The tooltip for a Mercenary's ability reads 667,540-1,064,441 damage. The mercenary has 2444 crit bonus and 899% crit chance, The minimum expected damage this ability should do is 16,314,677. Instead, the logs show that this ability does a maximum of 153,269 damage, a difference of -99%. Meanwhile, the mercenary's median auto-attack hit is 4,445,583 based on an auto attack range of 128,358-155,xxx. This is close to the expected value. This is in the same fight where a character's tooltip ability of 871,767-1,259,779 hit for 211,769,905 damage based off of 4810 crit bonus and 235 fervor which is also close to the expected value.
The Merc took a ninja afk and was accidentlly wearing it's harvesting gear? These mercs are getting dangerously close to actual players now!
In pre-PoP zones, mercs are better than most players. In PoP and above zones, mercs are nothing better than a heal bot.
It really depends on how the merc is geared out. If the merc is fully trained and is wearing the same armor you are, it should be decent. There is, however, a dearth of good Accolades. I think the best I have seen have 70 resolve. What resolve does your merc have? I dunno if mercs can use Crit Bonus Overcap or not. Also, remember that mercenaries calculate off STR, even if it's a caster or healer.
My point was that Avithax's concern about mercs becoming as good as players was misplaced. A fully trained and geared merc isn't close to being equal to a player in PoP and CD zones.
Simply the fact that you don't equip a merc with weapons or jewelry, and that mercs can't use set adorns, is gonna guarantee that they won't match an actual player.
What mobs are you seeing this damage with? From PoP onward, mobs have potency mitigation (a hidden stat) that will make your damage very low if you aren't over a certain amount of potency. Also, mob mitigation and other defensive stats will come into play as well.
It has nothing to do with Combat Mitigation. I see this effect in all zones, all mobs, training dummies, etc. My mercs potency is higher than my character's potency. In fact if you read my post closely I compared my mercs ability damage to the same mercs autoattack damage to my ability damage on the same training dummy. I really saw this effect in KA but I suspect it has existed since the introduction of mercs.
Do the devs know about this issue? It's been going on for so long that I've wondered if it's intended behavior that mercenary abilities do nothing and they're only useful for the new buff, though that just seems wrong to me.
I think they know about it but they probably do not have time to balance merc damage. The good news is that overland and Solo instances are easy enough for BoL solo players, well, provided that player is paying attention to spell, attributes, gear, etc...
Yeah, makes sense if it's a triage thing. I think my playstyle is probably an edge case in that I tend to duo/trio very casually with friends so mercs would be pretty significant for us, but I can understand that there's probably not many people like that.
I haven't found any mercs that do even 1/100th the damage of even my healers.... What mercs are people finding that are good for anything besides heals and maybe a few buffs?
Well just fyi, the thread started before BoL came out. Some observations though: 1. It doesn't matter if the merc is "properly kitted" so much because the issue seems to be one of the tooltips and side stats being just wrong. I would think that the stats (expected damage) showing wrong would be a QA target of high priority but it seems like it isn't, based on progress made. 2. I tried the tank merc just to see whether I could sit back and blast mobs as a warlock player. It worked, for the first time ever. Grolla (Treasured Tank merc, BoL) has a 64% threat transfer. Mobs would take some halfhearted swings at me and then run off to focus on her. I haven't tried to Leroy with her yet, I"ll try that today. Only the samabata types in overland Wracklands made any dent in her health (got her about half way down). She did some damage, but not more than 25% of any mob. Fits the definition of tank. Caveat: I think I saw her cringe (stop attacking) when a linked mob of sambata added, but once a few died it stopped. I think the cringe happens in mercs below Fabled quality. But I'm guessing. No word on that from a developer. 3. Fabled shattered lands mercs (Kluuron, Claz'akala..) do enough damage once they're level 10+, when they get into the 20's they can just one shot landscape mobs. But not names. Probably working as intended. The shame of it is, as times goes on, crafters will lose this protection. And it's hard to get it to work even in BoL areas because you need your jeweler to make accolades for you (heirloom). I think the heirloom tag is not intended. It seems like a plain mistake.
I think it is possible to increase damage output by giving a lot of WDB/DPS/MA/Flurry gear to mercenary. I think I saw about 5%-10% of damage contribution from my mercenary in ACT in Solo instances a couple of months ago. I have switched mercenary attack off though because it mostly slows me down fighting mob when I run from one boss to another (in Solo).
Well, to be clear, the effect is that potency doesn't affect the casts of their abilities. Procs seem to work fine: if you have a shadowknight merc, their damage shield will be the right values, but their spells/combat arts won't be. So you'll have the damage should do like 70 million or whatever, while their CA hits for 100k.
I don't tell my merc to be passive because I cast a group reactive damage spell and that functions normally.
