Since merc AA's have been around a while now I was wondering if everyone has gotten which one is undeniably better. Caster, or Melee? Never used melee much but if they're good with the AA's I would totally do that. Never see melee mercs anymore. Thanks all.
They are actually alot closer than they used to be. The melee now days are still slightly less dps but are better in a sense of control. Such as melee wont stand in wierd spots and when they steal agro have the mob running to them.
a warning on the rogue mercs, do not put anything in their off hand slot as it kills their ability to duel wield, even a sword will cause this "feature" to kick in.
I assume you mean the merc gear in your Inventory window, not trying to hand them an item (which I assume wouldn't work anyway). I was told about this problem with tank mercs, in that they become worse if you do this. Has anyone confirmed this is still happening or hear anything from SOE about this (especially a fix incoming)?
Even with shm, I couldn't get melee mercs to perform up to the standard of casters. The casters really do OOM sometimes, though, if you're grinding tier 3 w/o breaks.
As of last night I can confirm that putting anything in the hands of the melee merc sinks it's dps to the floor. Leave both hands empty.
If the group has a Bard and also optionally Shaman or Beastlord, then the melee merc will perform about as well as the caster one (maybe even outperform the caster if you have all 3 of those classes). Without a Bard the melee merc is useless and will always underperform compared to the caster. And if the group has an Enchanter, then the caster will be on another planet compared to the melee merc.
What is it about the chanter that adds so much to the caster merc? Other than mana regen, I'm not aware of other unique abilities an enchanter has to help. Tat Oh wait, twincast aura helps. So that's one more ability.
Last time I parsed them the caster merc was significantly outperforming the melee merc, with both on balanced. Does anyone have sustained parse info for level 105 mercs with and without support?
We have a bard in group, and with him, melee merc wins hands down. We don't use the wiz much because we can only get about 20k dps out of it (no chanter in group) where as the the melee does around 30k dps or more depending on what the bard is doing. This is on balanced for both. Warrior in group does the parsing, and sometimes he shows combined data for thousands of fights, melee merc wins out over the times we needed to use caster merc for what ever reason.
What Vran said. if I'm playing my bard, melee merc. If I'm playing my chanter? Wiz merc. Wiz merc runs in the low to mid 30s with chanter. Mele merc does 29-35k with the bard+ranger+beastlord in the group (not sure how much of that is from bard, or from others as well.)
Una Lucem in 156s, 15893k @101880sdps --- Monk 10883k @69763sdps (68.48%) --- Wiz Merc 2249k @14414sdps (14.15%) --- Rogue Merc 2034k @13038sdps (12.8%) --- War Merc 571k @3663sdps (3.6%) --- Shaman 124k @794sdps (0.78%) --- Cleric 32k @208sdps (0.2%) These were on burn and had shaman help but the gap is a lot closer than what it once was. Main reason I had both to begin with was because originally was under the impression wiz mercs were way more dps than rogue mercs. Which at one point was true, and I would have had 2 wiz mercs but for some reason my wiz merc will not ever do anything just stands there so I use a rogue merc on that character. This is only one parse but it does show they are closer than they once were. Both mercs on burn. And shaman dps is so low because of being a box b4 pointing that out.
Some players just are not knowledgeable, You see sk's trying to keep agro off a burn wiz merc and they don't have their Voice buff on so they can't get the agro they need and they end up just using balanced.
