Either they cast it when you really don't want it, or don't cast it for minutes when you do need it. Can't you just include a button on the merc window that says Rezz Me? They're your mercenary, you're paying them money, you should be able to tell them what to do.
I always figure that they got a better offer from someone else at the moment, and they'll get to me when they are done with that. They are mercs, not serfs or slaves you know. If you wanted that, you should have brought a box. It would be nice if their rezz ability was higher in their instruction chain because the delay at times for a rezz can be annoying, but complaining about a merc casting rezz when you don't want it seems a bit disingenuous.
I like that idea! Kinda like the "revive" button for when they die. Put one next to it for when we die. The merc does not always zone out when you die, they stay till your rez timer ports you so you could even get rezzed back where you were. One big problem I have is when boxing they will not usually do a rez while the rest of the group is in combat which results in who ever is dead not getting the bonus on whatever HA we are in or losing out on hunter /ach. Sometimes it just not feasible to mez the mob(s) and move away until the merc feels they can do the rez. I have solved this by having each toon carrying some rez tokens you get from loyalty merchant and then we can rez the dead during combat. But on the other hand my cleric will jump in and start fighting - haven't figured that out.
When in a dungeon zone, always turn off mercs until you need them. When navigating to a camp in a dungeon zone like Howling Stones in RoS, I keep them off until I get there. If you leave them on and you get attacked, they heal you before you fade, then they die after you fade. Often they will train you too. Once you say no to a rez, it takes some time for them to figure out you want a rez later. Toggling to passive and back to reactive might help that. They ain't mind readers. If you say no, then no means no...just like coming from your mom. If you only turn them on when actively fighting mobs, then you don't have to worry about declining rezzes when you are going to drag a player corpse to a safe place. If you do not turn them off then when you do say yes to the rez, you will be rezzed where the healer merc first saw your corpse, not where it was when you accepted rezz. You can also be made puller when going to get corpse so the merc doesn't follow you. Mercs are not really turn on and leave on types of characters. You need to develop a strategy on how you are going to use them, so they do what you need them to do.
Sometimes the heal merc owner needs to toggle passive, then back to balanced or reactive then target the corpse. Also moving a bit to get the merc to reposition near the corpse can help.
Also make funny faces at it, cursing, and beating that heal merc with a stick... Nope.. those don't work either. When a merc doesn't want to rezz you, it won't. Whats amazing though is if you have two heal mercs, if they actually decide to trigger the rezz after a long period of not, it'll be at the exact same time. And given nothing else changes... that implies there is literally some type of non-visible timer stopping them from rezzing. They'll sure buff you instead, though.
rez needs to be before buffs in their priorities, nothing worse than waiting for a rez and instead it buffs you. Then decides you need a rez and rezes you and then does the buffs again. Mercs are stupid!
No one I know prefers a merc over a real cleric who has a clue of what to do. Without mercs EQ would have likely died long ago. They currently suck and need to be reworked but the Devil they are not.
Instead over half the clerics and druids quit playing within months. I cannot say if or how many shaman quit, as 90pct of the shaman I have ever known were a bot to a melee or mage main. -Regards-Former Raiding Cleric-
So are you saying mercs drove them from the game? Were mercs the only factor or did nerfs play a role? No clue here, as I left EQ during Omens of war and didn't come back until well after mercs were in game. All I know is mercs made EQ tolerable for me when I came back and I wouldn't have stuck around w/o them. I don't remember all that many cleric mains running around at the time I quit.
They never made functional tank mercs, despite massive feedback about their uselessness. Parses comparing tank merc damage-taken/DPS to ungeared chanter pets were the funniest; and... the saddest. The original bugs reported have still not been addressed to this day, If a tank merc's sock is slightly damp, then the only thing in all of EQ capable of healing it is a cleric merc. The healer mercs were OP from the start, every tank, melee and pet class molo-raced their way through the entire SoD progression, all the way to Korafax. OP healer mercs in tow, one-upped with all rank 2 spells granted just due to the players level. Even more grotesquely bizarre, if your monk liked to run around and tank named mobs wearing only a G-string, all he had to do was group up with two more nudists and tank anything they wanted with their three perfectly stackable OP-healer mercs. During this time the cleric-mains were banding together seeing how many of them it took to keep one Tank merc alive in Oceangreen Hills, chain-dying from TERRIBAD(much, much worse than horribad) tank merc scripts. They followed this up with never improving them, ensuring the wound would keep leaking players and subs to this day; and that every grinder-guild would always have open spots for clerics. Clerics that were incapable of accomplishing hardly anything outside of raiding; surrounded by groups of most other classes and their multiple, stackable, just-as-flagged-as-the-owner, OP-healer mercs. It would be nice to see an actual numbers chart of character classes per server, and what percentages of those classes finish current progressions, special event quests, aug-farming etc etc etc. I am quite sure I already know what that chart will look like. You will run into 100 players every day in this game moloing about with their OP-healer mercs, stop and see if you can ever remember a time you saw a priest out moloing about with its tank merc...
From what I saw and remember, when mercs were introduced it was the clercs that were being boxed that got replaced and not played not main clerics. Main clerics have always been better in a group. But when there isn't a main cleric around mercs are a god send and allowed groups to actually kill stuff without the need of boxing a cleric.
Just find me on Tunare. That's the only way you'll find me (with my tank merc, that is). It tanks better than I do, and I got sick and tired, over the years, of the stupid summoning mechanic, making it impossible for me to solo most everything, except the little pockets of mobs they'd place here and there. So, it's me and the tank merc. Because I'm too stubborn to roll another class And even if it doesn't tank better than me (it's actually pretty close, LOL), it's very good at keeping agro and picking up adds, so I can get some DPS in between heals. It helps that I've missed lots of content over the years, so in older content, it's a fine setup. If I had nothing to do except recent content, I'd be screwed. I've used the tank in EoK, and it's hit or miss. One mob, and it's a long fight which uses 1/3 of my mana bar. If I get an add? Forget it, egress out.
That ended up being the case for me. I retired the cleric. As for main clerics/druids/wizards/chanters and to a lesser extent rogues and zerkers and bards; They need a tank to tank for them. Since I don't play a tank, when one of those classes says LFG, I have no choice but to ignore it, unless we have a class that can tank in group. These classes have no capability to do anything close to current content, without a "tankable" class. By "tankable" I don't just mean WAR/PAL/SK, it also includes MAG/NEC/RNG/MNK. These classes always race through progression, the "non-tankables" may never get it done. To give you an example this happened during double spawn weekend. My druid and my chanter, both raid geared max AA "olde Timey" toons with more experience playing this game than i care to admit. were grouped with a main raiding cleric, and a just returned to the game, crap-geared, low AA ranger. We were working on the cleric and rangers progression quests in Stratos with two healer mercs and the fully-geared-chanter pet to tank, our only possible option. We spawned four named as we moved about the zone. We tried multiple times to kill the first two, wiping each time. Eventually a group-geared WAR from a non-raiding guild and his MNK bot arried in zone. And easily killed both the named we spawned using OP healer mercs. When we spawned the third one, we just ooc'd for the warrior to come and have his fun. Eventually we finished the quests and spawned the fourth named. My dispirited group just sighed and started to move along. I told them we would kill this one, so i logged my 20 year old fully raid geared max AA druid main out, to log on his geared mage bot. The mage easily tanked and killed the named. In reality, my group-geared mage didn't need anyone else in the group to be there, he could of molod it himself. Now i am wondering why I don't just main-switch to the mage, and only have to pay for one account instead of two. Since his one toon and merc are more capable than my entire group with two raiding mains, and one fully raid geared alt and the returning ranger; who hasn't logged back in since. As it stands now, even a cleric main is better off using a cleric merc to heal them, while they tank and dps.
I hear you, pure stubbornness is the only reason we still have druid mains in the game. I remember when RodCet lost ninety percent of its druid population during LDoN; due to this complete moron making half the druid spells outdoor only, then releasing a fully indoor expansion. Anyone who made it through that gauntlet is a testament of stoic will and more stubbornness than you could find in a hundred mules. The important thing to note from your testimony is that you are a druid. Some pizzed-off coder broke Druid AC back in Luclin, they have never fixed it; they possibly don't know how. Aside from your shield, buffs and perhaps food/trib; your AC is useless. The numbers on your worn items mean nothing. You ever stop and wonder how every mob that kills you keeps hitting you for the same damage over and over? That happens because their is no variable in the DI cause you are to far to the left of the comparative ATK/AC calculation. Druids are the only class that has to worry about grey con mobs killing them. All that being said, you would still be better off letting a chanter pet tank for you than a worthless tank merc. You might be able to get along with light blue cons in VoA and RoF using a tank merc with you to heal and dps(tank merc DPS is also utterly pathetic.) I have not tested how capable a level 110 tank merc is on level 95 content. I do know that if you use him in something current, most of your time will be wasted counting down the revive timer.
Ok i hate to break it to you but i promise they easily killed the nameds because he used an actual tank class that likely knows how to play the class to some degree and not because cleric mercs are crazy OP. Clerics mercs are still terrible compared to an actual cleric (or any healer for that matter) that isn’t braindead. Yes they are the most useful type of mercs I’m not gonna argue that but they are FAR from OP.
They are OP, for multiple reasons: 1.Always ready, never goes AFK, definitely casts vie about 100times more than any cleric main i have ever seen. 2.Gives you a full complement of rank 2 spells just because you leveled. They didn't just slap the entire cleric class i the face, they held them down and dutch-ovened them too! 3. Completely stackable. Your monk alt likes to run around in a G-string and nothing else? All you need to do is find two more nudists, and you can still kill a great many things with 3 perfectly stackable always ready healer mercs, who wont even ask you to put your armour back on.
