Dragon Merc

Did anybody tested whether a Dragon Merc from Act III (with 2x Dragons plus 1x HoJ) could be good? I'm thinking about pairing one with a tesladin...Two auras, more fun?

It works. Dragon stuff on merc, Dragon stuff on you, then if you play warlock you can bind the hephasto and have enough bind lvl to gain fire aura on that too... Its OP af as is but if you have bunch of dragons around; itll be op even more.

I tested 2x Dream and 2x Dragon + HoJ.

To be honest, it's a huge waste of highrunes.

On /p1 in Act 1 you notice some effect, but against higher life monsters, for example in

Chaos Sanctuary, the inflicted damage is barely enough to cover the regeneration of monsters! On higher level counts, you won't notice any damage at all.

There are much better options for an auradin.

Ofc its waste of HRS! Why would anyone try something like that if they didnt care about wasting them.
But on /players 1 it works just fine for sure.

I am pretty sure that most people don't want to waste their highrunes...

DasNarf wrote: 2 weeks ago

I am pretty sure that most people don't want to waste their highrunes...

I dunno, a lot of offline players cheat their runes eventually anyway.
Personally dont see anything special finding something good offline then showing it to people for example on forums like these because its offline. You could of have just cheated the item in. Zero impressiveness.

No synergies (or Mastery) -> too low dmg to be viable.

Semirotta wrote: 2 weeks ago

I dunno, a lot of offline players cheat their runes eventually anyway.
Personally dont see anything special finding something good offline then showing it to people for example on forums like these because its offline. You could of have just cheated the item in. Zero impressiveness.

Yeah, of course, if he is cheating he probably won't care.

But your argument based on the presumption of him cheating is way off. And even if he would cheat his runes, why would he want to choose a build that isn't very good at all?

Let's do some math:

Level 44

Holy Fire deals 120-288 fire damage per tick. Multiply this with 3 (every item ticks once) we end up with 360-864.

This is the maximum damage dealt to monsters in melee range. Damage linearly scales down to 50% at maximum range. Since the Act 3 merc won't come in melee range very often (and if, he will try to get some distance asap), he will deal a much lower damage than possible. Add to this that he will fall behind very often, and a Dragondin has no way to reposition him due to his lack of using Enigma.

So we are talking about an average of maybe 270-648 (factor 0.75).

For comparison:

Paladin's

Holy Fire is at 864-2073, which translates into 2592-6219 at melee range.

It isn't worth investing 7 highrunes to add like 10% extra damage.

Yep, definitely not exactly worth the hrs but then again I play the game for fun and its all just pixels I dont really care about value of things.
Constantly sell stuff cheaper than it is or give free completely because I just dont care if it sells cheaper as long as others are having fun as its not away from me in any way.

If I dropped hrs, id be trying out fun builds. Unfortunately even 16 hours a day isnt enough for hrs so these days barely spend an hour or two to play and not even daily :'D

Semirotta wrote: 2 weeks ago

Yep, definitely not exactly worth the hrs but then again I play the game for fun and its all just pixels I dont really care about value of things.
Constantly sell stuff cheaper than it is or give free completely because I just dont care if it sells cheaper as long as others are having fun as its not away from me in any way.

If I dropped hrs, id be trying out fun builds. Unfortunately even 16 hours a day isnt enough for hrs so these days barely spend an hour or two to play and not even daily :'D

I won't argue that. If this is what makes you happy, more power to you.

But here we try to help someone we don't know, and thus means to give the best advice possible.

Neither fire nor light auras are in any way really worth it on classes that cannot actually support them and scale the damage. And that inherently includes all mercs.

They work on a paladin, thanks to them being able to pump up the synergies.

And they work on a sorc, thanks to fire/light mastery doing essentially the same thing (better in the light case actually, worse for fire).

Everything else that's just stuck with the base auras and no significant push to them pretty much just makes it a complete waste of runes.