I didn't find a good thread on this quickly with search, but are they going to do anything about caster DPS mercs? They still do diddly compared to melee DPS mercs as far as I can tell. (Unless maybe your group has a lot of caster adps built into it.)
What is everyone's experience here? I had parsed the caster DPS merc at a little less than half a melee DPS merc in the same group, with similar amounts of merc AA. Some of that I could assume is due to the ranger buffs and haste that the melee DPS merc benefits from, but my wizard has Evoker's synergy. That is something for adps for the caster merc, at least.
Caster dps mercs are pretty much inferior to melee dps mercs in every way except for range and generating slightly less aggro. They do less dps, they're squishier, and they run out of mana fast.
A serious mercenary rebalancing could be useful. Melee DPS mercs feel about right. They should have a self haste buff and their belt should have worn haste getting them to 90-100% haste. Melee classes all can get 40~% Haste belts and 50% Djinn illusion buff, mercs should get the same by now. Healer mercs are about right as well. It would be cool if they use unity buffs so they buffed faster. Caster DPS mercs need their DPS output doubled if not more. Melee DPS mercs basically hold DPS constant and never run out of resources to put out that DPS. Casters need wildly more mana regen or better preservation so they can sustain like melee DPS. Tank Mercs need more defensive discs. They should be running Paragon Champion 100% of the time, Courageous Defense whenever they aren't running Culminating Stand and during non-Culminating Stand times they should fire off Finish the Fight. The current game of tanking requires tanks constantly alternate cool downs to mitigate incoming damage. Tank mercs have Fortitude and Culminating Stand and thats it. So the other 75% of the time they just get blendered. As it stands basically the Caster DPS is by far the most useless mercenary. Even with a Druid/Bard for ADPS they are awful.
Caster merc dps is low because caster direct damage is low. They don't need to fix caster mercs. They need to rebalance caster direct damage (with major increases). Direct damage pales compared to melee and damage over time gains the past n years.
It was a fairly short test run, on my part, since I was just checking to see if anything had changed since the last time I had used my caster merc. It was only 18 mobs in EW. I didn't use any burns of any kind, and was just fighting in a grinding way. The melee merc hit about 115k. The caster merc was at 44k. Both were set to Burn, and the caster merc AA was only slightly behind the melee's. Both had the appropriate extravagant merc gear from EoK. I'd want to do a much longer and more detailed test to get more solid numbers.
I disagree on the secondary 50% haste as the Djinn buff is earned by players time and effort. Classes that can buff haste to 200% plus should still get their own class value of buffing mercs.
