Galvanic Shards Mercenary Leveling Guide

In this guide, I'll be explaining how I leveled my Mercenary through the campaign into the end-game.

In the beginning you won't have much to work with, you can start by using Permafrost Bolts and Fragmentation Rounds for a nice combo of freezing and shattering enemies.

Find a bow, and keep your crossbow. We will be using the weapon swap mechanic for this.

As you find more gems, start using Lightning Arrow and Lightning Rod , this is very comfy and easy to use, just land the Lightning Rod and then shoot Lightning Arrow to kill packs.

Use this until you reach the needed level for Galvanic Shards, this is when the weapon swap happens. You won't have to manually swap, the game does it for you.

Start using Lightning Rod and then instead of Lightning Arrow use Galvanic Shards. As you upgrade your crossbow, you won't need to use Lightning Arrow on packs, since the Galvanic Shards will have enough DPS to clear off any stragglers, only use the wombo combo on bosses and Rares.

If you have some Exalts laying around, I recommend using Corpsewade combined with a low level Flame Wall , the boots will trigger Decompose which will do nice DOT damage to enemies int he poison cloud, and Flame Wall will make the poison cloud explode, dealing heavy fire damage. You can also level the Flame Wall as high as your intelligence allows you to.

At level 42 we can get access to our boss deleter, Shockburst Rounds for this to work, our target needs to be shocked, for maximum damage and AOE.

As for leveling unique items, I recommend the following:

Foxshade Meginord's Girdle Northpaw Blackheart Corpsewade

As for the rares, get as much lightning damage, resistances and life as you can.

Your weapon will be the most important part, try to upgrade it every 10-ish levels, or when you feel the damage is starting to drop off.

Get a crossbow with high phys damage, and flat lightning damage and good attack speed preferably. My weapon at level 39 had the following:

105% increased phys damage

2-51 lightning damage

12% to critical damage bonus

And this carried me all the way to end of act 1 cruel, then i searched for an upgrade.

As for your bow, any generic bow you find that has decent phys damage will do, it's only used for Lightning Rod anyway.