Path Of Exile 2 Carry Run

Your experience in this extremely challenging game officially begins when you complete all the main campaigns of Path of Exile 2 and enter the endgame stage. In this extremely difficult endgame, the build you use must also be nearly perfect, such as having fast map clearing capabilities or super combat capabilities.

Among the many excellent POE 2 endgame builds, Grenade Mercenary has become a choice for many players with its unique play style and unstoppable capabilities. But it is worth considering that entering the endgame means that there are more build options to choose from, so who is the best Grenade Mercenary endgame build?

In order to save you time and energy in trying various build options, this guide will introduce you to the current options that can make Grenade Mercenary endgame build play its best effect, including skills and gear. Without further ado, let’s start our exploration!

Skill Gems

When you enter the endgame with Grenade Mercenary build, you are no longer just considering your damage output, but also your defense, because as you go deeper into Atlas map, the enemies you face will become stronger and stronger. So you need to start looking for skill gems that allow you to rotate between controlling and weakening enemies.

In view of this, you can use Explosive Grenade and Explosive Shot as your main means of damage output, and then use Flash Grenade as a tool to reduce the threat of group enemies to you periodically. With the help of these three skill gems, you can effectively fight most enemies, except for those bosses with anti-stun abilities.

But here I need to remind you that although you are likely to be flashed by the large area of ​​light generated by Flash Grenade, it is very suitable for you to use when you are forced into the corner of the arena, because you don’t have to have a high degree of accuracy to detonate the grenade on the ground, which is very friendly to some players with lower operation skills.

Additionally, you can rely on Gas Grenade and Oil Grenade to slow and poison enemies, just ignite them with your Explosive Shot. On top of that, these two grenades that deal area damage will also make enemies more vulnerable to fire damage or reduce their fire resistance after you choose the right support gems for them.

Coupled with the fact that Explosive Grenade can deal a lot of fire damage to them, this rotation combination can help you defeat most of the enemies you encounter during exploration. And in some trials or challenges with Rituals mechanics, you can try to distract the enemy with Ripwire Ballista.

Although Glacial Bolt is not a required skill gem in this build, if you put Fortress and Glacier in its support gem slot, it will give you more room for damage output in the arena because it will gather all enemies together.

Passive Skills

In the vast POE 2 passive skill tree, the best choices for Grenade Mercenary endgame build should be those passive skills that have strong buffs to your area of ​​effect and skill damage. Here are Notable Nodes that are worth your attention and what they do.

• Devastation: Increases area damage and area of ​​​​effect size by 15%.
• Overwhelm: Your attack speed is reduced by 5%, but your stun buildup is increased by 20% and your damage from two-handed weapons (includes crossbows) is increased by 40%.
• Cluster Bombs: Grenades take 50% longer to explode, but all grenade skills fire another round.
• Authority: Increases area of ​​​​effect size by 20% and cooldown recovery by 10%.
• Crushing Judgment: Armor Break duration and area damage are increased by 25%.
• Smoke Inhalation: All damage penetrates 15% of enemy fire resistance and all damaging conditions last 15% longer.
• Repeating Explosives: Increases the chance of a grenade exploding twice by 15%.

In addition to the above options, there are several Notable nodes that are also worth your attention, such as the group of Evasion and Armor nodes located at the bottom of the entire passive skill tree and to the left of Crossbow and Grenade constellation.

But if you have trouble exploring the maps unlocked by higher-tier Waystones, you can try increasing the elemental resistance in your build and respeccing those more defensive passive skills.

Best Gear Modifiers

There isn’t a specific piece of gear to recommend for Grenade Mercenary endgame build, but there are a few modifiers you should be aware of. But there is one weapon that will be key to the entire build - Bombard Crossbow, which always adds an extra projectile to your grenade attacks.

And when you have Cluster Bombs passive skill activated, each of your grenade skills can fire at least three grenades, which means your area damage and single target damage will be tripled!

Given the power of this weapon, my advice is to buy POE 2 Currency to upgrade Bombard Crossbow to a weapon with Magic or Rare attributes once you get it, so that your physical and elemental damage will be greatly increased.

Once your Bombard Crossbow has very high physical and elemental damage modifiers, you can use two Artificer’s Orbs to create two rune slots on the gear and add two Iron Runes to them, which will increase your physical damage by 40%, and this is additive with the modifiers on the weapon itself.

It is also worth mentioning that you should try to farm belts that can provide you with additional amulet slots so that you can take less damage from fights that can cause you status damage, to enhance your endgame survivability directly.

These are some of the skills and gear options you can use for Grenade Mercenary endgame build in POE 2. With POE 2 Patch 0.2.0 will be released on April 4th, Mercenary will have a new Ascendancy Class, so this kind of ranged enemy health depletion build may set off a wave. Hopefully, you can make such a powerful build that can easily explore the endgame as soon as possible with the help of this guide. Have fun!

Hello, Exiles, the biggest update since Early Access release of Path of Exile 2 is coming! Recently, GGG released a trailer for this patch 0.2.0, revealing some of the main contents of this update, including new seasons, Ascendancy classes, endgame balance overhaul, etc., but here, let’s focus on the two new unique items introduced in this patch.

It is well known that the current unique items in POE 2 are not good enough, or to put it bluntly, most of them are not worth the player’s investment currency. This is not only because most of them are mediocre in the early campaign, but more importantly, they will soon be surpassed by some medium-rare equipment, which means that all the efforts you put into this equipment may become a waste.

Therefore, players are eager to hope that the new unique items brought by this patch 0.2.0 will have a different effect and can remain powerful until the endgame. Without further ado, let’s take a look!

Prism Guardian

First up, we have Prism Guardian, a unique shield returning from POE 1, and as such, it unfortunately continues the trend of unique items having very low base defense values, minimal armor and energy shield counts, and no life scaling either.

However, its unique modifiers will make up for Prism Guardian’s shortcomings and provide a nice bit of flexibility, which could be useful for gear or support gem requirements. Additionally, it also provides a minimum of 18% bonus to all elemental resistances, and it’s worth mentioning that this modifier can even roll to 20% or more if you’re willing to invest more. But if you’re currently strapped for funds, you can also buy POE 2 Currency to fully utilize this mod, which is definitely not a poor investment.

The most important modifier here, though, is that you can add one to your maximum Spirit for every 50 maximum life. As such, this item will provide a way to scale your Spirit, allowing you to retain more Spirit to maintain powerful persistent buffs or more minions by expanding your maximum life at all times. This is a very powerful tool, and it’s just right for balanced defense.

The interesting thing about this modifier is that we currently don’t know how GGG plans to address life in the upcoming patch, whether they will improve life scaling to compete with energy shield, or whether they will keep it as is and nerf energy shield remains to be seen. But at 3,000 max life, this shield will provide 60 max Spirit, which is enough to reserve one or two low-cost persistent buffs or enable some extra minions.

Interestingly, however, we already have a way to scale Spirit from max life in Path of Exile 2, and that’s a skill node for Infernalist, Beidat’s Will, which only reserves 25% of your max life, but in exchange increases your max spirit by 1 for every 25 max life.

Combine this node with Prism Guardian, and you can greatly expand your total Spirit purely through life scaling, which is going to be very powerful. Keep in mind that there may also be some new abilities in 0.2.0, so there may also be new Spirit reservations to use.

An important thing to note about Prism Guardian is that Spirit gained from life only counts towards your total maximum life, it does not include any excess life you have.

The Deepest Tower

Next up, we have a crazy new unique helmet, The Deepest Tower. Unlike the Prism Guardian and a bunch of other POE 2 unique items, this one actually has a decent life modifier, breaking the unspoken rule of GGG that good unique items have no life modifiers. On top of that, it also has a decent amount of armor and energy shield and very good chaos resistance.

Then it has a special modifier where enemies in front of you count as low life. Now it’s important to mention that low life in Path of Exile 2 is 35% of max life, not 50% like in POE 1. So it takes longer to get a monster to low life, which in turn makes this modifier very powerful when combined with some of the other mechanics.

First up, Witchhunter Ascendancy adds 35% more damage to hits against low life enemies on the small connected nodes on the skill tree, these damage increases will always be active because any monster in front of you counts as low life. More importantly, because any class or Ascendancy can use them, these skill nodes together with The Deepest Tower provide an insane damage increase, with each small node adding 30% more damage to hits against low life enemies.

To put these nodes in perspective, a 30% increase in damage is about 2.5 times more than a normal small damage node. For example, 12% more damage when you’re swinging, or 12% more damage when you’re using a two-handed weapon.

So, just the small nodes themselves are pretty good, but there are two Notable Passives worth looking at as well.

First up, Finishing Blows adds 60% more damage to hits against low life enemies, which makes your damage rolls against low life enemies lucky, meaning you’ll always have lucky damage hits that can give you about 20% more damage. For example, this could be stronger for damage properties that have a much wider rolling range like flat lightning damage.

Then here’s another node, Finality Passive, that gives you even more bonuses against low-level enemies. It significantly increases the damage of hits against low-level enemies by 120%, which is crazy.

But the downside is that when your life is low, you take 5% more damage, which can be bad. But remember, in POE 2, low life is 35% of max life, so it's recommended that you get your life down to that low before you really start taking increased damage.

At this point, these nodes in the tree are well worth going with this helmet, even though some builds can’t even get to that point in the tree, but The Deepest Tower will still be useful even without these nodes. Because there is an Execute Gem here that provides 40% more damage on hits against low-life enemies, which is crazy.

Overall, both of these unique items have their own overwhelming advantages, and their appearance is bound to bring a new build gameplay change! Let’s wait and see!