Is there any reason that a Melee DPS merc with max AA does nearly 5x the DPS of a Caster merc with max AA? Both of them have highest merc gear equiped and both of them are journeyman 5. Would be great to hear from a dev on this as to if there are plans to bring casters up to par with melee. A 114 caster merc should not be nuking for 100-250k only if a melee is quad hitting for 75k. DPS average across 10 fights Melee Merc: 158k dps Caster Merc 34k dps
Are the NPC's you are killing resisting the spells the DPS mercs are casting? If so, that would be your issue. That's not the fault of the devs. Use melee mercs instead.
Terrible versus The Worst. The Rogue still stands a better chance of getting smoked (as in getting perished) versus the Wizard though. Did you parse what spells in name your Wizard merc is casting?
The rouge merc was boosted by a reasonable amount because the dev in charge of merc stats (melee) had time to do the work. I imagine tank mercs are doing better as well for the same reason. The wizard merc didn't get boosted because that requires spell focus and AA work, since they are casting wizard spells. Those devs haven't got to that work yet. Let's hope that they get to it soon.
Rogues dont need to be buffed, Casters need a buff. If you bring Rogues down in dps to Casters there would be no point to using a DPS merc at all. Dev's should realize that at level 115, 150k DPS isnt "good" by any stretch of the imagination.
What do you expect? Melee are the favored and preferred form of dps in the group game. This is not a surprise.
I noticed that my caster merc was putting out about half the dps of my melee dps merc in GMM missions with my 110 3-box group before they changed the Darkness Howls mission. Both had max merc AA. I could even have the caster on burn but the melee on balanced and it still didn't close the gap. I haven't done any parses recently, since I needed to have 2 healers for tougher content anyway. (WAR/WIZ/RNG is the group). Some of the difference could be accounted for by the melee usually having haste and other buffs (from GL mgb), but it really did seem like it was a waste of merc AA to get the caster up if melee was going to be better dps in 95% of the situations. As for how the melee dps compared to the rest of my group: It is usually comparable to the dps of my ranger which was mostly just autofiring and doing adps stuff while I focus more on tanking and nuking with the wizard. So, I wouldn't say that melee dps is overpowered at all. I get that people will worry that they'll nerf melee dps merc damage (given the history), but I wouldn't see that as justified at all. But the caster dps is likely way behind where it should be.
Even before ToV release, the devs had fixed mercenary triple attack in a patch. I suspect that was the first improvement we noticed.
I was hoping this was a buff to mercs but if the caster dps didn't get the same treatment, yeah it's probably going to be nerfed.
This thread is why we can't have nice things. Rog merc is finally useful, the first time since its implementation? Must nerf now! That's an exaggeration but you get the point.
Please forgive the complete newb question but in the original post it says that a melee merc is doing 158k DPS. 158,000 damage every second? Really? I have been away a long time but that seems really high..... Is the abbreviation "DPS" being used differently than I understand it to be?
On TBL raid content (no undead) I was around 400K dps as a paladin ...and I was like 19 or 20th in every parse. 158K mercs is DEVs way of showing what a casual should be capable of imo.