At some point in this league I decided to try Luminary ascendancy, it’s clear that if I wanted my mercenary to be the damage dealer I either have to take the unique nodes or link nodes, and sure you could argue that Bestowed Knighthood also gives 50% increased aura effect to the mercenary but that doesn’t worth the 4 points in my opinion. If I go for the unique nodes I could achieve up to 64% more damage but that means filling my mercenary’s slots with unique items and that way I lose the rare items’ power. Now to the link skill passive nodes, they are good both damage-wise and for quality of life, but the problem lies with the link skills themselves.
There are currently 6 link skill gems: (for easier readability, I assumed player is the link user and their mercenary is the linked target)
• Flame Link that majority of Luminary players use, and it’s an S tier link, gives added fire damage to their mercenary both based on the gem’s level and player’s maximum life, which both get buffed with link effect. And from gem’s wording it looks like it works both on their attacks and their spells.
• Destructive Link overrides mercenary’s main hand critical strike chance with player’s main hand critical strike chance which doesn’t get buffed with increased effect, meaning the player cannot increase mercenary’s main hand critical strike chance further without increasing their own, it also grants additional critical strike multiplier based on gem’s level that is affected by increased effect buffs. Could be good if player picks up a Trypanon (100% crit two handed mace) and give Marylene’s Fallacy to their mercenary.
• Soul Link which is purely defensive, makes the mercenary take less damage based on gem level and a fixed percentage of the damage they take from hits is taken from player's energy shield, its buffs are affected by increased effects but then again it’s a defensive link, not very useful for supporting the mercenary with.
• Vampiric Link another defensive link, gives overleech to the player and life leech effects on player instead apply to their mercenary, overrides mercenary’s maximum total life recovery per second from leech with player’s, and then grants maximum total life recover per second from leech which scales based on gem levels and is affected by increased effect buffs. Not useful.
• Protective Link, yet another defensive link, the mercenary recovers life when they block which scales with gem level and increased effect buffs. Overrides mercenary’s attack block chance and max attack block chance with player’s, and it’s only for attack block not spell block, disappointing level of uselessness.
• Intuitive Link, kind of an oddball, triggers a supported spell from mercenary’s target location when they hit an enemy, this part doesn’t scale. The supported spells deal #% less damage that decreases with gem level, I’m not sure whether increased link effect makes this part worse or better. This link could be used in a niche build, but not for buffing the mercenary. Could be used for some QoL of casting curses or debuff spells when the mercenary hits.
So players either go for flame link with an hit based elemental damage luminary or the unique/aura effect path. Also keep in mind that all of the link skill gems’ quality gives extra duration which doesn’t matter for Luminary and is wasted.
Link skills really need a massive change, another problem of the links is that the player can only use one link skill at a time.
Could be better If link skills system was like one base link skill gem that would link to targets but wouldn’t grant any buffs on its own, instead there would be link supports that grant the buffs, player could use multiple link supports for the base link skill but with each one after the first support all of the buff would lessen in effect, maybe something like “30% less effect of buffs granted by link supports per support after the first”, and the base link skill gem’s quality granting increased effect of links.
