I recently bought my tank merc a full set of resolute merc gear with a stalwart sword. Ever since getting this armor for my merc i've noticed a loss in its agro. So to see if I was just going crazy or if the armor really was nerfing my merc's agro, I decided to do some tests with and without some of the armor. With all 4 armor slots filled, the merc was doing 1.5k-2k dps and I would constantly pull agro off of it. Next I took off the weapon and shield to see what would happen and the merc's dps raised to 2.5k-3k and I had no agro issues at all. So to see what was causing the issue between the shield and primary weapon, I put the shield on and no weapon. The merc's dps lowered down to 1.5k-2k again and I constantly pulled agro off of it. With a weapon in the primary slot and nothing in the secondary slot, merc did 2.5k-3k dps and there were no agro issues. So after doing this i'm almost certain that putting a shield on a tank merc will nerf both its dps and agro. Is this intended? I thought that merc gear was supposed to just be stat boosts with no negative effects. Any input on this would be great, thanks.
I have also noticed that tank mercs with a visible shield also do less dps than a tank merc that is DWing, with similar agro issues you are describing. By that I mean DWing tank mercs have more agro than sword and board tank mercs. Both tank mercs seem to take damage the same, though. I did a variety of overnight tests on the Test server to verify this. Too bad "upgrading" my toon to a heroic toon for a few minor perks and I won't be able to test this in the future as I update things.
What race is your merc? that has affected bugs with visible shields in the past (Dragorn merc suffered from this iirc)
Tank mercs dual wield. It makes complete sense that giving it a shield will lower DPS and agro generation, since that's exactly what happens to players as well (over simplified, I know). The drop in DPS and agro isn't the real issue here...it's the fact that giving a tank merc a shield doesn't seem to make them take damage better at all. Seems that they still require the same amount of healing, which should not be the case at all.
Giving a tank merc a shield should no be lowering it's DPS, only improving it's defense per the stats on the item. The appearance of a merc is not supposed to affect performance.
I notice also on the melee merc, equipping the merc shield cuts its numbers of attacks in half. Also, defensive proc buffs like fatigue are still mis-firing and procing the debuffs onto the mercs, is this ever going to be fixed?
Not in appearance they don't, but they do in function. At least the ones at a level high enough to have the dual wield skill do anyway. My werewolf tank merc has a graphic showing a shield and whip, but that doesn't mean he's rocking the S&B. Parses clearly show that he's DW.
Whatever you see a merc holding is irrelevant according to the devs. It is apparently just window dressing.
What if you put a "weapon" in the off hand? Does that reduce attacks as well, or does it realize it's not a "shield?"
I guess every merc that is holding a shield visibly I have tested just happens to be bugged then. Example, alaran ghost tank merc (has a shield visibly equipped) does about 1.02 attacks per second against a dummy after 8+ hours. Guk'tan merc (is visibly duel wielding) does about 1.53 attacks per ssecond against the same dummy after 8+ hours.
Mitigation was the same, or close enough ( technically 1 dps off ). Granted, the dummies were doing very little damage back. I didn't think to up their damage as I was only concerned with outgoing damage. I think the lvl 100 tank mercs with the lvl 100 testing dummy was taking around 300 dps incoming. It is low enough that I wouldn't fully trust it in that regard. I only parsed a bunch of the tank mercs because I noticed that it sure "felt" like a DW merc was holding solid agro when compared to a sword and board merc. My wizard friend and I both noticed it when mercing up one night in PoShadow.
Sure, thanks for sharing. I was hoping that you had tested both their offensive and defensive differences at the same time.
The debuff mis-firing is not a buff display error. The melee/tank mercs dps shows a consistently parsable reduction (on gamparse) in dps when the slow from fatigue mis-fires on to the merc. Their haste is also shown as reduced in the merc stats window. I doubt they are getting the heal portion at all. To check the shield bug, try equiping the shield on a melee merc instead of a tank. It is blatanly obvious they are doing far less attacks. It was about half when I parsed.