Improving Mercenaries

I've been playing a Merc/TA Hero MM..and some random improvement thoughts have occurred....

- Give Special Ops maneuvers (similar to Thugs).
- Stealth Strike for Special Ops.
- Give the Medic the full Medicine pool, including the self-heal and the ally rez.
- Also, make the medic more prone to range and less melee..

I'm sure most of this has been mentioned before..but there you have it.

I am bumping this thread, because it should remain on the front page and become a monument to Paragon Studio's failure.

Spec-Ops:

Stealth is meaningless because I've tried goto Spec-Op to see if they can open the battle with that melee Rifle Butt stun. They get attacked before even hitting. Without doing Stealth-Strike, I really don't see a point of having stealth except for slowing them down.

Two things they can do:
1. Add Stealth-Strike, or
2. Add more +defense for Spec-Ops.

*rubs chin*

I didn't think about putting the ToLG in there...that's a stupidly cheap IO as well...hrmmmz.

thugs starcking leadership buff is too good. mercs need one too, like a stacking assault or something.

All Mercs need is to have a secondary damage type, so it's not just all lethal.

Wow, The lady Grey Proc added some nice dmg and debuff I likey thanks for the heads up!

Could give them the DP ammo, with having a minion with incendiary, a minion with cryo, medic with chemical... Would help with mitigation and the resisted damage types.

Achilles' Heel? No it's not, if you look for the low level ones. I was able to pick up a lvl 12 recipe for 100-200k. Chump change by IO set standards.

In the past couple of weeks I bought 4-5. The thing to remember about Procs is... it generally doesn't matter what level they are, they do the same no matter what, generally.

I grabbed 5 of them for about 6 million each yesterday.

Look, mercs don't need much in the way of buffage other than the issues brought up.

1. Serum is borked in it's current state, utterly useless garbage.
2. Pet mez powers are horribly short lived, I can live with short duration but the long recharge is a little overkill.
3. Commando's big hitters take too long to recharge.
4. Medic, this dude needs remedial training to actually act like a medic!!
On the medic issue I remember back to my army days and disciplinary actions being taken because I had not done my job correctly. Those times when the medic goes off and punches a mob in the face I get visuals of using some of those disiplianry actions on the medic. He'd be begging me to take his grenade away from him by the time I'm done with him!
If I missed anything feel free to add it in there.

Well the good news is that the horse is now a skeleton so it doesn't stink anymore. *puts the skull on his head*

With the swap ammo thing going on now, howzabout making the medic a DP/ user and he can swap ammo, that way he can help the boys by debuffing as well as healin'. Or maybe give him the blinding smoke bomb
that night widows have?

There's a bunch of good Serum ideas previously posted and I can't think of anything that would top them, except replacements with some sort of recharge-intensive pet so that they can be slotted with the other res/def aura io pieces. Maybe something like Gang war with more soldiers running in, guns blazing (not as may as GW though).

I had a few thoughts to throw out over the Mercenaries.

Serum ... sigh ... Right now it is about as desired as getting tagged by a skunk. Why not make Serum a MM buff. You stick yourself with the needle and you becoming a supercharged combat leader. For the duration you get a bonus to acc and dmg but more importantly you get a bonus or double your supremacy skill for the duration. Now that would be a serum I would be happy to take.


Medic: Ditch the grenade or give him a flashbang that does no dmg but reduced acc like the trick arrow ability flash arrow. Couple this with a handgun and medic powers.

Soldiers: Give them secondary ammo effects.

Special Ops. Drop Tear Gas and give BeanBag in place. If they are keeping stealth then make sure they can hit with a crit. Otherwise dump stealth. Drop on of the grenades and give them a narrow cone attack. Spec Ops has too many effects that do not directly contribute to dropping your enemy. Special Ops should be dangerous not annoying.

Commando: I do not like him having a LRM. It takes too long. Give him a second type of grenade. Either that or borrowing from one of the earlier posts give him a mini gun.

one last post thought: Mercenary upgrades are based on better equipment. Maybe each update should slightly increase the recharge rate of their powers (most notably on the interruptable). Better equipted and trained soldiers are the ones you do not want to see across the battlefield.

Thug leadership, besides maneuvers, have pitiful numbers, assault is in the single digit range, even with both, due to how damage buffs work, the extra damage is just about unnoticeable. Especially after supremacy and/or the MM's assault.

Ther are many other ways to improve merc damage that would have a larger effect. But the defense would make mercs very survivable.