I know, I know, “Changes are gonna ruin the game”, but seriously. Why is the act 3 mercenary so useless compared to the other ones? All of the other mercs have some form of viability and good abilities:
Act1 Merc: reduces enemy armor with inner sight and attacks from range. It’s pretty good if you give it a faith bow and use it with the right character.
Act 2 Merc: Do I even need to explain? He has inbuilt auras and can also use insight or infinity poleaxes.
Act 3 Merc: No built in auras, very weak elemental skills that do next to nothing in higher difficulties.
Act 5 Merc: Not great, but can still be useful and hit stuff hard with the right gear. Might benefit from being able to cast some limited warcries.
Obviously the Act 3 merc falls WAY short of the others, why not give the guy some love and at least give them some kind of aura or something? Maybe a weak conviction aura to help elemental characters? It needs to be something good, because the act 3 merc is virtually worthless right now.
One says “they are the weakest” and another (bolded for emphasis) “They are akin to Sorcerers, but are relatively durable, and are arguably the most useful hireling in the game due to their pure elemental damage attacks and ranged fire support.”
The only thing they should revamp is A3 merc and the A.I.
I would really like to see some kind of Code rendered that tells the A.I. to attack the players target.
Re-typing what I have put in a few other threads on this topic.
Rouge is good as she is, her main problem is bows just suck, ask an Amazon. There are a few good bows to give her but not much that compares to what the A2 aura’s can. To help her they need to work on the bow mechanics.
A3 mercs need better ‘masteries’ and a change up on a few skills. Fire Wolf needs to lose Inferno. Lit Merc needs to lose charged bolt. Ice wolf is good. Add a few levels to their skills and give them better masteries and they are good.
A5 mercs need to use all weapons and even duel wield.
It would help, if they can fix WSB why can’t they deal with fixing the inferno bug…but the Fire wolf spends a lot of time walking up into melee range to use inferno. That usually gets him killed. If he only had ranged attacks, he would stay back out of harms way and just spam spells.
That would sick AF hahaha. Giving him chant would definitely make him viable. The light one could get static shock, and the cold one could be given blizzard and cold mastery to hit hard.
it was maybe , to quote a certain blizzcon , “an out of season april joke”
i never seen any use for them personally even though i tried so much.
Even with +skills and conviction their damage is low.
and they have their niche in normal mode i guess, but in nightmare and hell , they don’t do any damage nor can they give really usefull aura.
and even the ice one doesn’t have much use since act 2 merc can have holy freeze.
I hear that a lot of people want mercenaries to be rebalanced and I don’t mind having some more choice when I’m thinking about which one to use, I remember my sister always loved act 3 merc when we just started playing the game when it launched
But I have one issue that I would like to resolve even before merc rebalancing, I spoke about it in this thread if you need some more info:
The main topic is that Merc auras are not consistent and they should remain on you 100% of the time and current Merc in vanilla is always left behind and is not being helpful if you are fast and not using teleport
Act 1: Can now use Crossbows and Amazon specific Bows. Can now come with Ice Arrow and Amplify Damage, or Fire Arrow and Decrepify. Both come with Multiple Shot.
Now both have a slow and a damage boosting skill, and both have a form of AoE.
Act 2: Nightmare Mecs no longer have different Auras from Normal and Hell. All now have Fend as well as Jab.
The fact that the Nightmare Mecs specifically has different abilities was somewhat baffling especially since they were so much better then the others. Added Fend for a small amount of AoE to Compensate.
Act 3: Can now use Scepters and Paladin specific Shields. Can now come with Zeal, Holy Freeze, and Ice Blast; Zeal, Holy Shock, and Lightning; or Zeal, Holy Fire, and Fire Ball.
Now all have Zeal, a level 12 Magic spell, and an Aura. The Addition of Zeal makes their swords much more useful.
Act 5: Can now Dual Wield. Can now Equip Clubs and Axes. Always has Frenzy and Might Aura. Uses Bash or Stun (unchanged)
Now they are much closer to actual Barbarians.
All 3 Mecs now have 3 Skills and some sort of party ability and with the increased items they can use allows for more nuanced strategies. All have AoE so they can accidentally kill a minion before dying to Diablos Lightning Hose.
The main problem i see with act 3 mercs is NOT the missing gear (that would just be like a +5 to skills; Belt +1, amu +2, rings +2). The problem is the missng synergies and masteries. a fully skilled and equipped fire sorc fireball does around 20k damage. A lvl 98 merc’s fireball does 429-469 (lvl 29). Even if you ramp the level up by 20 (!!!), it only does 845-912. So Masteries are a must. Also if you ramp the level up so much, +skill items matter less, since they barely have an affect on the damage.
Here is my go at it:
All get 10% more strength sothat they can use spirit shield at level 90.
A3 Fire: Fireball + Firewall + Fire Mastery; Firewall doesnt need synergies to do good damage, plus that inferno needs him to engage in close combat, which is like suicide for him. Firewall is the AoE attack, fireball the main attack. Fireball and mastery needs a buff to the level (maxlevel is 29 for Fb at levle 98), even 10 levels for Fb (29 to 39) and the same levels to fire mastery (maxlevel 39) only get the damage to 2.1k. Maybe one could add hidden skills that he does not use for synergie? Like firebolt, just that he has no chance to pick it (which skill he picks is determined by a %) for the synergy.
A3 Cold: Glacial spike and Frost orb (needs less synergies), cold mastery and Frozen armor.
Same problem as the Fire merc. Hidden Synergy skill like Ice Bolt. Still Bad damage, though good crowd freezing capabilities due to the frozen orb.
A3 Lightning: Lightning, Lightning mastery, and either nova or chain lightning.
Better synergies, better damage than the 2 others. Maybe even a static with a very low % of triggering (since its quite op)
Not sure on this but maybe one could add a flat lvl 1 Fire/cold/lightning res aura. No scaling with the merc’s level, just flat out lvl 1. that would be a +50 to that element res, might give him so usefullness and fits a bit to the merc’s elemental design. Though i can see balance issues like ladder reset groups using 3 of those mercs to gain +50 all res in nightmare and making it too easy.
