Overview
Gas Grenade Pathfinder is a damage-over-time build that wins by owning ground rather than by aiming at anything. You fire grenades, they leave poison clouds, the clouds stack on top of each other, and anything standing in the pile takes a poison application every two seconds. Because the clouds persist and overlap, a monster that walks into a saturated area is instantly loaded with poisons and usually dies before it acts.
That behaviour makes the build unusually well matched to content where you already know where monsters will appear. Abyss overrun maps, Ritual and especially Simulacrum are called out as its best farms — you pre-seed the arena, the spawns arrive into a wall of gas, and the encounter resolves itself. With Encroaching Ground widening the affected area over time, the creator covers an entire Simulacrum arena regardless of which room they are standing in.
The mechanical heart of the setup is Persistent Ground III. It stops ground surfaces from being destroyed, so ignites and other detonation effects can no longer blow up your clouds and cut off their poison ticks. It also raises cloud duration from 6 to 9 seconds — and, critically, because clouds can now only leave by expiring, it bypasses the six-cloud limit entirely. That side effect is why 0.5’s nerf to Pathfinder’s Overwhelming Toxicity (35% to 50% less poison duration) barely registers here: you can still trivially maintain maximum poisons, because you can hold as many clouds as you can fire grenades.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Massive area coverage that trivialises Abyss, Ritual and Simulacrum farming
- Effectively untouched by the 0.5 Pathfinder poison-duration nerf
- Relentless Pursuit makes your speed immune to slows — chilled ground and Temporal Chains stop mattering
- Running Assault removes heavy stun while sprinting and cuts the move-while-casting penalty
- Light crit investment goes a long way, so the build works before you can afford premium supports
Cons
- Damage is entirely over-time, so it does not delete a target on contact
- Depends heavily on one support gem — without Persistent Ground III the core loop breaks
- Best-in-slot supports like Garukhan’s Resolve and Verona’s Siege are expensive
- Ground-based clouds reward positioning and pre-placement; you cannot simply hold forward
Key Skills
- Gas Grenade — the core skill; poisons as though hitting, so all damage flows through poison
- Explosive Shot — optional detonator for a faster grenade payoff, but it destroys clouds, so use it deliberately
- Persistent Ground III — the build’s most important support: cloud permanence, added duration and cloud-limit bypass
- Deadly Poison — a flat 40% more for this build, since there is no separate hit component
- Encroaching Ground — the area-coverage scaler that enables the whole-arena farms
Gear & Anointments
Support gem priority is Persistent Ground III, then Deadly Poison, then Arakaali’s Lust (8% more hit damage per poison on the enemy, roughly another 40% more once stacked), then Encroaching Ground, then a flexible fifth slot. Elemental Armament fills that slot on a budget; Verona’s Siege (more area, plus damage against isolated targets) and Garukhan’s Resolve (critical-hit bifurcation) are the upgrades once currency allows.
Crit is a splash, not a build pillar — around 25% chance is enough. Because a cloud that rolls a critical hit keeps inflicting critical poisons for its whole duration, a small crit investment fishes for high-damage clouds on bosses rather than needing a single reliable big hit. Plague Finger anchors the elemental-to-poison conversion setup; the creator is testing an alternative configuration during 0.5.5, so treat exact gear beyond this as to be confirmed against the source video.
Endgame Notes
Simulacrum is the flagship farm — full arena coverage means every wave spawns into standing gas. Abyss overrun maps and Ritual benefit from the same property. Boss damage is real but slower than a burst build’s, arriving as stacked poisons rather than a single hit.
Credits & Source
Build credited to Dreamcore. See the source video for the full build’s gameplay footage + voice commentary: My FAVOURITE PoE2 Build & 0.5.5 Starter - Gas Grenade Pathfinder | Path of Exile 2: Forbidden Rites.