best merc for magician

so i have a magician and have been using water pet and a merc tank. recently i hired a cleric mercenary and tried earth pet. seems a lot slower, so switched to water pet and cleric merc and that seemed slightly better.

so far from my observations seems a tank merc plus water pet works the best. but.... im wondering what really is best combo? how about in the tight corridors of indoor dungeons?

what are your recommendations?

what level are you? at lower then bout 50ish tank mercs are killing machines. after that you need a healer merc.

36ish, yup tank seems solid so far. I want to solo dungeons, finding it to be tricky...

Depending on the level you get to you will change what merc's you use , solo mage will hardly ever use Tank merc is later levels , but a great mage can use a Cleric or Wiz merc , you will kill much faster with Wiz merc at lvl 105 ,same can be said for Bst also ,id like to say this for Necro also but I am so out practice on Necro I wont say anything about them here

YiMin

My reply would be ALL mercs are appropriate for a Magician

You can buy merc slots in the DB Market, this does NOT enable you to have multiple mercs out. It does allow you to have multiple mercs you can call on ... as in swap.

All mercs will start to gain AA experience at level 40(?) one of the places you can spend them is on the Merc tab. I choose the General Melee one as this seems to make the Merc (as in my opinion) much harder to hurt OR said differently more durable.

Healer: A safe bet and can make you very hard to beat but the dps is just you and the pet(s).

Now then depending on the con ... Dark Blue to Red

Red to Yellow: Tank has high damage mitigate and can hold aggro

Yellow to White: DPS Melee has high damage mitigation and a outstanding (1 hit many times) poison attack as well as backstabing

Dark Blue and lower: DPS Caster - What can I say they will bring the heat great dps here as long as they can land as in not be being resisted.

Stances:

Passive mode allows the merc to be out but NOT charging plat, that means IF the merc is in passive stance the entire count down cycle it will wave the fee. It will gain AA experience on kills.

Aggressive: Tank

Burn: DPS mercs, they enhance their damage and can easily gain aggro
Burn Area: DPS Caster for when you have a lot of mobs on a single target.

I'm told tank mercs are killing machines below level 50.

Above level 50, my suggestion is to have two merc slots and keep a healer merc in one and a caster DPS merc in the other. Swap between them based on the situation.

When soloing, your bread and butter will be to have the cleric merc out for healing an air pet while you blast the enemies with fireballs.

If you aren't sure you want to invest in buying a second merc slot yet, then you can't go wrong with just running a healer merc. Especially between levels 50 and 75 or so, the magician's ability to heal their pet isn't that good compared to the DPS of the enemies you'll be facing, so you'll want a mercenary covering that role so that you can focus on burning the enemies down. At level 76+, the additional pet healing tools you gain as you continue leveling up will increase the number of situations where having a caster DPS merc out is viable, but you'll still want a healer merc available for the inevitable times when burst damage isn't going to be enough to solve a situation and you really need for your pet to be able to endure better.

At 105 you can either DPS on your mage and use a cleric merc, or concentrate on keeping your pet alive yourself (heals, AAs) and use a wizard merc.

Cleric merc is obviously safer, but when dealing with lower blue mobs, you might be able to get away with a wizard merc.