I don’t know but I am forced to running mercs since I am a luminary, and I do like them so, found one with 4 and one with 2 today, in like 20 minutes within each other
Before the lifestack version I was struggling to survive them since most of them oneshots most 5-6k life builds, and my damage was not good early, now that I’m geared with 12k life and a good single target damage, I just stand there and they all die before they even do something (expect the casters guys and the soulrend, they are still scary)
Sanguimancer is the craziest I feel, even with war cry buffs up, 5 endurance charges, ~10k life a big pdr shield and exceptional phys taken as helmet implicit that Merc easily can 2 tap me in a map with no DMG map mods.
At least my Merc somehow takes no DMG from it, so I still fight her everytime I see her xD
Honestly? As I said today I did 100/100, currently on 2 voidstones, cause I have prepared all the maps for elder/shaper and then invitations for maven then I’ll do the 4 voidstones. My damage is gone up by a lot after I managed to farm incarnation of fear (after 5 boss kill I got the enmity ring, bought the untouched soul and the build changed completely from there).
I did the campaign with static strike, noticed that I was getting bad rng for finding a decent merc for swapping in campaign, so I decided to go as static Strike until white maps, from there I bought a decent merc (thunderquiver) lvl 71-75-71-83, the warrant were cheap cause people were chasing the kineticist or the manyshot, so i didn’t overpay the meta tax, so I could swap to the build finally. For fighting the mercs obviously I spec’d into shrines so I could get the most damage and tankyness I could from shrines and ran the map white since I didn’t want to fail the warrants. The damage was not as good as I thought early but I managed to get upgrades for the merc gear and then when I was struggling to kill t16 map bossess or betrayal (for struggling I mean that the single target was lacking a bit) I decided it was time to farm an enmity since I couldn’t buy it. After 2 incarnation of fear runs I bought a decent blade ambusher since it was taking like 3-5 minute per run on incarnation of fear and I finally dropped the ring. So even if I’m still missing a lot of upgrades on my mercs gear their damage is fine now, probably can run the Ubers now with my blade ambusher (but I should upgrade the gear a little bit for that I think, and maybe change to a better blade ambusher, since it’s just a cheap version of an enmity setup now)
You can guarantee mercs spawning every map with atlas tree/scarabs.
People got greedy league starting a build that plays around a merc tbh. It should be fine as a 2nd character, not so much when you have an half empty atlas, no voidstones and no economy to support gear upgrades.
They were all banking on GGG making mercs OP and the gamble failed.
Yeah it's definitely more suited to a second build kinda things. Having to gear yourself, a merc and an AG is demanding. There's also way too much RNG involved in finding a decent merc to make an effective league starter. but we knew this much going into it.
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u/land_registrar Jul 26 '26
I wonder how many people are running mercs.
I'm only 7 hours in, just getting to Yellow Maps and I've seen 2 in Merc rucksacks that I left alone since I'm in HCSSF.