. So base around crit and not lucky hit and lightning scaling.

I've tried my gear on warbringer, deadeye, pathfinder, gemling, and so far deadeye is the best minus the mana issues. So I would choose gemling. But the monks may be better as well. Haven't tried them yet.

I have a 96 CI invoker and I stopped dying to anything except Ubers, really bad mod combos, or total player stupidity. It wasn’t cheap getting here but it now works.

I started leveling a gemling to compare but will wait for POB 2 later today to decide if it’s worth continuing.

My guess is this though: you can make both nearly identical. Most gemlings don’t go deep into monk area for es/ev nodes but they certainly can. They’d be dropping damage for it, but dmg isn’t an issue. Monks will have more evasion in the end, but gemlings will have a higher Es pool. Probably comes out in the wash.

Monks also tend to go critical while gemlings go lucky but they could switch places since both builds path by the same nodes.

I have been doubting gemling from the start. The benefit of extra mana and life just doesn’t sound appealing when comparing to other ascendencies like invoker or even deadeye which I’ve been playing for the past week. The gems used in howa pillar don’t really benefit much from gem level or quality either. I guess we’ll be able to compare with more confidence when pob finally comes out.

yeah just trust your instincts if you already believe so firmly that invoker is a better choice.

uh no. you only need 2.2divs at most. I play a gemling str stacker and have 9.1k hp, 400 regen

1. Ruby Grand Spectrum x 3: 105ex (35ex each)
2. Corrupted Koams heart: 9ex for base. I currupted for 3 sockets.
3. Xophs blood: 3ex for base.
4. Corrupted Black sun crest: 25ex. high str roll, low int/dex roll
5. 354 combined life from glove, belt, boots, shield: 20 - 50ex per pieve (35ex avg)

Total base Cost: 282ex

To explain what each does

1. 3 grand spectrums give 18% increased life
2. Corrupted koams heart is raw 1000 hp + 6 % increased max life
3. Xophs blood with quality gives 18% increased max life
4. Black sun crest gives 17% increased strength
5. 616 raw str from tree + raw str on gear. Excluding black sun rest. With black sun, its 702

Conceptually, life stacking is the same as ES stacking. Except that life has regen, recoup, leech and flask. Of course ES is more accessible on tree than life. Give and take I suppose

Monk probably is better at a low or mid budget setup.

Gemling is strong and probably the best at the high end setup because you get enough flat life from strength that you can discard all other points of defence and just go full damage, at the high end you'll have enough AoE, attack speed, attack damage and jewels on the tree you'll basically freeze and explode everything off screen. You only need a certain amount of life to tank like one small hit if a mob goes invisible or something.

The entire point of it is to not grab any single defensive node unless it gives attributes and just grab all the attribute nodes and jewel sockets on the tree.

Spirit you don't care about because you just need enough to use combat frenzy and herald of ice, plus like cannibalism support. The 100 from campaign is enough.

I've done it on both. I have a 96 almost 97 gemling, and a 94 invoker and chonk. Gemling is much tankier. You can get above a 10k life pool between hp and mana. 1 shots were the most deadly for me on the monks and nothing but raw HP gets around that.

My setup is quite minmaxed at this point, and I've even gone CI on the gemling with no issues now that I have over 7k mana.

Imo protect me from harm is mid. Evasion won't prevent 1 shots, and you can't get enough es that even 2x from raiments is enough without sacrificing dps. The extra quality on gems and reduced mana cost are nice for tempest flurry.

Well, now that POB2 is out, I did a quick comparison between a 94 invoker monk and my 94 gemling, and with my current gear (good, but no Astramantis), the damage was about the same between the two. On (POB) paper, though, I actually could take higher hits with the gemling and MoM than I could with the Invoker monk without doing some real investment into some specific rings with ES and such, and after I made the changes to the equipment for the monk to match, started losing damage quickly. Real world may differ though.

There are some advantages not listed for the Gemling here - besides the double mana/life/dex bonuses due to ascendency, you also get a chance to open up 3 more skill slots along with using two of the same type of supports. The three more skill slots can be filled with Tempest bells, and trust me, when you have 3-4 of those down, the damage on bosses skyrocket.

I don't understand why people say that gambling is tankier.

Because going hybrid life/ES/mana with Atziri's disdain is the best hit pool maximisation in the game outside of pure mana stack, especially since you can scale it with adorned amplified jewels (which you want anyway on stat stacker because of stat implicits). And since the only things that can kill you are unnoticed shotguns/one shots, hit pool max is all you care about. What people forget to say about gemling is that he is also straight up faster in measurable manner because he ends up with larger AS bonus from dex.

What is my best bet for quality of life and tankiness?

Invoker, but as a matter stands at 200-250 div with reasonable investments both are going to be erasing every normal content (i.e. not bosses, maybe not +4 simulacrum and maybe not 140% deli maps with multiple rippy mods) in complete autobomber mode.

The fact is, that with the gemling you kinda have a blank exoskeleton and you need to fill each part with something.

You need to acquire a font of extra cold damage (invoker ascendancy) to proc the Heralds, you need an heroic tragedy to scale ES (another monk ascendancy and also implicitly you scale a lot of evasion with that) to avoid feeling weak, you need a proper regalia with spirit to achieve the number of auras invoker can have (again, by ascendancy). Basically you have to have a lot of decent gear to scale defences and attribute properly.

I have played my gemling up to 95 and in map i basically destroy every content, but Against bosses i'm feeling weak because i miss a lot of gear, jewel and whatsoever to my exoskeleton. Things that the invoker instead offer passively by ascendancy points.

I think that with a LOT of investment eventually the gemling can outscale the invoker but on a decent sized budget (125/150 div) the invoker its just better in any way.

I built a Gemling attribute stacking build for about 4 div and I blow through T15 maps without any issues at all.

Mobs melt and don't really ever get a chance to hit you. The only time you may die is if you get stuck on something.

Yes you can spend 500 div on the build but you really don't need to in order to make it effective.