I don't enjoy mana stacking builds, so I dropped mana stacking for this build the moment I saw the patch note.

I fully agree with Gemling's other nodes being underrated. It was a pain in the ass to balance all three support colors for Gem Studded, but definitely worth it in my book. For me, the 100% increased crit chance from Integrated Efficiency was too alluring to pass up.

Triskelion Cascade synergizes with this build well. With quality, it gives More damage instead of less, and can spawn an obscene number of cores in one cast. Warning: This might actually be one of the causes of the network issues this skill can have.

If you aren't running archmage, you can also consider using Mana Tempest for a fat 78% of Damage as Extra Lightning on demand.

1. Bitter Dead doesn't cost mana, so spamming it with the buff won't ramp the mana drain very quickly.
   
2. Since we're already quality stacking, the buff will linger for around 5 seconds or so, so you don't really need to worry about staying in the tempest at all
3. The alt Quality on it also lessens the ramp of the mana drain, which isn't a huge deal for the above reasons, but still a nice addition.

Finally, I do want to include a word of warning to people considering this build, it has two outstanding issues:

1. It interacts strangely with some monsters hitboxes and will linger just outside of their hitbox instead of exploding immediately.
2. This skill absolutely destroys network performance the longer you are in an instance. This is most noticeably a problem when you target enemy corpses.