I fully understand that mercenaries should NOT be equivalent to real players, by any stretch... However, they are woefully underpowered for current content. A beastlord or ranger can out heal a healer merc or out tank a tank merc. A played cleric can out DPS either DPS merc that is on 'burn' without pulling any agro... You get the picture. They are so ineffective at their jobs in current content. They have not scaled well to 110 at all. I propose 'Expert' mercenaries be added. You could unlock them with group EOK progression completed (and later, some quest in a future expansion, similar to what was done to unlock J5) They need to be about 50% better than current mercenaries. Double the cost per 15 min, that's fine. But good grief, ALL of them are so BAD right now. That's the real killer for many people that aren't in ideal groups. They CAN'T do RoS progression BECAUSE the mercenaries CANNOT fulfil their role in current content. I dare ya to try and have tank merc tank a RoS mission, or healer be the only healer, or DPS mercs the only DPS, for ANY RoS progression. Pick up groups for progression are extremely difficult to find a whole group of players that need the same things. Mercs NEED to be able to fill the roles of missing players, but they are so woefully bad for level 110 content, they can't.
This is a big reason why I whine so much about the HA scaling. My mercs cant even handle the instances now. At least before I could do something during my limited play time.
Something in my feeble memory recalls when mercs first came out, there was supposed to be a third "class" of mercs, which they never specified how they would be obtained. And then time went by, and I never heard any more about it.
I've had to turn off Others hits due to lag on raids and can only do self-parses now. The last time I parsed my caster merc (TBM), there was very little difference between Balanced and Burn, aside from the aggro generated. And the DPS was so low, it was roughly equivalent to my auto-attack. No abilities, no autofiring, no discs. Just straight auto-attack was enough to out-parse a caster merc on burn. Beyond that, there are spells that healer mercs cast that are generally useless, and need to be added to a blocked spell list so you can be healed more effectively. Beyond that, pairing healer mercs isn't as good as one would think. If they're both set to Reactive, they're both casting the same spells at the same time. Unless you're taking a boatload of damage, it's an ineffective way to be healed and you're better off having one merc set as Reactive and another set as Balanced. Realistically, two healers should be able to offset the same spell to have a more effective healing round. Expert mercenaries aren't necessary. A revamp is necessary.
They dont need Expert mercs what they need is to add 2 ranks for the mercs. Tier VI - For level 105 increase which will give hp, spells and abilities of that tier tied into a TBM quest to attain that tier merc. Tier VII - For level 105-110 increase which will give hp, spells and abilities of that tier tied into a ROS quest to attain that tier merc. An extencive testing on test prior to release with devs involved in the player feedback so the appropriate changes and tweeks can be done befor it is pushed to live and you get 50 page posts in regards to being ignored, issues not addressed etc.
I would not expect a tank merc to handle the missions as they require tanking multiples. Something that tank mercs have never been good at in current content. As for the healer merc, I have done the missions with a healer merc as the only healer with a group geared tank. It can get sketchy, but it's doable. I do have the healing AA maxed out and I use the tank merc gear, not the healer gear. Doing all the merc/partisan tasks with just the healer merc was never a problem.
The below information was provided by SOE at the time mercenaries were first released: Master level mercenaries were never released. I'm not sure whether it is a good idea to have Master level mercenaries or not, but the Journeyman level are definitely lacking at times.
Well they also said they were going to revamp dots over the new few months and its been 24 and the classes they should have done first are still sol.
Master was probably considered a bad idea because it'd have required raids to access, and raid level players do not need the help of mercenaries for group content nearly as much as group level players. Perhaps there were initial plans to allow the use of mercenaries for raid content, but I'm sure that was dropped once they understood how difficult that would be. Expert is not necessary. What is necessary is for current mercenaries to scale to the content. The issue is EOK and this current expansion heavily raised the level of difficulty relative to previous expansions - which players were able to deal with because of a similar upgrade in equipment - but mercenaries did not receive a corresponding upgrade. Within a short time, we have gone from 15,000 hitting trash to 25,000 hitting trash, from over 3 million health to over 10 million. It's too much for mercenaries to handle. The equipment they added help to a degree but not nearly enough, especially for DPS mercenaries who receive little benefit from them in the first place. Mercenaries operate off of base player skills, but most of the power players get come from abilities. It just doesn't work.
Healer merc seems about right. Bad enough you'll have some incentive to invite a real healer to group but good enough to get things done in a pinch. The last group I was in our real healer had to afk for a bit so we popped a merc and did just fine. The only difference was the tank changed from 2h to 1h + shield. The dps mercs are pretty horrible though. I haven't used a tank merc so have no idea how they perform.
I often times keep a spare healer merc up instead of a dps just to make sure since: 1. dps mercs are very not good 2. healer mercs are not the best
My understanding of Mercenaries was their original intent was to fill a group slot and keep a group a float if a healer or tank suddenly had to leave. Which is why only healer and tank Mercenaries were available to start. It felt like with that intent Mercenaries should've had some sort of time limit to encourage looking for a replacement. What apparently has happened is everyone has worked Mercenaries into their groups or box crews as permanent fixtures with no intent to drop them. With how reliant many people are on Mercenaries and the difficulty step up in the last 2 expansions, it definitely would help if the Tank, Healer and Caster Mercenaries were less awful. I haven't even bothered trying to pop my tank merc because I'm guessing he will just die in two rounds. The healer one mostly just gets summoned to Buff me and then he is promptly unsummoned.
Not sure how much it would help but it would be near trivial for them to implement... how about a new set of merc gear dropped with total heal bonus of 6000 instead of 600, and damage bonus 6000 instead of 600. Might have to be even higher than that. Should be easy enough to figure it out, I'd even let Absor turn the knobs (with proper supervision). Not sure what would help the tank merc, been a while since I used one. Nearly as trivial is more merc AA. I am assuming the current merc AA additions won't have much effect, with them being bugged for so long I haven't had time to max them out. I don't mind having to grind merc AA, I kinda like having things like that to work on... would just like them to have a noticeable effect.
Yeah.. like bards! On another note... Mercs were never meant to be used to complete missions, farm named, do progression with, etc... The devs have expressly stated, multiple times, that mercs are there so you can just earn some basic xp while trying to get a group of actual players. The fact that many people have built their bot armies around them doesn't mean they should be better. If you cannot accomplish what you are wanting to do with mercs, find a real player. Then KEEP finding real players, once you have finished with whatever 'required' them. Don't just go back to using mercs as your default. If you don't have friends, make some. Join a guild. If you are in a guild that doesn't have enough people in it, and you cannot find people outside the guild... Join a bigger guild. If you are in a guild that only has your bot army (or just your close friends) and you cannot accomplish what you are trying to do, the problem isn't the mercs. It's that you are trying to avoid the MMO aspect of the game. Sometimes I have no interest in grouping, myself. If what I am wanting to accomplish (other than just basic XPing) can't be done with mercs... It's not the mercs fault. Now, if mercs are unable to handle basic XPing because of bugs, poor tuning, etc... that's a different issue. But that's not the case here.
Since I have so few merc AAs I can't say but I think from other reports they do have a noticeable effect. However, gaining them is somewhat like trying to open a crate using the crowbar inside it. If you don't have them your tank is weak and you need to use someone else's in the group who has them maxed already, thus preventing you from earning any. If you are moloing, then your tank is too weak to use to gain more AAs...
mercs were originally brought in because by the time of SoD unless you have a regular group of friends or a all guild group you would sit for hours looking for a cleric or a tank to complete your group so you could go exp on something more then low light blues. Remember this was also the expansion where they put in "easy" zones that were more solo friendly. the population of EQ had fallen so far that casual pick up grouping was all but dead...
Heroic Adventures are not missions. The initial complaint referenced RoS progression. Which does not include any HAs. But does include missions. (Now, the current tuning of past HAs could be a problem, but is a completely different issue, and has it's own thread.)
