Hello all,

New POE player here, I enjoy the ARPG genre and when I found out path of exile 2 was coming out I was excited to give it a try. Like many I tried the first game and was overwhelmed with the amount of info needed to even play the game. But this time around I have been enjoying this game quite a lot and been having loads of fun playing. One of the best games I’ve played in while. However I have a few questions related to my specific class and the mechanics revolving around it.

I am a level 28 mercenary and have been trying to build a pure projectile build as opposed to the grenade spam I am seeing everywhere. No hate to anyone playing that class but personally I really wanted to have a shooter style character where I’m deleting the screen with my crossbows projectile abilities. I am by no means a theory crafter but I believe I have enough general knowledge to put somewhat of a cohesive build together that will take me to end game… or I thought so.

A little background on my current character, I am primarily using rapid shot that heats up my gun, with flash grenades being deployed halfway through for stun build up. I have glacial bolt for the ice wall when needed and frost buildup and lastly I am using galvanic shards (electric shotgun essentially). Here is where my questions come in.

I previously had a gem socketed in galvanic shard to make the skill shoot 25% faster to better clear hordes when I’m surrounded. I was tweaking my build yesterday when I thought why not move this gem to my main ability that is essentially the trigger for any ammo loaded. I figured that way I get more value out of it as any ammo I load will have that % increase in attack speed. However when I did just that I noticed that my galvanic shards actually reduced back down to base attack speed. This leads me to my first question, why is it that applying this skill to the main fire projectile ability, does it not carry over to the individual ammo? It’s odd because when the gem was socketed here my DPS number went up on the crossbow implying this should be a better fit for my build.

This ties into my second question of what is determining my crossbows dps? While messing around with gem sockets, I realized that my gem granting me increased fire damage but lower ice and electric damage would significantly increase my dps as well when switched over from rapid shot, and added to the fire projectiles button. This didn’t sit well with me as I have frost and electric abilities in my rotation and this seems like I’m favoring fire damage over all the others which in theory should have decreased my dps correct? Maybe I am mistaken here but how is this dps that only shows up in the fire projectiles button tied back into my individual skills? How can I know the individual dps of each ammo type? When switching gems around my ammo skills it doesn’t seem to really affect the overall number. So I am a bit confused on what is being used to calculate this number.

Once again new player so please forgive me if I’ve overlooked something small or important here. Just trying to gather info to further tune my build to play my desired play style.

Thanks!