Crossbows (and merc by extent) are in a weird spot right now.

So I've been playing Merc since release, I'm level 86 right now mapping around tier 13-15. My gear is pretty good, as I've basically no-lifed the game for the past week.
My build revolves around grenades. I use oil grenades, gas grenades and explosive shot, and I'm a gemling legionnaire (something which I'd probably change if given the chance but alas).
I have a Bombard Crossbow with 471 pdps and +4 skill levels, there's only one on trade as of writing this with similar DPS and +5 going for 780 ex. I bought this one for 200.

Rest of my gear is full armour, I'm sitting on 8k armour, 2.6k life, overcapped res for ele weakness immunity and 55% chaos res. Also 100 life regen / sec.

My damage and survivability is... Okay to good. And I feel like a big reason for this is that crossbows are just kind of weird, especially for grenade.
Looking at ladder placement, Merc is the lowest represented class in the top 1000 by quite a margin. While not definitive, this is definitely a tell imo.

Lets look at Crossbows in detail, especially in comparison to Bows, which are the direct competitor for ranged attacks, in particular I will compare the two "meta" bases right now which seem to be bombard crossbows and Dualstring crossbows.

Expert Bombard Crossbows have an average damage of 60 with higher spread, while dualstring bows have an average damage of 56 with a lower spread. Both have very strong implicits for their respective uses, though the crossbow specifies grenades only.

The bombard crossbow has a pretty high APS of 1.65 compared to the Dualstrings 1.2, however it should be noted that grenade skills across the board have a 0.75 attack speed multiplier. Since thats what you'll be using the bombard xbow for, the APS is actually more like 1.2375.

Across other bases stats look rather similar, with crossbows always being a little bit better base than the bow counterpart. However, there is one big thing that changes this dynamic. Quivers.

Quivers can not be equipped with a crossbow. And quivers can be insane for damage, utility, or survivability (though the last part is nerfed in comparison to PoE1)

So if you compare any crossbow to a bow and a quiver, crossbows pale in comparison. Crossbow skills have higher scalings than bow skills, but not by a very large margin. Now what do crossbow skills have that bow skills do not? Thats right, cooldowns and reloads.

If you want to use bolt skills, you need to invest into reload speed (which seems bugged at the moment with local aspd not giving cooldown speed but global doing so). Imagine how broken lightning arrow would be if you could shoot it 5 times and then you need to reload for almost a second.

Grenades have cooldowns, and these are quite hefty. Most of the "basic" grenades have 3 seconds cooldown, with flashbang having 4, oil 5, and cluster 10! seconds cooldown. As a build thats focused around gas grenade as my main damage, especially during league mechanics like breach, its basically impossible for me to really efficiently clear a breach in a T13+ because I run out of grenade uses.
There's also map modifiers for 50% LESS cooldown recovery, which 90% of builds can completely ignore.
And for grenades in particular you need to quite heavily invest into them to make them good. I also already have almost every CDR node that is on the tree (a stat that exclusively exists in the mercenary area btw).

Fuse duration is a whole different thing. You cant invest into skill duration as skill duration -> fuse duration, making your grenades take longer to explode. Sure you can pre-pop them using explosive shot, but there's still situations where that feels kind of bad.

My final point is, right now crossbows seem to have all the downsides with none of the upsides. If I did my exact same tree, skipping crossbow/grenade nodes, and instead used a bow with gas arrow and some sort of ignite, I'm 100% sure that my build would feel a ton smoother and probably do more damage. Even though gas cloud has 50% less damage scaling on it, gas cloud has no cooldown, no negative attack speed multiplier, no damage delay via grenade fuses, no weird aiming where your grenades sometimes get shot into the sky because you aimed at the wall funny. And I dont even wanna talk about how I could probably do this build way better on a deadeye (on xbows) as I could forgo the bombard crossbow thanks to +1 proj, which would also apply to any bolts i use.

I dont really know how to fix this, giving crossbow a quiver equivalent, fixing the aiming issues, maybe lowering fuse times and the attack speed penalties on grenades? I dont know, but right now the build works, but ANYTHING else could do the same job better.

Lemme know if I'm coping or if you have similar experiences.

Crossbows are like two-handed melee weapons but ranged.

I don't like the whole grenade thing; it's too wonky and slow.

But I liked freezing stuff really reliably with Glacier Bolt and popping it for massive damage with Frag-rounds. This I found rather enjoyable.

Secret of crossbows... all the 2 handed weapon nodes in tree apply to them (and they are more numerous than single handed ones)

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Urza_Mechwalker#7393 wrote:

Secret of crossbows... all the 2 handed weapon nodes in tree apply to them (and they are more numerous than single handed ones)

Still Ranger with crossbows is better than merc. Merc needs some help. Probably not in the worst spot of all classes, but the clunkiness needs to be rewarded and although it goes against the core concepts it's debatable why ranger can just use these skills and be better with it...If Ranger would be locked out of grenades and xbows merc and Rnager would immediately be balanced...

Also giving the merc an ascendancy that you can just get from a gem or from an aura is also just meh

My suggestion would be to remove the more or less useless ascendancy culling strike and replace it with a huge bonus to weapon swap, reload speed and grenade cooldown that only merc can get which would make him better with xbows and the related skills than any other class.

you can just place a totem with culling strike anyway for bosses or use the gem if you want the 30% against white mobs so bad.

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SomeDerpyGuy#7682 wrote:

If I did my exact same tree, skipping crossbow/grenade nodes, and instead used a bow with gas arrow and some sort of ignite, I'm 100% sure that my build would feel a ton smoother and probably do more damage.

Seems like you should reroll.

No, seriously. I think its important for gas grenades and gas arrows to function differently. Otherwise Crossbow and Bow, or Merc and Ranger would be far too similar.
This comes with trade-offs and one thing outperforming the other in a specific task.

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Urza_Mechwalker#7393 wrote:

Secret of crossbows... all the 2 handed weapon nodes in tree apply to them (and they are more numerous than single handed ones)

Another secret: This also applies to bows! Bows are now 2 handed weapons with poe2, so that is not an advantage that is inhererent to Crossbow.

Edit: Also, there are 2 two handed clusters and 2 one handed clusters, so they arent more numerous either