The A5 mercenary is not a viable competitor to an A2 merc, and in some cases has negative incentives to use (curse overrides).
I have heard frequently that A5 mercs needs battle order and or shout. I strongly disagree. This would be annoying for Barb players who want to play with a fellow barbarian merc. This would be annoying for players who have a nice CTA and +skills. Imagine in multi-player games where five barb mercs are overriding shouts from an actual barb player. In short, think about how much less useful an A2 merc would be for some players if he had a fanaticism aura. Beast would be useless (sorry summon necros). Zealots would lose a might aura that stacks with their own, better fanaticism. This would be the same problem with Shout and BO being in the barb, but more widespread because CTA Exists and is so commonly used.
As a baseline, A5 mercs should use War Cry as their sole shout. This will add AoE stun, which helps him survive.
Bash and Stun need to go. Especially Bash. The problem with Bash is that he knocks back opponents and actually hurts his DPS. Furthermore, he chases his knocked back target and can easily get surrounded in so doing.
I am actually of the opinion that the Barbarian shouldn’t provide any Auras. Instead, he should be built as a melee brawler in his own right that can serve one of two purposes: damage or tank.
To accomplish that, make two different archetypes:
Berserk + Sword Mastery
Concentrate + Iron Skin
An act 5 merc using Concentrate with a modest iron skin can get into the 30k defense range very easily, and go much higher than that. He would be a solid tank for casters and other ranged characters that deal high damage themselves and just need a merc that doesn’t die and can keep baddies entertained.
Berserk adds a lot of value, but makes for a glass cannon mercenary. He can do a ton of damage and beat up phys immunes. He needs to be protected, so pairs well with a teleporter, summoner, or someone who can crowd control. The pay off for some micro is a high damage mercenary that crushes monsters. Sword Mastery would set the DPS above what an act 2 merc can throw out, which needs to happen if they aren’t going to add auras to the player/allies.
Both archetypes would cast War Cry with a 0.25 coefficient (25% of their attacks would be warcry) to help stun and crows control, which is great for the player as well as for mercenary survivability.
As it stands, the Act 2 merc can throw basically 2x or more the damage of an A5 mercenary. The A5 mercenary offers very little in terms gear options that pair well with the players main build (and most of that can be accomplished on an A2 merc, and most of the time more effectively).
Another way to fix some of these issues, which should be done alongside the above changes, is to look at important runewords like infinity and carefully expand the bases that they can be put into.
