Improving Mercenaries

Thanks for fighting the good fight!

The Commando can get back his Gun Drone now that it is mobile, pretty please. And the Serum is only good as a placeholder for a special IO, at the very best. It can safely be replaced with about anything else in the game. I don't care what, for it will be better.

There is hardly place for a heal IO inside the soldiers for the Medic, since you tend to go with Lady Grey proc and Achilles Heel in order to be able to kill stuff. So what heal there is left is not exactly adding very much to general survivability. Medic Healing could need a boost, as long as you have to cram stuff in there to even hope to kill stuff on par with other MM types. After these two procs you might want a Pet Aura or something, and then you're supposed to compensate for the soldier's lower levels with damage and accuracy. That's a lot of things going into 6 slots. ;-)

Medic healing is generally very lackluster, due to the ongoing effort to compensate for doing crappy damage at higher levels, and it is a rare event to get one when things get busy. Mostly because the Medic then is dead, but if he *had* lived, it's still a rare event to get a heal in combat. :-p

The LRM Rocket is not exactly doing so much of an impact to warrant the recharge. It seems excessive to have to wait for a paper mission between each launch. It's not like it insta-removes a spawn, which that kind of recharge should indicate. Getting back the Gun Drone might of course make it look logical. In any other case, it's outrageously slow to recharge and the unbuffed damage isn't exactly impressive. I have played Robots, I know you can have more bang for the buck. ;-)

---

Do you guys think giving Spec-Ops Bean Bag for stun is a much better choice than Riflebutt?

Riflebutt has 16s recharge and it only works when the target gets close. Now I've even tried to goto spec-ops to start the battle with riflebutt but they get seen before even getting close enough. So stealth + riflebutt don't work.


If Spec-Ops is supposed to bring the best controls, I would definitely trade Riflebutt for Bean Bag which also means the recharge may be pushed back from 16s to maybe 24s? I would rather them use all the time than waiting for a target to get closed and they can still shoot bean bag at close range.

What do you think? Is this overpowered? I mean spec-ops have no aoe damage at all.

Yep I've suggested that before Along with giving them Smoke grenades and/or reducing the recharges on the other powers or taking there snipe and giving them a cone attack or....


The list goes on and on.

Maybe with the new borked pet AI, they should give Soldiers Riflebutt at the 32 upgrade.

I've heard the idea of maybe giving the Commando 'Assault' to help Mercs damage

I also believe Mercs should get a higher base accuracy than any of the other pet sets, as Mercs are supposed to be real battle hardened and professionally trained soldiers.

I dislike giving mercs what thugs already has. I also don't think it would change much. 10-20% damage boost is great on all, but I feel like Merc is missing something else besides simple numbers.

I've stated before that AoE Serum would be a way to freshen up the set as a whole but I also feel like the Medic should get some love. Take away all of his damage abilities except, 2(?) and give him an AoE Heal, and possibly a single target serum for him to use.

I don't see Mercs being high damage dealers, I'd prefer it if they were more control and safety oriented, sorta like Robots except more dedicated.

Commando can be shear power for all I care. Rocket Lawnchairs required. More explosions etc. Perhaps give him Scourge? Yeah he's suppose to deal good damage but in comparison to nearly everything else in his tier, he's only average. He beats the Lich but thats about it. Needs improvement.

Eh, that was my original suggestion. Make serum weaker, but affect all of your pets with no crash.

Also, give Soldiers Rifle Butt on the 32-Upgrade (If they're gonna run up there anyway, at least they'll have a reason).

I cast the awesome power of the Bump! It crits you for double the bump! You are also affected by my trap card, which increases my damage by a whole bump! now subtract that from your life points and pick a move!

I have a Mercs/Poison sitting at lvl 36 they seem sooo...ugh...is there any advice to give me to keep me from deleting him? lol Maybe I should hold on until NG? I've never seen it in action anyway.

I've actually read a post around here of some crazy MM supposedly using Serum + Noxious Gas on their Commando to good effect.

Thanks that actually helped heh.

Never Surrender!

I19 has come and gone and still nothing!

I would hope the Dev's would buff Mercs before they come out with another primary.

I am not surprised to find a thread of this length on Merc improvements... I haven't gone through the whole thing yet - have any devs commented yet? PMs, mentions at meet and greets... anything. I have a /ff, /dark & /storm mercs and yeahhhhh, they could use some help.

It's hard for me to say if they are strictly worse than ninja, who die like weeds, but their damage is definitely sub par. I need to try the double proc thing and see how much of a difference that makes, but judging by the comments here I don't think it will be that much.

Lots of good ideas in the posts that I did read.

*No need for slow LRM, replace it with something frequent and useful or massively buff the recharge - it doesn't seem strong enough to warrant it.
*Spec Ops Rifle Butt->Bean Bag: Yes please! Why wasn't it this way to start?
*Medic: the worst mm pet in the game, hands down. I'd rather have a 3rd soldier than him. Any suggestion for improving him is a good one. My addition to the pile: add a buff that is some combination of regen/+dmg/+res to his stimulant and increase the duration, allow him to keep it up on the entire squad & give him some kind of aoe heal (maybe something like the /pain regen auro to differentiate him from the /demons healing).



Has something like adding Venom Grenade (half debuff strength) to spec ops been mentioned? This would give them a little bit of aoe as well as being a great damage buff for the set.

Everyone agrees Mercs are basically a bad primary. My main for the longest time was Mercs/Poison -- even slotted out with purples and basically everything you can imagine he's very much weak compared to my other MM's. I just wish the Devs would hook us up already, they've been bad since they day they came out.

There really isn't going to be a situation where some players are going to complain about a favorite ability not being there or something. There are no good abilities in the Mercs tree. Everyone knows this.

Actually, as a comment -- I find it irritating too that my Mercs don't have any leadership abilities, but thugs do. That makes thugs more logical for a military unit than Mercs. It makes no sense. Surely at least one of these guys is an officer of some kind right? Officers should leadership stuff. I think my biggest complaint about Mercs is they have such poor survivability. They get no defensive powers at all, no way to keep them in the fight. Even if you go with something like Traps that just brings them up to mediocre. Lots of Mercs/* builds are missing a rechage intensive pet so they can't stack up the defensive procs too.

Replace Serum with a recharge intensive pet (like a flier maybe?), and tweak the abilities of the Mercs as very well discussed already in this forum. Thats my two cents. ;P

Mercs = Oil Slick

In other words wait till 2012 if you expect to see them ever get brought up to snuff to the other MM sets.

Edit: Yes I'm bitter lol.

Just some ideas I've been tossing around but how about adding caltrops to the soldiers and the spec ops as well giving the commando gun drone. Or Giving the soldiers frag grenades, the spec ops liqued nitrogen grenades, and the commando a napalm grenade. Also replace Serum, take a risk and break the cottage rule, with something, anything... Wait a second I have a completely implausible idea for it. The coding nightmares and bugs it could introduce alone would be worth it.

Keep Serum(reduce its recharge time to 5 minutes, change it to be a 20% resistance buff and 400% regen buff for all pets) but include a choice at level 18 for another mutually exclusive power(IE you an only pick it or Serum not both). Lets call this other power Armor Peircing Rounds. It should do one of two things depending on how the devs want to handle it. It could either provide a substantial, 60%-80%, lethal damage buff for all of his/her pets or act like Fiery Embrace and add a extra 40% lethal damage to the base dmg for all of his/her pets. In either case the duration would be 1 minute with a 20 second period of 20% to-hit debuff after the buff ends. Its recharge would also be 5 minutes.

Well. The "Cottage Rule" is a bunch of crap. It makes sense for powers that are occasionally useful to some players. It makes no sense for powers that are complete garbage.

Serum and Poison/Poison Trap come to mind. Could ANYONE, ANYWHERE, at ANY TIME EVER complain if those got replaced with something even occasionally useful? No.

Game developers have got to be the most stubborn people in the universe. NCSoft makes a lot of good changes but on some points (such as these) they are just wrong headed and seem to have decided that they just will not listen. This thread is quite old, and its still alive. That itself means something.

I'm with Negate here, but I think 2012 is probably too soon. We have to wait for all the people at NCSoft to die of old age and get replaced by younger people who are perhaps a little more responsive. They are probably about my age overall, so, if I eat healthy and stay fit I might get a year or two of decent Mercs before I kick off.

That said, the NCSoft guys should feel free to prove me wrong. *hint hint*

EDIT: Maybe I sounded more angry than I really mean too, obviously I love the game and I love what NCSoft is doing with it. They just need to make an exception to their rules for Mercs and perhaps one or two other powers.

Another idea I have is that SoA Soldier's Pummel is similar to Riflebutt but does decent damage and less stun chance. Maybe they can add some good melee damage on Riflebutt? I mean it's already rare enough for Spec-Ops to use it but it would be cool if Riflebutt does very good melee damage when it happens! Riflebutt's damage would match Snipe's theme I guess. Decent burst damage.

If Riflebutt does good melee damage, it may make more sense to goto Spec-ops with that pathetic Stealth that serves no purpose.