Mercs That Bad?

On my quest to get a 50 of each Primary MM just because, and I've either seen almost no comments about using Merc, or just a handful of comments being bad. Are Mercs really that terrible?

When compared to thugs or bots: yes.

When compared to any other AT: nah, they still get the job done.

Yes, they are.

Mercs being a 'bad' MM set is like 'Energy Melee' being a bad scrapper primary. You still kill stuff, you just won't be min/maxing.

Mercs are the worst MM pets, but at the end of the day, you're still a mastermind. The difference between the worst and best pet sets is a lot less than you might think.

Doesn't matter what pets you're using, MMs as a whole will still be subpar to pretty much every other AT (ducks). However, within the AT itself, as others have said, while Mercs may be worse than other MM primaries, it doesn't make such a difference as comparing sets internally in other ATs where your set choice could make a significantly bigger difference.

IE: if you want to play an MM, and you want to play Mercs, the difference isn't going to be that much worse than playing thugs/bots/ninjas/whatever, MM primaries are pretty well balanced, there will always be a best and a worse in some regard, the gap just isn't all that big. It's not like you're trying to choose between Assault Rifle and Fire Blast.

The trick to MMs is that like Kheldians they are an AT where player skill is as important as build and powers.

A good MM PLAYER can do amazing things with any power set combination. But not all PLAYERS are the same skill level. In the hands of someone with no skills at hotkeys, macros, and complex positioning of multiple characters, and with poor reflexes, MMs will underperform nomatter what the build. In the hands of someone with those skills they are awesome. I see a lot of posts about issues with the AT or sets that really come down to MM's are harder than other ATs, possibly the hardest of all. And other posts by people with the skills not understanding why others don't get how powerful MMs are. The skill is the issue, not the AT, not the powers, not the build.

This is why I have such trouble with all MMs. Btu the concept is my favorite of all, and I really want to find one that I can play. I'm guessing that I'll end up on bots/ff set to aggressive. Heh. But I am trying other options before settling on that as a last effort.

That said, Mercs do have some performance issues that are not player-specific:

1. the supposedly top damaging pet, commando, misuses his knock powers and I don't think it would be possible to intentionally choose worse targets than he does on his own. You have to constantly babysit this jerkwad. He loves to fire off grenades, LRMs, and other knock powers as his opening attack on a perfectly packed spawn. THEN use full auto and flamethrower when only 1 or 2 are grouped up. I eventually started to loathe my commando. Having access to an AoE immobilize with -knock will prevent this I'm told, but that was just 1 more thing I couldn't micromanage. Others have had much better success. Loathe. Not just hate, waaaay past dislike. Loathe. Despise. And eventually respec out of and shelve permanently. fu***** Jac****

2. the spec ops have a couple good attacks on paper. In play I once ran a mission I had outleveled using just them to see how often the powers came up. It was pretty pathetic. they love their wimpy immobilize, stun, etc. And they will try to snipe while being attacked in melee. They will try to snipe, get hit and interrupted, then start sniping again. the snipe, is crap damage even when it hits.

3. they have a tiny amount of resistance, but no other protections. Keeping them alive is thus harder than several other sets, but definitely easier than ninjas.

4. they deal almost exclusively lethal damage, and unlike ninjas they do it in dots. I have very often seen my boys killed by an enemy who dies 2 seconds later from the dots stacked on them. I'm not aware of any other MM set with this issue. Even thugs have a reasonable amount of solid hits.

All that said, mercs do have a few decent slotting options. All of them take a wide selection of procs. You can drop the achilles heel into the tier 1 soldiers and that's practically AoE since there are three of them firing. All of their attacks except the melee do -def so it checks ALOT. Doing this noticeably improved my commando's damage output (I gave him a damage proc after testing it out the other way round, commando doesn't use his -def powers near enough to benefit from the heel).

If you are going to pick up all 4 pet resist and def bonuses, they at least start with some resist.

But overall, they really are that bad or possibly worse. In every circumstance I can think of, thugs do all the same stuff, have all the same advantages, but perform better.

Gavin im so sorry for the pain that mercs gave u but im glad you made this post. everyone has heard stories about mercs but not everyone has gone up and leveled one. Your descriptive tale really puts into light just how painful of a GAMING experience it would be to play such a primary especially if you had already played with the previous MM primaries. I thank you for helping me once again steer clear of mercs. Im fairly positive the devs would more than likely release a whole new pet set than update and fix mercs first.

Mercs are an entirely playable set, all the way up to 50. That said, after levelling my first character - a Mercs/Traps - to 50, playing Bots seemed like easy mode.

I like Mercs. I'd certainly like to see them improved, though. Something along the lines of these lads here.

I found while playing Mercs, I had to focus more on pet control than other MM set. The Stay/Aggressive commands were most frequently used followed by Passive/Attack my Target/Follow.

For the Stay/Aggressive commands, I would constantly hit Stay and let the mercs shoot anything within range. Clicking Stay isn't that troublesome as commanding pets can be done at any time even while other powers are casting. Recently I bought a keyboard that allows me to bind 3 keys to constantly click Stay, once per second for 10, 20 and 30 secs. This prevents them from running off.

I use Passive/AmT/Follow whenever there was a boss, elite or AV that needed to go down faster than anything else. Clicking Follow to pull them back when they decide to go melee.

The only time I use Defensive Mode is when I'm in trouble but I can usually keep a fair distance away without drawing much aggro.

It's the Merc's borderline useless Brawl and Rifle Butt powers that gets them killed, rushing into melee but ending up being lambs to a slaughter.

Every merc pet should have flamethrower as their base shooting power I mean how cool would that be.