Hi everyone, I made three characters to box. One gold, one silver and one bronze. My gold account is a Shadowknight. My silver account is a shaman and my bronze account is a mage. So far things are going fine and I got to level 60 boxing. I am using the tank merc on my gold account, a rogue merc on my silver and a cleric merc on my bronze. However, I find the Shadowknight to be pretty boring and the merc does fine tanking with the bronze healer. I was wondering should I ditch the Shadowknight for something more exciting? Something that can do damage. I was thinking a ranger or a berserker. I was thinking of power leveling one to 60 and just continuing to use the tank merc. I am just wondering at later levels, does the tank merc lose power? He seems to be insanely powerful 1-60 and just wondering will I need the SK at later levels? If I switch my tank merc to a healer merc and do two rogue mercs and use my SK for tanking, would that be better? Thanks
You want exciting? Drop the mercs and play like the old days - sk tanking - shaman slowing and healing and mage doing caster damage and no mercs. Or start taking on red cons. Now that's excitement. But yeah that's the right line up with the right mercs allotted to the right characters. Changing them around or making a new char will not change much. SK's are pretty powerful so I think your merc has diminished your SK worthiness. Yeah I would switch to the healer merc on the SK like you said and see how that plays out.
Thanks CatsPaws. I think you are right. I swapped to a healing merc on my gold account, and it works out better. Now I feel like my SK is doing his job hehe.
I never played a shadow knight to very high level, and it was long before mercenaries existed. However, just reading these forums, SKs seem like they'd be a fun class to play, if not at the early levels, then certainly at the higher levels. I just happened to go the Paladin way, instead. And yes, the J1 mercenaries are very powerful at lower levels. That's because they have more hps, and more regeneration than the apprentice mercenaries. At some point, their regeneration is much lower than the mob damage output. Lore says that happens around level 60.
Merc tanks are OP at lower levels and useless at high levels. Stick with the SK. SK/Sha is a pretty powerful duo. The Mage is easy to box, the pet can tank as a backup and CotH is nice. For pure damage/fun you can replace the mage with a berserker to great effect, but then you'll have two melee characters to worry about which can be a big change.
Not really. A well-rounded tank merc is VERY viable. My merc, with all Extravagant gear and maxed out AA has no problem tanking T1 named in EoK, and with backup healing and proper support can do T2 names. She also has iron grip on mob aggro, even on full burn aggro meter rarely tops 50%.The biggest issue with tank merc is they are horrid at positioning. Also, if you get an unmezzable add, trying to punt and root it nearly always causes merc to run to the rooted mob. My box set is chanter with tank merc, druid with healer, and mage with water pet and caster merc. I am quite pleased with this setup. A real tank is definitely way better, but there are problems: To properly tank high end stuff, you need most AA filled out. That takes a lot of time. Gear is exceedingly important for tanks. TDS/TBM gear barely cuts it vs T1 EoK trash. Getting a tank to a point where he can do T2 names takes a lot of effort. If boxing, you might have problems with positioning and holding aggro.
If the apprentice healer merc was able to keep your tank merc alive you might consider ditching the tank all together and running a caster merc on your gold account and one of your ftp accounts with and keep your healer merc as an apprentice. Your tank merc did not have added taps for self healing which your sk has to help with the fact that you are using a merc. The tank mercs at early levels are very OP as already stated so you might not even see a difference in how fast you are killing now but in a couple of levels things will slow down for your merc and I think having you do the tanking and the added dps might work out better. When you get to higher levels consider going gold on your ftp accounts and farming some AA's to maximize their potential. Also there are tons of non prestige augs you can pick up along the way. Most of the current and previous hot zones have non prestige zone wide drops. Tons of them can be quested via hero's journey quest line, and at later levels there are some in COTF and TBM that I know of. Try to work these quests into your xp grind to help reduce the amount of gear farming in the future. Most of these augs are not uber but it all adds up and something is better than nothing. Raidloot.com is a nice resource for finding non prestige gear for your guys.
