Best to pair with Mercs?

I keep wanting to try mercs, what's best to pair with them?

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Well, Mercs are resistance based so thermal, pain, dark and storm would compliment them defensively. Thermal with its resist shields, Pain by adding extra resists through world of pain and dark/storm would fill in some of the resist holes with shadow fall/steamy mist respectively. All 3 of those give you ways to increase damage to mobs, either through +damage buffs or -resistance (or both) which is also good with mercs as they need a little more help with their damage then the other sets.

Dark, storm and thermal go slightly better with the ranged nature of mercs; pain requires getting in melee range for it's one debuff but thats just the one power. From a resistance stand point storm has the advantage of allowing you to slot the recharge intensive pet sets so you can use the expedient reinforcement +res aura IO, which is a huge boon to a resist pet as that lets you take it and the sovereign right +res aura IO for a total of +20% resistance to all.

However as Merc's are mostly ranged and have decent smashing & lethal resists any set that keeps mobs at range would also work - so trick arrow and traps would do as well. About the only sets I wouldn't suggest are force fields and poison as FF doesn't have any way to increase merc damage and poison has no way to keep things at range - plus I don't really like the single target nature of poison as even the most single target oriented mastermind will tend to take on a lot more opponents than a non-MM. I honestly think poison should have been done as a corruptor set first.

I have played traps and dark up to L30ish on mercs and found them quite playable. If you want an easy mode on mercs go with dark - the tendency of your mercs to stay clustered around you nicely counters the low area on the heal and all of the controls plus the debuffs makes it pretty effective. I am in the process of working on a merc/storm and it looks to be a lot of fun although he is only 23 currently and so I haven't gotten to the really good chaos inducing powers yet which means it should only get better.

So I would say come up with a concept and pick which set fits it best - all of them will be effective except for the last two and even those will be playable as I don't think you can have an unplayable MM without working actively to create one.

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Globals: @Midnight Mystique/@Magik13

my mercs/pain Major Trauma got to 26 tonight, seems like a really good combo, healing + resistance goes well together.

My theme for the character is a medivac team that works for the highest bidder (so evil dictators and duboius drug lords ect).

I quite like using team teleport in missions, keeps the boys together in my healing bubble and they use their attacks without prompting when I arrive next to a group (can stay in def mode all the time), so they dont flashbang only one guy.

If only the stupid medic would spam stims on me :P

Avoid serum btw

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I have a level 50 Mercs/Pain...and I love it. Great since the mercs usually stay near you. It's a very nice set,and great for teams.

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A bunch of 50s and too many alts...
Neo's Guide To Thugs/Storm (need to update it)
www.facebook.com/bbirgephotos
Questions about Fire/Rad? Just ask!

Trick Arrow...

stop laughing....

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The hard things I can do--- The impossible just take a little bit longer.

If numbers are so much more important than a teammate who is fun to play with, forget about the game altogether and go play with a calculator instead. -Claws and Effect-

I have FF on mine and can verify that damage seems to be a bit of a problem. Not that I have any other MM experience to compare it to.

FF does work well to keep them safe and it has multiple tools to keep opponents at a distance but I can't really recommend FF with mercs.

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