Mercenary play question

[sandytaxman]

Most mercenary guides are build upon use of grenades as the primary damage dealer or even the sole damage dealer to mobs. The problem with this is that many mobs move much too quickly to use grenades,which are much slower to throw, and detonate. so, how do we deal with most mobs if grenades have this problem? Maybe I am missing something here. Yes, I know I can use a combination of frost and fragmentation. So how do sole use of grenades work?

[LegacyXI]

You circle around them inside your grenades and build for bigger aoe and reduced duration which makes them explode faster. Can also try using the freeze rounds to keep them in place. Movement speed and throwing grenades early before walking into a area works. I would generally pre throw my gas grenades ahead of me before walking forward so that when the enemies bum rushed me there was no need to worry about where to throw them.

[Wyrtt]

I dont even know why anyone would use nades. Maybe at max lvl they better or something.
I just use shotgun with 3 pellets for clearing 90% of stuff including bosses. Mobs die in 2-3 hits anyways.
If I want a long ranged attack I use differnt bolt.
Time wasted on throwign grenades is a time I would have spent just shotgunning.

[J197382645]

Most build abuse gas and oil grenade, because the oil make fire spread and gas blow everything out. Explosion grenade a powerful but slow. If what you want to use is ammunition use galvanic ammo, it pretty powerful early on but doesn't scale well in the end.

The gas and oil technique is very powerful, I make about 100k damage to boss without good item. I tried to make ammo build but you need so much attack speed and fast reload and even then it still not very good.

Ice shotgun is good to clear packs but compared to galvanic ammo it's pretty bad.

They will change the ammo balance I'm pretty sure of it, it doesn't scale and even building around it doesn't compared to the gas and oil technique.

[Womens Deodorant]

I use nades to light them on fire then swap to a 2 handed hammer attack to make them explode lol. Pretty effective for me.

[Moscini]

explosive bolt will instantly detonate any grenades it hits, if you want to use that for proccing them. I combine that with ripwire ballista and oil grenades to CC mobs. Generally it's either I CC them or i use explosive bolts, if I'm using CC to set them up I use rapid shot to add fire to my grenades instead.

[Ponder]

Glacial Bolt is one of the best abilities for merc, both for damage and crowd control. Not does it wall enemies (allowing you to more easily hit them with grenades), but you can shoot fragmentary shot through the ice wall too to inflict cold damage, and some enemies will even instantly freeze when hit with glacial bolt itself. After I got it in act 2, it was the main ability I used throughout the rest of the campaign.

When used it combination with the scattershot support gem, you can absolutely annihilate bosses like shown here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExile2/comments/1hahj56/glacial_bolt_scattershot_has_carried_me_through/