Mercs make me want to scream

It seems like mercs in their current form may start to influence a shift towards more people creating and playing the following classes:

Warrior, SK, Pal
Druid, Shaman
Chanter, Bard

Due to clerics not having enough of a group utility edge over cleric mercs and wiz dps mercs being so much better for their dps archtype than tank/cleric mercs are for theirs. My J5 wiz merc without support regularly crits his nukes for ~105k every few seconds on burn. The wiz merc can also tank unslowed level 101 COTF T1 mobs with just a J5 cleric healing if he pulls aggro. I play necro and mage (with good group/raid gear) and I can outdamage wiz mercs on burn sometimes, but usually group mobs die to fast for necro's sustained to get rolling, and mage has to p*ss mana using spears to pull ahead of mercs (who have basically endless mana). There's not much point to bring along either class unless you want to pet tank with mage.

I don't see much point in creating or playing anything but the classes above in the group game with mercs in their current state...

Eh i would say it depends on the group game, if there's something hard (sadly that is a very rare spawn currently) a real Cleric is pretty damn useful.
Also...come on, Zerkers for example are pretty damn cool and class "racism" is bad anyway.

The problem with playing a melee dps is you can't do anything in pet tank groups. And, even if you can actually swing at something, you need either great support or great gear to match wiz mercs on burn.

Most of the utility given by hybrids or casters, such as CC or ADPS, is either completely inconsequential or can be made up by having 1 true support class like bard/enchanter in group. That's the new group meta as I see it....1 good tank, 1 good support class, and fill the rest with wiz DPS mercs and an optional cleric merc if u don't have a healer

I guess one could say that you can 1 hybrid or casters to make up for missing a true support class, but that's usually not quite as fluid...

For grouping to happen we need:

*a server where boxing is not allowed....IP check...and don't allow multiple EQ instances to work at once...EASY..many games do it

*don't allow mercs on the server

But they won't do it, my guess is because that would result in less boxed characters, so less profit for them. They would rather you box than play with other people.

MMOBSPG

Massively Multiplayer Online Boxed Single Player Game

As far i see there should be no reason to rage about mercs, they still classes below players, at least if players know how to play their class.

If a person cannot get a Group, then that person should not look at the mercs for being a problem but him-/herself.

Would guess the problem could be 1 or more of the following:

Dont know how to play the class.
Do not carry your load
Slack(go afk all the time)

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Reputation is everything.

20 good impressions is worse than 1 bad.
1-2 bad impressions = can ruin you forever.

At least you're honest, instead of people blaming the clerics that they're bad players.

They should nerf mercs, or make a server for people who prefer grouping.

I would be game for a server like that, not that i blame mercs (i blame the lack of real group content where AI just won't do) but i start missing what really got me playing Eq ages ago.
It certainly wasn't boxing, picking up collection items from the ground and all that stuff.

Please.

It is far easier to just pop a merc than to look for a cleric:

-you don't need to wait for the cleric
-the merc never goes AFK
-the merc never rolls on loot

people pop mercs out of convenience, not because real clerics have "problems" or are "bad players", what a load of bull

the issue is the mercs, not the clerics

Make a server without boxing or mercs already. EQ used to be way more fun before all the boxing and mercs came about.

There used to be an actual community.

In regards to a melee or caster dps, or hybrid needing to learn to "play better", that's kind of a cop-out. Because using a wiz dps merc is about as mindless as it gets. I don't even bother with "balanced" on mine, I just use two toggles: Passive and Burn, and then assist the main tank. The merc really can't screw up unless you forgot to switch it to passive in between pulls and, like I said before, even if it grabs aggro on a single level 100+ mob, it can usually tank it better than most dps classes in the game can. Merc standing there taking hits and not moving like an idiot? Hit your "passive" hotkey and take 2 steps back, it'll follow, then once it's out of melee, hit "burn" again. Simple

So, in order to "out-play" a wiz dps merc on burn, you better really be dps'ing hard. Sure it's do-able, but what is that really going to buy you? 1-5 more seconds faster kill? For the trade off of needing loot, and not being a robot and having to maybe AFK once in a while. Hell, the per/mob kill-speed advantage of having a geared player over a wizard merc is already made up for by the player having to take a piss! That one break will probably make up for all the seconds of all the mobs that you killed slightly faster with a player lol

It's the same for dps mercs, run into nameds that need a good burning and your shiny wiz merc won't do that 100-250k dps that a real player can do trust me.
Maybe he also might not follow that nasty emote and dies...

Hah, this might be true, just broke into HA's and haven't seen any named yet. Luckily, always had at least 1 player dps to burst anyway

Sure it is easier to pop a merc, but unless you box most of times, you do prefere a real person behind.
That said, then in my guild on our forum we write down the good players / and bad players we Group with.

That way, when playing in Groups, we know which ones we really should avoid.

Also we get to know, who might be a potentiel applicant for the guild.

For the first, if some has knowledge that person X is bad, then better to share the info in the guild.

What'd be cool is if someday EQ is like Tron, where mercs are everywhere and are called "Programs" and we can all be identified as the super rare "User!" with a sort of a hushed-reverence lol

I quest a lot. I do not grind. I stay in one place only as long as it takes me to complete the acquisition of whatever it is I need for the most recent task/quest I'm on. Often I am going after LBs/Blues even though I can handle yellow/red content fine when I need to. To me those sound like a poor offer of a group for a PC that isn't working on the same content I'm working on. I also have kids, dogs, work and chores that I need to pay attention to from time to time, regardless of whether I'm playing EQ or doing something else. If I suddenly need to AFK/drop a fire and port out because of this, sounds pretty unfair to the person that was expecting a consistent group for a while.

There are bad players, but also bad leaders. Not meaning to be offensive to you, but if you are the leader of the group - it is your job to set ground rules and kick out whoever is breaking them. That is how I run my groups and I command respect because people know I am not messing around. When the ground rules are laid out, we all work wonderfully as a team - cracking jokes, telling stories, and gaining exp. Whether it be on vent, teamspeak, or good old fashioned group chat - you have to communicate with your team if you want to maintain control.

Now in my honest opinion, I think mercenaries for what they are worth are pretty good. My only suggestion with them was posted on another thread here:

https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/mercenary-discipline.207887/#post-3049522

That thread was primarily focused on ability to direct where your mercenary to stand. Other than that, the overall AI of mercenaries are fine. Each mercenary type has its use with each level range. Tanks are great between 1-70; then its commonplace to switch to a healer 70 and higher. The DPS caster or melee mercs are wonderful in a group situation. They add tons of extra DPS.

Mercenaries do serve a great purpose. They are the alternative that was introduced to solve people's issues of not being able to proceed to higher end content simply because they could not find a group. Let us all be real about this. Everyone in this game becomes "clandish" or forms their "cliques". We only want to group with people we know. We develop a comfort zone, and overall closed off. I can count the number of times I LFGed on genchat over the last year and received just a few invites. I did that as an experiment to see who would actually bite. In reality, if mercenaries didn't exist - I would not have been able to do all the content I have done in UF, HoT, VoA, RoF, and CoF (thus far). They are valuable, and extremely necessary.

Thanks for taking the time to read this! =)

This is a true statement. This is what separates good groups from poor ones, someone needs to take the reins, and lead from the front.

Without being condescending to the poor players, give positive critique and encouragement for your team mates. /disband for the leakers and AFKers. Often times Poor playing isn't the players fault, they may be playing their class the way it was played years ago (most classes have changed quite abit they way they operate, using a past archetype for operation can leave you behind where you need to be)

Example: Playing a cleric in Old EQ was more about reactive healing, nowadays you have to be far more proactive to keep a tank alive.

Another example: Tanks/melee in modern EQ have to know when/what abilities to stack, poor stacking can result in substandard DPS/Tanking. Also For melee DPS especially things need to constantly be on Cooldown < saving stuff for a named lowers your overall Sustained DPS/Sustained tanking by a significant margin.

A good leader will point these out, in a non derogatory fashion and suggest changes.

There is no group game before level 85.... Mercs have made my life better... would I take a real player over my Merc? yes... I would if they existed... but I dont see them unless they are an alt thats being power leveled.

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and this is the true reason that mercs even came into being. Clerics and tank are just mad that they can no longer hold groups hostage over the content they want to do and then move on. It got to the point that people were quitting from a lack of healers and tanks. not that they didn't exist ,but that they would get what they wanted done never to be seen helping anyone else advance. Sitting around hoping or praying that healer you made friends with or that tank that helped you out last time he was bored, got really stale. Enter mercs. Now that cleric u always begged to group and he said well if we do this i will, yeah forget him. That tank that helped you when he was bored, now he has an alt he wants to join you on..Clerics are mainly mad that they no longer control the flow of the group game, and i for one could not care less about grouping with them.

Times when you needed a cleric as a healer ended many years ago, and some people still dig this corpse out it's grave.... are you looking for vendetta or something like this?