I frequently 3 box ber/brd/shm and rely on mercs for the other slots to cover any progression from older content I missed out on & also to fill in what I miss in a current expansion after my guildies & I have done the progression, usually the regular group will start to fragment before we have completed it all and we end up finishing the remaining parts by ourselves. Typically we get all the hardest stuff done first as an organised group the first week or two, keying/flagging/zone unlocking etc via Hero missions & Partisans, then mop up the leftover mercenary tasks later on solo or as pairs on an ad hoc basis. Now Merc Tanks on TLP are amazing at low levels, making catching up if you started once the server unlocked SoD a lot easier. However the weaker mercs rapidly lose effectiveness after level 60 and you can have a big gap to bridge until level 75-85 & the J5 mercs become available. The real problems don't start until EoK onwards, from there on even J5 mercs are starting to get relatively weak vs the content & by Ros/TBL they are actually bad vs even a poor to moderately well geared group player. Their cost to use is escalating rapidly while their performance is decreasing in real terms at a similar rate, they become an overall bad price vs performance proposition. by TBL the mobs hit so hard they are wrecking the tank merc so fast it becomes a liability to use them, but its not just that. A key change would be if you could block the promised mending line of spells on mercs but you can't, and it's that which is reliably getting the merc tank killed in later content, the merc healers could output enough healing to hold the tank up but they simply stop healing while the promised buff waits to trigger & the mobs put out so much damage that the tank merc doesn't live long enough for it to heal - that's with a tank merc that has full vigilant merc gear for a tank & all the merc tank AA maxed. Now I have read that the 111-115 mercs got an overhaul, and with CoV they got an additional tier of merc AA but the 105-110 Mercs are not good enough, I can't 4 box due to truebox and I already went out of my way to buy 2 additional PCs to 3 box with, so it's not like I haven't done my best. The content in those expansions is not like pre-100 content where a raid geared melee can tank in place of a group geared tank, nope even a raid geared melee get ripped apart. I would suggest that adding the ability to block buffs on mercs is a great start. Then I would either need the mercs tweaked up a little or that the devs consider adding in higher ranked mercs, not massively improved but improved enough that they can actually handle the content for their levels, right now they are definitely behind the curve. The 110 merc tank is actually a worse tank than my mostly-group-geared 110 Bard is. Some of that is that their Armor class is really low for a tank, their avoidance is really very low too, considering just how low their avoidance is their ac should be vastly higher, their hp is also poor, barely any higher than a cleric mercs is, while player tanks have a substantially larger hp pool than the other classes. I actually have to plan to 4 box once I transfer off Phinigel to a live server because staying as a 3 box is not a long term option for me, it should be, but it isn't, I need a real tank not this garbage merc tank just to remain current on progression.
They really just need to remove the promised mending line for healer mercs and replace it with something more reliable. They could call it reliable mending, easy-peasy. It's not that blocking merc buffs would be a bad thing, just maybe harder than reworking a bad spell line for one merc type. Everybody I know on Live that uses mercs blocks that line on themselves. It's already pointless, so no need to keep it. Other than that your experience with mercs jives with what I've seen, both the 60-85 gap and the trend in EoK and RoS.
Tank mercenaries need buffs across the board from level 65-115. Their base DPS needs to be increased especially since tank DPS is pretty decent on its own. Beyond this they need more HP/AC/Mitigation. Modern tanking especially relies upon cycling discs to reduce incoming damage. Adding a few discs to the repertoire like Finish the Fight / Courageous Defense / Paragon Champion would help this. Melee DPS mercs need huge buffs across the board from level 65-115. The melee DPS merc should self-buff with 100% Melee Haste so that haste isn't so critical to their DPS. By the time players reach 110 all player worn belts are 43-45% Haste and with Jann's Veil have permanent 50% Haste buff. So I think it is fair for melee DPS mercs to have full haste self buff especially late era 110-115 modern EQ. Caster DPS mercs also need huge buffs across the board. They need the ability to critical nuke and their critical nuke damage amplification should be increased as well. Without this they need a massive base damage modifier on their nukes. Healer mercs are more or less fine. Only thing I wish is that they had a rez stance where they only cast rez and will do so in combat so that you can force them to rez if they are refusing to do so.
the simple solution which any intelligent healer would do, was to continue NORMAL healing, even though promised is ticking down... if it heals for it's full load... fine (it was needed then) if it only heals for 10k then fine too... it is super fast fast (half a sec if I recall right) but that they STOP healing is just idiotic... so they should obviously just continue their other heals and treat promised as a "bonus" if it heals a lot (what I do when I use it)
I like this idea, any cleric worth their salt will rez during fighting if needed (usually the tank went down due to poor TLP tuning in TBM *cough cough*)
I'd be okay with promised mending line being removed from merc healers & replaced with another direct heal, healer mercs dont have any "rescue" abilities that player healers have nor any of the proc buffs like shining defense or reptile so you just lean on their raw heal throughput. The tank merc does at least use a defensive but its use of it is somewhat odd & I don't think it has access to the wide range of defending tools most tanks have & depend upon to do their role. Overall if the mercs are to remain fairly "dumb" then they need to compensate for that in other areas, having a tank or healer that is far dumber than a player & has less tools means their base abilities need to be stronger to fill in the gap for their more simple actions.
