RW ideas for A3 mercs

General Discussion
1

I thought up some runewords as a means to help address the poor state of act 3 mercs despite the changes already made to them. I made up these runewords in another topic but I decided to make my own post showcasing them here. They would not only be useful for act 3 mercs, but players as well.

The problem with a3 merc is their gear choices. They can’t use pally shields and being stuck to swords has always limited them. Now that frenzy barbs exist and have the stats to equip most useful swords like plague and last wish, there’s very little else than to juice their already bad damage.

Pretty much the best way i see blizz devs helping fix a3 mercs is making new runewords or gear that gives fire, lightning, and cold mastery as O skills in them. Probably new highlevel shield runewords with 6-10 mastery/20fcr/-10-15 res. They should also allow hotos to be made in swords as well but that’s a tangent for another time.

Like the new helmets and sunder charms, they would follow the same template of covering every damage:

Gluttony (FalGul)- poison shield (2 runes so necros can use them in heads and because not many 2 rune runewords).

20-30 str
20fcr
25fhr
15-25% poison skill damage
50% chance to cast lvl 21 lower res when hit
20% chance to cast lvl 50 poison explosion when you kill an enemy.
25% chance to cast lvl 32 teeth when you kill an enemy.
5% max poison res (gul)
(Updated).

Fal adds 10 str but the rune word could boost that to 20-30 (these mercs lack strength) hence the Fal. All these secondary runes fit the theme of a specific damage type.

Note: I am going to only add my thoughts on what should be the core affixes of these shields and any further input or ideas for other are welcome.

Lust (FalVex)-fire mastery one

6-10 fire mastery
20-30 strength
25% Chance to cast a lvl 20 blaze when hit
-10-15% to enemy fire resistance
20fcr
25 faster hit recovery
15% chance to cast lvl 5 attract when hit.

Sloth (FalOhm)- cold mastery one (give it holy freeze aura since Doom is the only other thing that can give holy freeze).

1-2 cold mastery
8-12 holy freeze aura
20-30 strength
20% chance to cast level 20 cyclone armor when hit.
10-20% cold skill damage
20 fcr
25 fhr

Envy (FalLo)-lightning mastery

6-10 lightning mastery
20-30 strength
15% chance to cast lvl 20 thunderstorm when hit
25% chance to cast lvl 30 nova when hit
50% chance to cast lvl 20 teleport on attacking.
6-10 telekinesis
20fcr
25fhr

Sorry, there’s no way to make this shield so that javzons and dream pallies cant take it and become even more unstoppable so it has the teleport on hit, kind of like the oculus. This would be when you hit you teleport. A3 mercs hardly ever attack and when they do its when they are surrounded. It works for them. Remember this isn’t necessarily for your busted builds. A3 mercs hardly swing but a small chance if they get surrounded which is why this is actually useful for them while not making zons monsters in the process. Im sure someone could game this runeword but it wouldnt be fun lol. Might make FoH or a shockauradin overpowered though. I’m not sure.

Greed (FalSur)- magic based shield dun dun dunn. Shield would give magic resistance and -enemy magic resistance.

10-50% magic resistance
-10-25% enemy magic res.
20fcr
25fhr
20-30 str
6-10 to berserk
Lvl 8-12 sanctuary aura when equipped.
100-150% extra gold dropped.

Has to have brutal odds and lopsided so that pvpers can negate busted magic damage and pvmers the bad sunder charm. Getting 50% res and 25% damage would be very difficult (1/1000 odds) hence the name. The berserk and sanctuary is also there to help melee builds like shapers that have little alternatives to phys immunes. Ever since the sanctuary aura fix it has become an almost necessity to counter undeads and barbarians have an unfair advantage among melee being able to have berserk as well as dual wield a grief and a lawbringer to render undeads laughably easy.

Vanity (FalBer)-phys based.

20-30 str
Indestructible
10-15% phys reduction (ber+rw)
66% chance to proc lvl 1 amp when hit
50% chance to cast lvl 5 corpse explosion on kill
10% chance to convert enemy on hit.
Lvl 10-15 thorns aura.
20fcr
25fhr

The conversion is there to balance the potential opness of the shield for players while pose little risk for the merc. Some builds will be able to use this shield but it will be a risk between corpse booms and converting enemies. It seems odd but fits the name and the thorns balances out enemies that wind up converted. The conversion needs to be done to make sure the multi hit builds dont become too op and to reduce risk of conversion you want to use high damaging attacks.

Well, what do you guys think?

2 Likes
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We have many ideas, but what’s the point of having them if we can’t discuss them on the forum?

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Who says we can’t discuss them?

1 Like
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The D4 moderator who feels entitled to close threads without explanation because no one wants to hang out in her part of town.

3 Likes
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Yu’re overreacting that d4 dev is just sloppy and doesn’t quite care, i’m pretty sure he wanted to block the other topic that was next to Char’sJT the guy in that thread demanded something from blizz in a bad way, not to mention few days later two other threads next to that thread got blocked noe was directly below it and the other one was directly above it…

DO either that moderator was drunk or in a big hurry, and staff came to him and told him quickly go over d2r forums there’s some a-hole that craptalks about us, go lock his thread, and the guy paused his 1001 tasks and in a 0.5 second clicked in that direction… although he missed… He looked back only once when staff told him he did that job poorly, so he went back agin and clicked two times in that direction, misssing for the 2bd and 3rd time, and never looked back after that…

I assume that’s how it went…
they simply don’t care about this forum other than their good name…
what makes you think all of a sudden CharlesJT is on their black list? what makes Him so important to the devs? nothing, it was simply a lazy-but attempt to block certain topic and CharlsJT’s thread got hit with a ricoche… big deal for us, but they don’t care…

As for the OP giving a3 merc an oskill even a passive one that isn’t on their skillbar doesn’t help them jack, they need to have that skill added in hirelings.txt first, otherwise it’s just a wasted affix… trust me i’m a modder of this game since ~20 years and been through this like a zillion of times…

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Not to derail this thread too much more, but there was also a thread started by TDJ asking about what happened with CJT’s thread, and that one didn’t get locked, it got completely deleted! I’m not generally one to overreact, but that was… concerning.

To the OP, adding a high chance to teleport on attack is a clever way to discourage use by Javazons and Shockadins! Dreamadins however already have the shield slot taken. :wink:

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however as i said before adding passive oskills such as fire, cold, lighning masteries will not work for mercs. Currently they don’t benefit from any oskill that they don’t normally use.

The best way to check this is by placing an primal helm with sword mastery on act5 merc. and the damage does not go up. However when said mercs are edited in hirelings.txt to natively have at least 1 slvl to that passive, they do benefit from adding more levels.
I have no idea if devs fixed it, however in LoD the bonus was displayed on merc’s character sheet, only for a blink of an eye, when act 5 merc was dealing damage/hitting a mob. I have no idea if it was corrected.

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I would vote to switch the increased poison damage to -enemy poison resist to compete with 3pc Trang set. As a poison necro lover, this would be super sweet and worthwhile to find a good shield base.

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I made bonuses different so that trangs would still be useful as i feel like -res would make trangs obsolete.

1 Like
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People have floated ideas on how to buff Act 3 Mercenaries and it largely boils down to the fact that they can’t block(what’s the point of being the only Merc with a Shield if you cant use it?), have horrible offense(synergies + lack of Elemental Mastery really hurt them here for a spellcaster in terms of raw power, not withstanding the lack of -Resistance) and little means to recover life(Life leech doesn’t help them, leaving Redemption aura(via Phoenix) as their only option(for now)).

What you’ve proposed somewhat addresses the raw power but A3 needs more than just that. Cold/Lightning counterparts to Flickering Flame(yielding Resist Cold/Lightning) along with Prayer would really help A3 imo.

Also… runewords are limited to 7 attributes, not including rune effects. Gluttony violates it by having 9(also that’s stupidly broken for a 2 rune runeword).

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On the below mentioned thread we discussed mainly a rework of uniques with several ideas to help the Act 3 mercs (mainly a proposal to Lidless Wall, Hexfire and Splendor to a lesser extend). With only very few added RWs, one was specificially designed only to serve Act3 mercs.

Since they can not block (and I´m sure we wont see this changed) we only added affixes which would help specificially those dudes and the -100 to mana prevents other classes to us it on top of a relativ big price tag.

As DarkHelmet already mentioned some of your proposal are not possible with the current affix limit. And some stuff doesn´t make to much sense imho. E.g 100% chance of open wounds on "Gluttony "? How would that ever be applied?

Keep up thinking :slight_smile: Make Iron Wolfes great “again”!

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Gluttony is not broken at all. The poison explosion and teeth are just flavor skills that hardly any build would be able to take full advantage of and the ones that could it wouldnt be that great. The teeth proc is a nod to how many teeth people have. Realistically its just there for that visual cool factor. Same with the open wounds. It’s a nod to the concept of “gluttony.”

Not to mention a bone nec could have fun with it by giving them aoe while using bonespear.

The problem i see with a lot of proposed item designs by players is that each affix is fit to serve an optimized meta. Sometimes you need to throw useless stuff on items because its weird and looks cool which is how the devs clearly approached some items.

Gluttony in particular is made with many builds in mind. Shave off the open wounds and rep life then. It’s meant to be fun but still useful, not just useful for a3 only. However i added in it to follow the current dev’s “approach is elemental damage type” philosophy. Anyways i axed off 2 of the flavor mods replenish life and open wounds.

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But it can not proc on a act 3 merc. What is the point of this RW. Otherwise we have plenty of choices and there would be no need for a new RW tbh! :man_shrugging:

And a high rep life would be good for an act 3 merc without any source of sanctuary or life after kill. Or am I mistaken here?

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What good is bonebreak and the magic resistance charm when they’re useless on most builds? It just follows their shallow template as i previously said. It’s for poison builds mainly and yea notice how there is no poison merc?

The piety is nice but will make an auradin pretty busted.

1 Like
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Which one, the dual dream who looses the second dream? Or the Firedin who looses the shield as well? Not sure it this is the case. You could argue that the -100 mana might even be not be enough as a need disadvantage. But not sure whats happens if you have higher -mana then you have mana on your char (every char has more than 100 Mana at lvl 59 except a barb with 68). But I can not see how this would be busted. But it certainly helps an act3 merc more than a Lidless, Splendor or late eth spirit monarch tbh. :slight_smile:

And I can´t imagine a build who would benefit from a piety shield more than the usual BIS shields tbh.

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The masteries apply their bonus twice to the melee component of the auradin’s damage. I did the math and using piety over dream or dragon decreases the aura damage a bit but not by much.

It will however double dip on the melee/ranged component of the attack. Making it very potent. You will do more lightning and fire damage with piety than with 2x dream or 2 dragon.

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How´s your calc? Can´t follow. A lvl 99 pally with dual dream, arach, enigma, crescent moon, maras, raven, LOH and Travs (assuming now charms at all to keep it simply) has - according to maxroll - an aura dmg of around 1-2300 (so 1150 avg and 1-7000 to your attack). If your take away the shield the dmg goes down to 1-900 (so 450 avg) and 1-2721. So a significant drawback. A lvl 3 light mastery on piety (highest roll) with +5 to all skills from the above gear will end up in +134% light dmg (lvl 8 mastery). So your average of 450*1,34 = 612 lightning aura dmg. Almost half of the dual dream. With a crescent moon in a PB your Zeal attack (maxed + synergie) does 23,6k dps. With a grief 32k dps (both dual dream) vs. 14k with CM and 23k with grief (1xdream and piety). But only with perfect rolled gear and three negative (!!!) res, low mana/life, low FHR, low MF with piety. Can´t utilize the +5% on max res as well.

Or where is my mistake here? That would not be used on a auradin imho with this numbers.

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I have my calculation based on a normal CS hell venom lord (they are the tankiest in the game).

With lower res on from plague and running lvl 25 conviction:

A 5 frame Zeal does 10k fire dps and 11,326 lightning dps with 1 hoj, dragon, and dream on a venom lord (using fire rupture as well).

A lvl 3 fire mastery is 44% skill damage and lvl 3 lightning mastery is 74% skill damage.

Take the 10k fire dps and times by 1.44 which is 14,400 dps (fire and light mastery apply after all other bonuses). Then increase that dps by 1.44 again because fire mastery applies AGAIN on melee attacks for 20,736 fire dps.

For lightning 11,326x1.74 for 20,420 dps then 1.74x again when the hit is applied for 35,580 lightning dps. That’s roughly 56k elemental damage on a venom lord, excluding phys portion and only at 5 frame zeal.

Note, i’m not even adding PLUS skills to the masteries which makes it even more crazily op. The masteries are OP because they double dip skill damage on melee (and now on ranged) attacks. And no, the double dip is not additive, it’s multiplicative. Also remember, masteries apply after ALL other synergies. It is only additive with facets and other sources of +elemental skill damage (which also double dip btw).

It’s why the enchant demon machine sorc is so op. Fire mastery applies to enchant damage when buffed then again on ranged attack. This is also why after the NHD and changes to ranged elemental damage you see some weird builds shoving facets everywhere because facets effectively work double on melee and ranged attacks.

This is why I decided to split the masteries to different shields in the first place and why i specifically focused on shields. It gets in the way of dual dream/auradin shenanigans. It’s the only way to balance paladin and in hindsight the masteries should be limited to 1 on the shields.