Besides, that's already there in Auto Assist vs Call Assist. It may be that mercs should be tuned to roughly equal the owning player's gearing. Or it may be that mercs should just be tuned to just below an average player with average gear for the same level. Either of those. The problem gets worse when you're looking at characters playing catch-up. Mercs are mostly designed to let us do group content when a group isn't really available. There are no groups in old content. If they can't pass the DPS Check in a Heroic Adventure, then what's the point?
All mercs are trash and not worth the plat in 99.99% of situations even if you have a billion sitting in the bank. The healer mercs can't keep a raid geared tank alive against a single previous expansion regular (ie not-named) mob unless the tank is actively hitting buttons. The dps mercs get set to burn get out-dps'd by sword n board paladins vs live mobs. The tank mercs I admit to not using personally, but from what I understand their threat generation and survivability is pretty terrible.
Aggro on tank mercs is just fine. Their problem is they are paper tanks. Fully buffed, AA'd, best geared tank merc can't reliably kill single and slowed Shar Val mobs in the pit when also using a healer merc. (I'm talking 50/50 chance of surviving through a single T1 mob) 2 mobs at a time? Are you kidding me? It will live just long enough to break mez before running out of HP. Tank mercs need either a serious upgrade in damage mitigation or an upgrade in AI so that they actually use their disc abilities at the right time instead of just die all the time.
The tank mercs and cleric mercs are not tuned to be used together. Unfortunately they are both tuned to underperform the average player and 2 underperforming players in current content doesn't go well. Think of the tank merc as an unskilled raid geared ranger main tank and life starts to make more sense with merc tanking. The tank merc is designed to be fed single mobs with proper healing, a hybrid on backups will do. The problem is that with modern discs, pulling and CC are becoming lost arts. People have gotten too used to tanks popping discs and tanking a few at a time. I used a merc tank from EoK -> ToL and it was not great but it was perfectly fine. I did have a raid geared cleric healing it but it wouldn't have taken raid gear to keep it up against singles in T2 or named in T1. I did enjoy it a lot because I boxed the CLR with my ENC and really got to work my ENC to the fullest of it's potential since Merc tanks can't carry a group.
Also, because the only way to get those skills is to bring them with you. There isn't a Merc that will Lull/Mez.
The inability to block Promised line & HoT line on Merc tanks is the number 1 achilles heel of Merc Healer with Merc tank useage, in many situations it renders both completely useless & it is almost certainly intentional. Changing that one single thing would make boxing less reliant on real tanks & healers & that's probably the motivation to not change it
Sounds like they are balanced perfectly relative to healer / dps mercs then. It's a crying shame that you can replace any merc with a sword n board paladin and have it be a net gain in whatever role that merc was serving. Maybe the goal was to make it so that mercs will always be replaced by even terrible players, if so they have succeeded... but at the cost of having mercs actually usable to make decent players get more enjoyment from the game.
