Will I regret making a mercs character?

The thing with mercs is that they don't deal a lot of damage, except the commando, so life plods on very slowly until level 26.

I like them because they're very good at holding aggro, so if a battle starts to go badly and I don't want to die, I can just leave them fighting and casually walk back to the elevators, confident that the bad guys won't follow me until the last merk is down.

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Originally Posted by Xiroth Easy...I didn't. Personally, I find tornado to be a marginally useful power, especially on teams. I'd rather be able to slot the entire blood mandate set in all 3 pets. I am not saying that as a definitive statement, but as my opinion of the power and how it works with my play style. As always, YMMV.

On a MM you don't take it to use it. (I agree it's almost totally useless.) You take it so you can slot the "recharge intensive pet" procs for defense and resistance. On merks, the resistance will be especially useful.

In my experience (Mercs/Dark), you'll love your mastermind, until about midway through the game. People who believe the AT is overpowered speak mostly from experience with their early game play, or just straight up aren't talking about most Mercs/* builds.

Mercenaries bring absolutely nothing to the table in the late game, and are functionally useless for all level 50 content, except farming -1 minions for salvage.

They really excel at destroying a billion of really weak things, but once the heat gets turned up at all (and I'm not meaning +4/X8 content, I mean being on basic +0 content with EBs), they wilt like nobody's business.

Serum is pretty much useless, as it is. The third minion, Medic, doesn't use his healing enough to even warrant mention of it as a bonus. Spec Ops stealth is pointless outside of theme, and their debuff grenades are all thrown at the first guy they see and have a long recharge time. You'll often face the first, lowest level set in a mission to watch 4 grenades hit the first poor sap they see, only to never see the grenades again for the rest of, or at least most of the mission.

The pets don't behave which I'm told is a symptom of all masterminds, but really does them no favors in keeping them alive as weak as they are, especially if, oops, you didn't take a secondary set with a Recharge Intensive Pet, and can't even IO your guys into surviving.

The power set doesn't really work in practice or theme (why are street thugs more able to command and defend on a battle field than hardened mercenaries?) out of the box, and has to be finagled into working with very specific secondary power sets (which goes against the general feel of the rest of the game, with most other power set combinations being viable from 1-50).

If you're a primarily role player and have friends who don't mind carrying you through later game content, then by all means take the set, otherwise stay far away, or do some major looking around for ways to use your secondary set to make a viable build.

I ended up deciding not to go with mercs/pain and went with thugs/pain and then went and retried my Demons/therm.

So yeah.

You just have to get past the idea of them being predictable. They're not. You never know when the tear gas will arrive, or the medic will finally decide it's time to help out, so you've just got to be on your toes and adjust your strategies as the situation evolves. Sometimes I'm all ready to start dropping purples,or run for it (did I mention they hold aggro off of you really well?) and all of a sudden I see two booms go off and the enemies are all standing there flickering. If you're really committed, then you'll start to get a sense of the timing. I can kind of feel when it's time to start healing the second most damaged pet, because my medic is surely going to help the most damaged one, and I'm tired of healing them just a second too late.


If you really like feeling in control of the situation, then you will hate this set. If you're like me and you like a little chaos to keep you on your toes, this is quite possibly the funnest of all the MM sets. It's like opening presents on X-mas day. You just never quite know what you're going to get.

My personal experience on raids with my mercs/traps.

LGTF: The pets got chewed up like doggie toys soaked in BBQ sauce and thrown in a kennel full of rabid Dobermans. I was resummoning all of them pretty much whenever the summon powers refreshed. However, /traps gave a lot of help to the team, especially with the big 3 of FF-gen, acid mortar and poison trap. I think I died only once, and that was due to my own stupidity.

STF: The last mission is where the toon really shines. When it's time to pull GW and her pals, it's nice to have a minefield complete with poison traps and acid mortars waiting and ready. Also, the pets seem to fare pretty well in this TF, with relatively few deaths. They have a lot of chances to keep on the consistent damage while I'm busy doing my traps thing. The key is to occassionally Heel them to peel off the morons who moved in to brawl, and then re-siccing them on the AV.

Khan: To be honest, every run I've done has been a turbo run, with someone stealthing + group TPing every mish. The only real fight came with Reichsman, and again, /traps really shines with these AV fights. And even while I'm toebombing or setting up poison traps and acid mortars, my guys are still pouring on the damage, something a /traps corr can't do.

I've never had any trouble getting invited to a WST. I'm sure I'll eventually run into some min/maxxer who will tell me to go get bent when I ask to join, but honestly, with all that /traps brings to the table, that wouldn't be such a wise decision. Even for meatgrinders like LGTF. And I haven't even tried a barracude SF yet.

Funny, speaking of high-end SFs, when some friends and I ran our first MoLRSF, I brought my Mercs/Poison MM. Commando + Serum + Poison Gas helped a LOT with the AVs at the end.

I saw go for it. Its not that the mercs are bad pets its just that many other sets are totally overpowered for what they do. I would say ninajs and then mercs need to brought up to the same level as the other pets. Ninjas are way too squishie for the damage they do and merc damage gets resisted way too much. In addition to that the medic is about as retarded as they get. He would work so much better if he did not have a much shorter range on its weapons compared to the others. Essentially to make mercs good you have to proc it out with the -resists proc in all the pets. Eventhough it might not stack its good that its going to be up most of the time helping the damage issues.

I've been reading the MP guide above. I just have a few questions:

1. How close do you have to be to your mercs to pass inspirations to them? Is it roughly the same as to pass inspirations to other characters? Can I give inspirations to other MM's pets during combat?

2. When you do a summons, each time the a new soldier is called he's dumber, right? My first summoned merc will be Lx(whatever my level) -1, right? If he dies, the next summons will be Lx -2, right? Will this keep going like this or will it "bottom out" at a certain point(Lx + -5 maybe)?

3. Merc speak. I see the /petsay_all<{(command)}>{message} to have the Merc's speak. Will this be a one time change or a permanent change until I change it again? Example, my Mercs now says "Rock and Roll!" Will this command change this?

4. What are differences between these enhancements:

Edict of the Master: Defence Bonus
Call to Arms: Defence Bonus Aura

Sovereign Right: Resistance Bonus
Expedient Reinforcemetn: Resist Bonus Aura

5. The Alpha slotting. I thought Musculature Cardiac Radial was the highest Damage but after reading the MP I discovered that the Musculature Core Boost is better for DPS.

My questions about the Alpha:

1. Will the Alpha slotting affect me and my henches or just me?
2. I see Muscle Boost and Muscle Core Boost, I see the obvious differences( damage only vs. damage and immobilization). Are the percentage increases different between these? I've seen IOs that had multiple features but had reduced increases %-wise.

6. Zoning. My Mercs go everywhere with me but I've seen necros and hell beasts die with other MMs. What causes this? Is this just software instancing? They die on one side and just reappear on the other side?

7. I hear everyone blast the Mercs but what do they do that the others can't?

my 5 cents.
i am mostly mm addicted, had about 20 of different combination, all have been brought above lvl 40.
i had two mercs/, both were DELETED, no concerns, no pity. never look back.

zombie/dark for being very hard to play still have HUGE advantages in some abilities or synergies. even thugs for being annoying like no other still be good in certain aspects.
mercs are just horrible for no advantages.
1. lethal is most resisted damage.
2. medic is more like walking useless corpse. toss a grenade, annoy all nukers for scattering the spawn with knockback, draw the agro, one hit death. and healing like crazy something at full health while you've been dieing is his normal behavior. that IF you've managed him to survive somehow.
3. spec ops snipe, their strongest attack, tier 2 upgrade, likely never will be used in combat.
4. recharge of serum is HORRIBLE.
5. commando use A LOT of endurance, he will be empty in every fight that is longer then 30 sek. his strongest skill, the long range missile has a cooldown of 5 minutes or something alike. i don't remember exactly, its been years since i touched them.

all this has been known to devs for YEARS, no changes has been made.

Just to throw my two cents in, I have a mercs/pain that I made before I knew any better. Over the course of time, they somehow got to 50 because I liked it even though it always felt underperforming. I'd get interested, get a couple of levels, and get sick of the issues of Mercs again

Just now, a few hours ago, I decided to try something else. I needed to respec for inherent fitness, so I went the tankermind route. S/L softcapped and such. It has in the space of a few hours and a few hundred million inf (About 700, for what it's worth, and some of that was unnecessary/buy it now spending) become much more fun. Now, it's still not as good as the same character would be as Bots or Thugs, I'm sure. I'm by no means excusing the shortfalls of Mercenaries, or saying that it's acceptable for a character to only be fun with sets. Just sharing my opinion of what has turned my Mercs character around.

Some people play mercs and like the set well enough. In my opinion, the fact remains that the set has some weird issues that most of the other MM sets don't share. A healer pet with a brawl attack, an interruptible heal power, and an AoE attack that's mostly only good for drawing aggro on a pet that even most minion NPCs can one shot. Tier 2 pets with stealth but no stealth strike attacks, and who have a few control powers with such short duration and long recharge that they're more like novelty powers than actual attacks. A Tier 3 who has a nuke-style attack that has both massive knockback and a five minute recharge. And a utility power of questionable value compared to its counterparts in nearly every other MM powerset.

If you've played Masterminds before, and are comfortable trying to work around the issues with the set, you might enjoy it. Especially if you have a strong character concept that requires Mercs, rather than, say, a military themed Assault Rifle or Dual Pistols character. If nothing else, make a Mercs and see for yourself. You can get Serum at level 18 to decide if you like it or not. If getting the character to level 32 starts to feel too much like a chore, or you just dread logging in on that character, then you'll have your answer.

Yeah. I think it's a good set for people that have already played other MM's. It's not very forgiving if you screw up like some of them are.

On teams: I think the best use is to have them focus fire on the boss, to def debuff him so your blasters/scraps can kill him easily.

Solo: Just be ready for a long, slow ride to level 26, and keep the difficulty low till you've got the Commando, or you'll be waiting...waiting...waiting.... for each mob to drop. (Which means a lot less XP per hour than if you simply dropped the difficulty and killed them faster.)

Mercs was my first MM back in I6, and I haven't played one since, so I was wondering (not that I'm going to play mercs again):

All of the pets take achilles procs. How does that work? Does each pet place one debuff, or does it refresh? Will 6 pets potentially result in 6 achilles procs?

If so, that could be a redeeming feature.