Improving Mercenaries

The 'dedicated healer' idea for the medic would be a very interesting idea. It wouldn't need nothing but heals but make him heal much more often.

My protector bots on my Robot/Storm heal more often individually than the damn medic.

Perhaps give the medic some sort of Vengeance style power. He could only use it on a fallen Merc that would buff all other mercs and perhaps yourself.

This would help keep your entire squad from dieing because 1 link in the chain died.

I'm just brainstorming, nothing I'm terribly serious about.

make serum like stimpack from starcraft. has no cooldown but the pet you give it to lose half their health.

I'm glad to see others have issues with Mercs. I was playing my 42nd last night and realized just how much I'm not having fun. The sad thing is that I don't think it would take much to make them fun and the suggestions here mirror my own thoughts.

I have read most of the pages and really cannot grasp why people think mercs suck so much other than the level 18 power and Spec-Ops under performing slightly. As far as damage go I logged into my mercs, thugs, necros , demons and robots then right clicked - info on each one plus the upgrade powers. The damage is very comparable ( not taking into account lethal or smashing resist ) Not to mention that mercs as a whole do a lot more cone/aoe as a whole than the other sets. I cannot tell you how many times all 5 of them have let loose with full auto and I watched the screen fill with hundreds of 4's and 5's. I think people are seeing the mercs 5's and 10's and 20's but not adding the 3 to 21 times these numbers come in. All they see is small numbers


For the record, I have solo'd every EB and some AV's with my Merc/dark and at no time did I feel gimped.

People have a problem with mercs because they are extremely vanilla compared to every other pet set.

-Robots are robots with sheilds, rockets and frickin' lasers.
-Thugs have a unique 18 power, enforcer buffs and a free brute /w fury.
-Zombies. I honestly dont have to say much else. They puke, bad-*** dead swordsmen and all kinds of fun control wit hthe Lich.
-Demons have cold and fire damage, huge cool looking pets. Interesting 18 power.
-Ninjas are probably in need of a look at too but they have critical boost, Fire-minion and stealthiness.

Mercs have a subpar 18 power, which could be looked over (Robots..) if the Mercs themselves had anything unique about them. The Spec-ops control abilities are so damn rare to see that they might as well not exist, the commando has a few interesting powers but is still fairly generic and the Medic is false advertising. Just some jerk that took the medicine pool and never slotted it (thats not a medic!).

Mercs aren't brokenly weak. But they sure as hell are bland enough to warrant a re-evaluation.

As I've said before, the best way to handle Serum is to have it turned into a lesser boost that boosts all of your existing pets without as much of a crash, as a nice contrast to the Thugs/Demon ability which can summon more.

My Demon is lvl 29 right now. Please don't compare Merc to Demon. It is NOT even close.

How did they let Demon pass the beta testing is beyond me. This set is so overpowering right now. Demon pretty much cover most of the weaknesses that other primaries used to suffer.

1. Fire resistance weakness: I used to think Longbow Flamethrower was designed to kill MM's Pets and they are VERY good at it because pets don't have fire resistance except for Oni (who is a boss pet).

2. Fast attacks

3. Stacking resistance from Ember Demon and even some healing.

And I am going to compare Prince VS Oni soon. I feel they are not balanced.

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If you play Demon or Thug, you will definitely feel there is something missing in Merc. Don't get me wrong, Merc and Necro are the only MM that I have leveled to 50. I got bored playing Thug/Trap 'cause it was too good. And I couldn't level Robot higher than 12. Ninja just frustrates me.

I think the only things that need to be addressed with mercs is serum, the recharge times for the pets powers and the medic.

With all the controls that mercs have available to them they should at least rival a controller or be 1 step below. The amount of control that mercs do throw out is substandard with the long recharge times and short durations. I have a 46 merc/traps and in that time leveling I've never been able to rely on my pets for sustained crowd control. I was disappointed from the start because I went with mercs instead of bots, was trying to not be another bots/traps, I had hopes that all the mez the mercs offer could offset the fact that I can't softcap mercs like bots can.

I still don't know what would be suitable for a serum rework but I'm sure I'd be happy with whatever they do to it as long as it's better than it's current state.

And PLEASE take the grenade away from my medic. I grow weary of losing my medic to the first spawn and not bothering to resummon till the next mission. With my 3 years of active duty in the Army I've never known a medic to attack if there was an injury on the battlefield and I've never seen a medic carry grenades unless they were spec ops or something like that but the merc medic aint no special ops!!

/e rant over

I think they need to go through all the pet primaries and reevaluate all of them but here is my idea for Merc's.

Make the Medic a pain corruptor for healing like the arsonist is a fire corruptor for damage
Basic medic gets soothe and a 80 ft smg burst making it equal to the soldiers range.
Equip gives soothing aura and a 80 ft smg heavy burst equal to soldiers range.
Upgrade gives Enforced Morale, venom grenade instead of frag grenade, and possibly a weaker version of FFG.

Spec ops hide needs to grant stealth strike when hidden to thier basic attacks which they will use under hidden effect, remove rifle butt and brawl replace with beanbag, change flashbang to 90 recharge and tear gas to 2 minute recharge and web grenade to 15 seconds.

Serum changed to a mini mog for the pets maxing thier resistance, grant status protection and giving a small to medium damage boost for 15 seconds on a 4-6 minute recharge maybe even instantly recharge all thier powers which then can ignore the lowering cooldown timer on pets controls changes as it would provide a way to cut thier rechage of those powers in half through this ability.

Commando lower recharge of LRM rocket, add auto turret the floating kind or FFG to him

Overall serum would give them short term survivablity that other sets don't have, medic becomes a better healer overall and can debuff resistance instead of knockback which will help merc mainly lethal damage, spec ops will have good single target still with a spike at the start, and a ranged disorient instead of melee and slightly faster AE controls, and commando wouldn't change to much.

As I said before, it would make a nice contrast to the Thugs power, which summons up more pets.

Any new ideas yet?

Actually, I don't know if they need it. If you slap on a few -Res Debuff Achilles' Heel enhancement on some of the pets, and possibly burst, too, Mercs can be killer.

BLASPHEMY!! BURN THE HERETIC!

...Oh wait. That's the Arsonist, isn't it?

DEBUFF THE HERETIC'S DEFENSE!

Meh. It's just not the same.

In all seriousness - insert the standard line about the game not being balanced around IO's - the fact that you can improve a set with IO's to the point that it's on par with the rest of the sets is not an argument for not buffing it, IMO.

I know "it can be killer" =/= "on par with," but the results of adding Achilles' Heel proc's are limited by the fact that the proc doesn't stack.

Touch of Lady Gray, IIRC

This about Mercs! Not NINJAS!

>gag!< That's the foulest smoke bomb EVER!

*SNIFFS*

Ugh!!
*dons gas mask*
Good thing I held onto this baby when I left the army.

the sad thing about Mercs is that we all agree they need to be tweaked, we did when the set first came out, and we have generally agreed on how so. really its not much to fix up the set!

make the medic heal a little better, give the spec ops stealth strike and lower recharge on a few abilities like tear gas, lower recharge on full auto burst and lrm rocket for commando..
make serum last two minutes and make it a weaker aoe buff - or replace it with a floating turret.

and that's it they could do that in an afternoon probably. no one is ever going to miss serum as it is, lol!

I just want them to stop running into melee range again. I want my disciplined soldiers back.