[0.4] (Mercenary) New take on the Shankgonne

Greeting, fellow exiles.
As many of you know, Shankgonne is one of the most funny and memey uniques in PoE2 - those boots give you a cannon leg, which makes sparks when you walk and disables your sprint. It would be already great if it only did that (/s), but they also give you a persistent skill called Black Powder Blitz, which replaces your dodge roll with a cannon jump. That jump counts as a leap and therefore a travel skill, can (and should) jump over enemies and bosses, and also it blinds, ignites and detonates everything at the point of impact.
There were some takes on this granted skill, stacking levels and using Temporalis for cooldown, which is expensive and bland. I levelled with this skill from level 46 when I was first able to equip the boots, and tried many combinations of crossbow skills, and I think I landed on a pretty decent combo.

Except for Shankgonne, which is the cornerstone of the build, it also uses Constricting Command. Surrounded condition was given a much deserved nerf, but we are still able to be surrounded when a single enemy (specifically a boss) is at 3.67m distance from us. This enables both surrounded clusters, Last stand and Defy II support.

I try to squeeze weapon swap mechanic into all my PoE2 builds, and this one benefits pretty well from it. For clear we use an intricate combo based on Flash Grenade. There are two notables in the tree - Eroding Chains and Shattering Blow, which break 50% of monster armour on pinning or stunning. It's 50% of any amount of armour, so it works the same on white rats and pinnacle bosses. But if we make Flash Grenade break 100% increased armour, 50% broken armour will become 100% and we will fully break it on every heavy stun. So we have two options - either fill out the Cruel Methods cluster to get 90% increased armour broken there and get small node near Crushing Judgement, or use Armour Demolisher or Uruk's Smelting along with 2 small nodes near Crushing Judgement and skip the top cluster altogether (1.2*1.7=2.04). Pin route is more budget-friendly as you don't need to anoint Shattering Blows, but you lose on Enduring Impact II which is a decent defensive layer with Charge Regulation. Finally Armour Explosion support makes any broken armour explode, so a single Flash Grenade (well, actually 3 because of Grenadier and crossbow implicit) into a white pack stuns everything, breaks armour fully and explodes it. The Molten One's Gift makes broken armour apply to fire damage, which is very significant. Flash Grenade has a pretty short fuse, but it is much more fun to launch yourself away from the packs, leaving a dozen of explosions behind. Flash Grenade is the only skill in the second weapon set.

Magic packs sometimes don't die from a single stun, and that's where Oil Grenade shines. The actual flying canister smacks monsters in the face pretty heavily, but the oil also slows everything for a lot, and as Black Powder Blitz has 100% ignite chance, oil always burns, finishing whatever is staying slowed in it. Exposure and cooldown rate reduction from Persistent Ground are cherries on top.

Finally, on tanky rares and bosses the full combo comes into play. Flash Grenade easily stuns anything, oil slows, exposes and halts bosses, and then Rapid Shot builds heat while dealing decent damage, and old good Explosive Grenade consumes heat for 50% extra fire and is detonated by you marioing the boss. Depending on boss in question and map mods you may want to use either Adhesive Grenades II for fast bosses or Fire Penetration II for resistant bosses/maps. If the boss has stun resist after the first combo, you can shoot it with Rapid Shot and throw an Explosive Grenade or three now and then, while gracefully soaring above the slams and strikes.

All this is possible only with significant amounts of cooldown reduction, which is why I went Gemling - quality adds CDR both to grenades and BPB, and mercenary area of the tree has some nice CDR in it too.

As for gear, you can use either two crossbows - pure phys for flash grenade and phys+fire for all others, or just pure phys for everything, as both Oil and Explosive Grenades convert phys to fire. Level to projectile skills is good, and there is also a desecrated modifier with a big increased % to grenades.
Time-lost emeralds are very good for this build as they can get 3% CDR on notables, which we have a lot because of the surrounded clusters. Rings having flat physical damage is good too, as grenades have good effectiveness.

Now, for the defensive scaling I decided to go against the flow and try hybrid Armour/Evasion, despite everyone telling me it's bad. Well, it looks like having surrounded stats along with triple defensive persistent buffs makes it work pretty fine. The main provider of ehp is the body armour with high AR/EV and both ele armour and deflection suffixes. Pure AR gloves provide decent EV via Leather Bound Gauntlets, and belt can have a lot of armour on it too. Scavenged plating and Charge Regulation both benefit from our Flash Grenade. Shankgonne is the sole provider of armour into deflection, which helps a bit, and I'm using three different soul cores for additional 40% ele armour.
That said, the biggest defensive layer is you being able to just jump out of ground effects, map curses, boss slams, abyss dots and everything else, while blinding everything in the launch zone. This build can't stand and tank big hits, but why would you even want that when you can jump off grenades?

I am able to do semi-juiced T15 maps and kill temple architect, with the whole build costing <15 divines (pretty much every single item in my current setup is 1 div or less). Of course, there is a lot to optimize still.

Here is my current setup: https://poe2db.tw/pob/9EDCMUsdD4
And here is a video of me doing T1 map straight out of the campaign: https://youtu.be/aTbfs51ZuZs
I will add some T15 clears later when I get a couple more levels.