Path of Exile 2 Mercenary build: best skills, passives, and support gems to use

Are you eager to jump into Path of Exile 2 for the first time, but don't know how to go about using the Mercenary? No problem. It can be tricky figuring out a class build in PoE2, especially if you're doing it from scratch. In this article, we've written a Path of Exile 2 Mercenary build that should get you started as you progress through the game.

In this guide we'll go through the core identity of the build, which skills it uses, the best support gems, and the best passives for what we're aiming for. We've also broken down what you should be looking for when it comes to weapons and armour.

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Path of Exile 2 Mercenary build

This Mercenary build is all about grenades! Who doesn't love grenades? This type of skill comes in a variety of elemental types, and when supported with the right gems and passive skills, can be incredibly powerful at both AOE damage and boss damage. All you've got to watch out for is the cooldown of grenades - you can't just throw them out infinitely.

• Path of Exile 2 Mercenary best skills
• Path of Exile 2 Mercenary best support gems
• Path of Exile 2 Mercenary best passives
• Path of Exile 2 Mercenary best weapons and armour

Path of Exile 2 Mercenary best skills

Here are the skills we'll be using in this build. You'll notice a lot of grenades here, obviously. But you should also see some other abilities that will help patch any holes in our build.

• Basic Bolt - Your regular crossbow shot, which uses no mana and deals decent damage!
• Explosive Grenade - A standard grenade that explodes with fire damage. Perhaps more importantly, it detonates other skills around the explosion area.
• Armour-piercing bolt - crossbow ammunition that breaks armour.
• Oil Grenade - Drops a patch of oil at the grenade location. Can be set alight by burning enemies or (more importantly for this) detonations.
• Explosive Shot - Loads your crossbow with exploding bolts that deals fire damage and detonates skills near where it hits. Your go-to crossbow ammon type when not throwing a million grenades out into the world.
• Cluster Grenade - A great AOE grenade that blows up into a collection of smaller grenades.

Path of Exile 2 Mercenary best support gems

Okay so what about support gems? Here's what we picked up for this Mercenary grenade build! (note, we've listed some tier 2 support gems here to use later on. If you're looking to fill up support slots in Act 1 and 2 for your skills, mix and match with recommended gems until then for a temporary boost to your skills. Who knows! It might inspire a build on your next character).

• Basic Bolt - 1: Pin. Builds up pin on an enemy, preventing them from moving or acting. Great for throwing grenades at.
• Explosive Grenade - 1: Concentrated Effect. Reduces the AOE range but increases damage. Exploit Weakness. Tier 2 support gem. Deals more damage to armour-broken enemies.
• Armour-piercing bolt - 1; Demolisher. A tier 2 support gem. Deals more armour break. 2: Break Posture. Applies daze to enemies when you break their armour.
• Oil Grenade - 1: Magnified Effect. Increases size of oil grenade. 2: Fiery Death. A tier 2 support gem. Causes killed enemies to explode if they are ignited when they die.
• Explosive Shot - 1: Fire Infusion. Deals more fire damage and sacrifices other elemental damage. 2: Ammo Conservation. Has a 25% chance not to consume a bolt.
• Cluster Grenade - 1: Hourglass. Deals more damage but has a longer cooldown. 2: Second Wind. Provides a 2nd use of the cooldown.

Path of Exile 2 Mercenary best passives

This build is focused on grenades of course! So this means any passives that boost grenades specifically as well as your AOE damage are important to pick up. In addition, anything that'll help with cooldown reduction is nice, as all grenades are cooldown abilities rather than infinitely spamming crossbow ammunition. From there, we'll take some passives that'll help improve your character power generally - like your survivability.

The major passives we recommend building towards are:

• Remorseless
• Volatile Catalyst
• Overwhelm
• Quick-Change Art
• Cluster Bombs
• Grenadier
• Adrenaline Rush
• Volatile Grenades
• Distracting Presence
• Advanced Munitions
• Smoke Inhalation
• Incendiary
• Heavy Ammunition
• Catapult

explainer

Path of Exile 2 Mercenary best weapons and armour

Okay so, what should you equip on your Mercenary. Well, Mercenary is one of those classes that sits between two main stats: strenght and Dexterity. As such, the Mercenary ideal armour type uses both Evasion and Armour. When you pick up armour, you'll notice some stuff has dual defensive stats for exactly this reason. So where you can, look out for gear like that as a starting point.

Now you've got some gear with Evasion and Armour, what about substats? Elemental resistances are always nice especially as you proceed further into the game, as is elemental damage boosts that align with the grenades you're using. One important thing that benefits this gear is a specific type of crossbow you get in Act 2 - which shoots out additional grenades when you use a grenade skill, without reducing its damage! So always keep an eye out for any substat that'll boost your grenade damage.

Movement speed. I can't stress enough how good movement speed is. While you will have some armour, you're not the tankiest class by any means, nor do you have a consistent way to push enemies off you. You don't even have a dedicated movement ability like Ranger's escape shot. While you're shooting or reloading, your movement speed is slowed too. All this means it's easier than you'd think to get surrounded, and getting surrounded is a disaster. Movement speed helps fix this!

If you can hunt down weapons and armour with these stats included, you should be good to go. The important thing is not to hoard your upgrade material. You might be tempted to avoid common gear and weapons in favour of blues and yellows, but you never know if a cheeky upgrade could reveal a god roll on this otherwise junk loot. Remember, upgrade material sitting in your stash isn't doing anything to improve your character's power.

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With that, we've reached the end of our entry-level Path of Exile 2 Mercenary guide. From here, you can choose to keep the build going with the grenade focus, or hey you can totally switch it up when you feel more confident doing so. Part of the joy of Path of Exile is trying out interesting new builds, so once you've played with this, give some other things a spin.

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