… and a little bit of SP modding…
But don’t get me wrong, no modification to items nor boosting merc stats in excel spreadsheets…
What needs to be done:
get Full hireling equipment mod for d2r (possibly with two ring slots for the merc).
in monstats.txt where it is determined what he can wear in offhand (usually it’s shie for standard shields only try adding shld for all shields or head for necromancer shrunken heads) next in hirelings.txt for all lines of expansion act3 fire merc make him a necromancer equivalent simply go to last row and type: nec where applicable.
get ahold of full trag-oul set, two sojs, mara, aldur boots, hexfire, and 4x perfect fire facets, larzuk hexfire, trang’s chest, offhand and helm. put fire facets in. equip everything on act 3 merc.
What happens is due to a3 merc no longer being tied to sorc class actually gets full benefit from the +oskill the trang set provides instead of only +3. You’ll get +18 to fireball for your merc, but that’s not all… full trang set offers +3 to Fire mastery, and with hexfire sword, mara and 2x soj you can beef it up to 10lvl fire mastery plus extra +/- 20 to fire damage and enemy fire resist reduction from those 4x fire facets. You’ll sit around +113% fire skill damage total with fire mastery, and You can still battle command your merc on top with CtA (extra 7%) the upper fork dmg for fireball exceeds 10k…
I know it’s by means of moding but hands down first practical dmg build for the act 3 merc… his fireball level exceeds 55 with warcries…
any of you folks eager to try it out?
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I must admit that’s an interesting way to bump Act 3 Fire but it proves the point I made in another thread that if we added Gloves, Belt, Boots + Jewelry to Merc’s, it’d only lead to more Power Creep. Would the Merc transform into a Vampire and have god awful casting frame rates? Curious what setups people will come up with for Cold and Lightning variants.
He’s decent with only extra gloves and belt no need for boots and jewlery, although they are a cherry on the cake…
The A3 does transform into vampire, although on contrary to common belif it benefits his attack rate… seemes native a3 merc FCR was even worse than the vampire’s…
what it does however is fixes merc kiting… a3 merc is always walking to keep armor class, yet he mooves like a fly in tar, the transformation remedies this, he now mooves as fast as he would be running while still walking ( one Cooley vid with Xtimus explains this in detail) aldur boots only boost this effect further for +80% FRW. now the merc reaches kite destination instantly, and actually has time to engage mobs, and oh boy he does… even stripping him from sojs and mara does not seem to slow him down significantly, he’d be down to like 8k dmg…
Don’t look at me like that saying it’s going overboard… i personally would like to have the ability to utilize class equivalent passives on mercs, and perhaps giving him an ability to use orbs ( not staves orbs only) as a sorceress class equivalent…
Unfortuneatly… despite the working: +to class skills and + to class tabs, single class passive skills still have no effect on equivalent class mercenaries, not only sorceress masteries don’t work as a class skill on act3 merc after giving him the sorc equiv, but even things like + to natural resistance (barbarian only) or + to sword mastery (barbarian only) do not work on neither barb merc if present on primal helm that they have equipped…
Damn shame if you ask me, as enabling the orbs on a3 merc ( which look pretty similar to them holding a sword) would solve a lot of issues with a3 merc damage… it still wouldn’t be as good as trang’s set for fire merc as a nec class, however at least equipping the merc just to be medicore support wouldn’t require the kidney of your firstborn as payment for the pelthora of rainbow facets theese mercs are sepose to utilize just to be semi viable.
Just an orb with +3 to sorc class tab 20%FCR +3 to coresponding elemental mastery passive and some bonus to utilized skills, and that’s all then mixmatch poison length reduction FRW FCR + skills and a smaller number of rainbow facets, and they’d have around 5k dmg, which is semi decent, for a fraction of the price of fully decked out in rainbow facets…
/wall of text
in my opinion the game is already easy enough, we shouldn’t make it even easier by transforming the mercs into another fully-geared char.
if you want to make the a3 mercs more viable just give them better utility spells.
the enchant one is decent , especially for summoners who can benefit from the buff on each minion, but the other two?.. pure garbage.
why not give them necro curses like Dim Vision, or Attract, or Weaken to make them more useful.
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