How is Mercs/Dark ?

Gonna try these two sets together, any advice?

Anybody have one and if so how is the synergy with these two powersets combined?

I love mine. I think the sets mesh real well. We all know that Mercs are the lowest damaging of the MMs. The Debuffs of merc with the Debuff in dark is great and makes up for the lackluster damage. I use mine both in PVE and PVP with great results

Friend of mine took one to 50. Dude's a beast. Hard to kill, hard to see, great debuffs. I'd recommend it.

Mercs is terrible, but Dark Miasma is good. Works out to being not bad. I haven't played mine since the pet AI got even worse than before, so I am not sure how she is now, but levelling mercs/dark wasn't as painful as mercs/FF or mercs/poison.

Thanks for the responses folks...got mine to lvl 12 so far and while it isn't uber powerful(yet). I think it's a fun set and at the end of the day that's all that matters to me.

Well the best thing with the mercenaries is that they tend to cluster at range, usually well within the area heal for twilight grasp.

Also the tar patch keeps the enemies at range for longer, which is where the mercenaries shine.

Not to mention ample opportunity to get an achille's heel proc to stack with tar patch, should you choose to slot it in the soldiers.

And of course you've got plenty of control with the spec ops and dark miasma's control powers.

I had a merc/dark a while back which was very enjoyable.

I retired mine after the mercs pissed me off too much to ever want to play them again. Loved /dark though.

things to watch out for are the second tier Spec Ops using more controls than attacks. Not upgrading them helps with this. And the commando loves his AoE knockback attacks. So picking up a power with -kb (like the Mu AoE immobilize) helps alot. Otherwise the idiot is likely to fire a grenade into the middle of a spawn, chuck them all over the map, then run into one lone guy's face and open up with three AoE damage powers that only hurt that one guy.

Because of all the stupidity of spec opps throwing 2 or 3 non-damaging controls in a row, and the commando avoiding his highest damage powers, I timed it using recall foe and tar patch. After 20 enemies my average kill time for all pets attacking one lone +1 minion was 4 seconds (record was a nemesis Jaeger who lasted for over 9 seconds). Compared to insta-death with every other primary I've tested.

I STRONGLY recommend getting an achilles heel -res proc into your soldiers as soon as you can, and look into the lady grey damage proc for your other pets as well. Your pets do almost exclusively lethal damage so you are dishing out the absolute highest resisted damage type in the game, you're doing it in damage-over-time powers primarily, and you're not doing a lot of it either. Those procs made a world of difference, they're not too expensive and they are available by level 20.

And get Tar Patch ASAP. For the same reason you want it out and under the enemy as close to permanently as you can have it.