If you're unwilling to bend your goals and/or playstyle to the resources you have available, then yes you'd better expect to get out of your depth sometimes. How is that at all controversial?
Tank mercs tank as well as heal mercs heal or dps mercs dps. ie: They suck. A real tank can do ok with a heal merc. A real healer can do ok with a tank merc. A real dps (or even non-dps) can make a dps merc look silly when it comes to dps. I don't see the problem, other than people expecting to have both a tank merc (sub par tank but usable), and a heal merc (sub par healer) at the same time. A merc is expected to fill ONE role, not most of your group.
I 3 box with 2 healer mercs and 1 tank merc. Rogue/Bard/Mage. I have no problem killing singles. I haven't tried TDS Tier 3 zones yet. Trying to increase my AA's on my Bard and Mage.
Milfurd no - you don't want to give the tank merc either a shield OR a sword (but the BP and helm are ok to give).
I play a 105 monk while boxing 105 bard and shaman. In TDS t3 I run cleric, dps, tank merc for trash and double cleric, tank for named. Trash is np, if I for some reason want to kill 2 at a time I have to assist heal with shaman on tank, some.. if vp/mez resists/doesn't work. All mobs are slowed obviously. On named I run one cleric on reactive and one on balanced with all the appropriate spells blocked on each, here I am tabbing to shaman regularly to help chain heal tank in between spamming monk dps abilities.. however I can kill all t3 named I have camped so far. It is doable. The shaman is my crutch here, for obvious reasons. It is much more difficult for the merc to tank top tier group content than in the past.
I disagree. Nearly any class can do "OK" with a healer merc. Real healer with Tank merc leaves almost zero DPS to do anything. Any class that can heal; Cleric, Shaman, Druid, Pally, Ranger - is way better off tanking themselves with either a Wiz or cleric merc, or letting the Wiz merc tank and healing it. Healer and Wiz mercs are VASTLY better at filling their roles than tank mercs. Its not even close.
So I've been having my tank merc go without a shield. Should I also remove his AC sword then? I just wish the tank merc could take hits as well as I can wearing a dress. 105 tank merc with steadfast resolve 1/8 couldn't handle 2 light blue mobs in Tempest Temple. 105 tank merc now has steadfast resolve 2/8 and this morning couldn't handle 3 light blue mobs in the Breeding Grounds. I'm a wizard boxing a chanter. Chanter was not able to mez the adds in Breeding Grounds and we were forced to fight 3 at a time. You're all correct that adding a 2nd healer helps the tank tremendously but good luck finding someone willing to go camp RoF these days.
Another problem is the tank merc defensive discipline stripping avoidance buffs. Since they are so much more reliant on avoidance 101+, as soon as they use their avoidance disc (which doesn't seem to help much) their foresight is stripped and when that disc drops they tank significantly worse than before. I'll take an hour of tanking poorly; over 30 seconds of tanking just as poorly and then 59.5 minutes of tanking much worse than "poorly". Can't the disc be made to not strip avoidance buffs? The effects don't have to stack, just coexist with only the highest taking effect. Or give the option to turn merc discs off.
Fortitude Discipline has overwritten avoidance buffs since they were introduced at level 68, eleven years ago. If you can get this fixed for warriors, please do. We'll put up a statue in the corner of Freeport's Arena to honor your contribution to tanking everywhere.
You're right, in some ways I'm unwilling to bend my goals and I still want it all. I want to complete all quests and do so effectively. And you know what? I can, because I pet tank. Not because I'm better at everquest than everyone else but because pets make great tanks. Why should the ranger and wizard combo I used in my example, have to suffer, and go get 10year old pieces of gear and listen to you theorycraft some condescending scenario based around these clickies and perfect combinations of events allowing them to have a chance in hell of doing 1/10th of what I can? How is that fair? tank mercs suck, and they will not be allowed to remain as sh*tty as they are, Mark my words, because this is a dying population and does not have the perfect combination of classes or often, the werewithawal to follow theorycraft to have their terrible merc and his tissue paper armor barely keep his head above water. Tank mercs will get a boost eventually
Weren't you one of the folks vehement against the pet changes when they were announced? So pets out tank a merc, don't eat a group slot and the owner can deeps away. How exactly is that "fair" again?
Obviously I'm still playing so.... Pets have the same few small disadvantages. Certain mechanics like in pow invalidate them. Any confined space can be difficult if u are having to stand near ur pet to have LOS, pet pathing issues can't be fixed by the instant pet call AA, if they are stuck behind something getting beat u can't summon them to ya, gets frustrating. But they are still light years ahead of tank mercs. So u can try the "let's continue to nerf everything and restrict content approach" which seems to be doing well (/sarcasm) for population, or u can give tank mercs a boost and they still won't be 1/10th of what a player or pet can do
I have never bothered to parse it out but it really seems like the dps mercs tank almost as well the tank merc.
105 tank merc with steadfast resolve 2/8 died to a single dark blue mob in the Plane of Shadow today before I could get it slowed on the chanter. Heals were coming from a 7/8 healing acumen cleric merc. You'll notice the tank merc has not gotten any better AAs since the last update. That's because I've been working on RoF so he no longer gets experience.
I use them just fine in Dredge and Thulisaur, zero problems with them. Of course, I have a non-merc healer on them and mobs get slowed and debuffed. Maybe you need to be a bit more proactive with your slowing.
People keep forgetting it seems that mercs were never intended to be used for the molo purposes that most of us use them for; that was simply an added bonus. Mercs have always been intended to be stopgap replacement for groups that lack a tank, healer, or (later) dps. So the people complaining about how bad the mercs are when they are 2 dps or support classes with 1 merc tank and 1 merc healer it is not a reasonable comparison. Especially when they are facing names, which in past expansions at times have required 2 real healers and a good real tank to do, much less merc ones.
Merc's started to suck once they put that new expansion in with merc aa's and gear.. That was the most horrible thing ever since most of us use mercs now... It is not like old eq where there was people everywhere... now real tanks can tank 5+ mobs with using a cleric merc or a cleric alt and have no problems... If anything it should be the tank mercs that should get huge upgrades so at lest all of us that don't play a main tank can actually do close to what a real tank can do... It's really sucky when you have to beg a tank to come help you since you can't do anything with out a real tank..Since the tank merc is so horrible now...I started playing again on vox when it first opened since i heard about how good the mercs where...then with that new expansion i got full tank merc gear and aa's and it was dieing in Kael in 1 hit from the named there... i soon ended up getting feed up and stooped playing for a while...To come back to a Dead guild on vox... so now i am playing on a progression server hoping that the nerf to mercs would not be there either... An what do i find they suck there just as bad...Tank mercs need to be fixed so they can tank for us all when we can't find a real tank...Since all the real tanks use a cleric merc and no longer need real clerics other then in raids... I really love eq that is why i keep coming back but with no tanks wanting to group with you it's hard... Please fix tank mercs or nerf down cleric mercs so much that they can't keep tanks alive on nothing and equal it out or at lest put in master mercs from Station cash that make mercs what they used to be...I would pay 2k SC to upgrade my merc and be able to actually do something with out begging a tank to come help... Thank you
I can not remember specifically when mercenaries were released if only being a stop gap was their purpose. I do remember playing a necromancer in the POR expansion without mercs and let me tell you it was impossible to progress. There were no groups or not enough tanks/healers to get things done. After POR, I swapped to try a healing class(cleric) and a tank class(SK). I eventually settled to the SK and am now a paladin. If mercs are being realigned to only stop-gap play, I really think that the game will really suffer from yet another loss of players or at least paying ones. Does anyone have the release post for mercs or some kind of developer discussion to confirm the "stop-gap" only purpose? If this is actually true, would it be time to reconsider that purpose? Rykard
