Merc for ubers

Which merc is has the highest survival rate against ubers? Which merc can deal the highest damage to them?

I suppose the items and the synergy with the main character also matter.

Any comment is welcome.

I would say the best bet is

Life Tap and alot of crushing blow, if you want him/her to be a direct participant. Regular lifeleech and damage are just going to be too low. I wouldn't bet on the merc to survive very long regardless.

edit: regarding which merc, not sure. I would go with

Holy Freeze, the slow could be nice. But I'm by far no expert with mercs and ubers.

Merc will NOT survive

Uber Tristram. Regardless of how you gear them. However, if farming for UT, then I've found a well geared act 5 or act 2 are better suited. Act 1 and 3 are too fragile.

Mercs will usually not survive

Uber Tristram.

The most survivable merc I've had is an Act Cold Rogue Scout wielding a Mist runeword

Grand Matron Bow and wearing Treachery for an 8-frame attack speed under

Fanaticism. The bow and her cold skills freeze groups of enemies, and she heals from the

Life Tap that I proc.

She typically gets through DClone fights unscathed, and can hold her own when mobbed by Urdars.

Uber Tristram is a bit hit-and-miss due to the number of adds coming from all directions though.

For more survivability, I gave her a

Steel Shade

Armet as mercs tend to be oblivious to fire damage like hydras!

you will need a summon necro with an army to take the hits instead. thats the only way my merc has survived

A well geared merc, be that A2 or A5, can easily handle

Uber Tristram so long as you take care of two things for him beyond his normal gear:

1) You need a way to counter meph's aura. Generally, in normal gear, your merc will still end up with solid negative resistances across the board. Something annoying like a pre-procced Treachery can help offset that. Or if you're a pally, just get

Salvation to offset meph's conv for yourself, your merc and whomever else may be there. There's other options but something needs to be done so he doesn't just get 1shot on meph.

2) Stop him from focusing on

Baal's phys immune adds for too long. Typically, unless you're on meph (see above), it takes quite a while for your merc to die. But he can. And he will eventually. The simple general counter to that is the same it is for you:

Life Tap.

Über Baal however summons phys immune adds and since your

Bone Break (if you even have one) doesn't work for your merc, that means that even with

Life Tap, your merc will not be leeching anything off them and will eventually die. So either kill stuff quick enough for it not to matter or reposition him every so often to get him off those adds.

When you successfully account for the two above, a well built A2/A5 merc has no problem with ubers whatsoever. Well, except for

Lilith..if she homes in on your merc, odds are he won't survive that no matter what you do. Unless of course you throw some full rejuvs at him..that'll do it for both her and

Baal's PI adds if you wanna bother.

I'm not exactly keeping track so don't quote the numbers but guesstimating, I would say my uber pally's merc (A2 might) probably dies once every 20 runs or so. And when he does, it is to

Lilith (or more accurately a combination of

Lilith and amp because I get too lazy to clear the adds around her first). Nothing but her even comes close to killing him. And that's with me never bothering to use a pot for him.

Damage wise you can theoretically get more out of an A5

Frenzy merc for ubers specifically because dual Last Wish = insane crushing blow procs. The problem is, you have to keep him on the actual ubers. So better be able to clear the adds quickly (which in turn is its own waste of time) or keep repositioning (also a waste of time). If you don't he'll blind his adds (due to the same Last Wish), overwrite

Life Tap in doing so, and get himself killed as a result. Plus the crushing-dps is kinda wasted on them, due to the crap life.
Infinity A2 probably comes in a close second though for A2, you have plenty of options.
Personally, I don't bother with crushing for my merc since I'm usually the one killing the actual ubers while he roams around cleaning up the adds in the meantime. For that, any ol' damage stick will do (botd, Insight, ...). Just need to stick with something that doesn't overwrite your

Life Tap so he gets to keep using that.

I'm using act 5 merc with dual Last Wish and he can see the

Hellfire Torch drop only one times on ten runs... against

Lilith there is no chance to survive...

My Act 1 rouge with Faith bow/andarials/fort tends to live the most in my runs. It just depends on where she stands. Sometimes she stays out of the way and others she runs right into the middle of things. As others mentioned,

Lilith is probably where she dies the most. Here is an example:

Thank you all for your inputs.

It seems that everyone recommends

Life Tap. My

Frenzy barb doesn't seem to need

Life Tap to survive the ubers, though it dies one out of ten to twenty times. Would

Decrepify from Lawbringer s, equipped as switch weapons, help the merc to survive?

I try and lure the ubers in UT out one by one to avoid getting into the difficult situation of dealing with multiple ubers at a time. It sometime works and sometimes doesn't. I suppose everyone uses this strategy.

On a different but relevant topic, what makes

Lilith so deadly?

A couple of hits on a Life Tapped monster should fully heal you or your merc.

You will almost certainly heal faster than you can be damaged!

bubix wrote: 1 year ago

It seems that everyone recommends

Life Tap. My

Frenzy barb doesn't seem to need

Life Tap to survive the ubers, though it dies one out of ten to twenty times. Would

Decrepify from Lawbringer s, equipped as switch weapons, help the merc to survive?

Life Tap is the simplest and typically most reliable solution and something that any physical uber runner tends to have with him anyways.
Decrep would help with survivability as it does slow stuff and reduces overall incoming damage/time but it typically doesn't reduce it to the point of "merc outregens without lifetap". Unless you're a summoner and spread the damage over tons of adds anyways, that's a different story.

So basically, decrep simply gives you more time to kill them before they kill your merc.
Whereas lifetap gives you nigh infinite time as damage is out-leeched and merc only dies under special circumstances (focusing on PIs, somehow gets 1shot, manages to miss 20 swings in a row, ..).
Generally speaking.

Lawbringer in your case further aids survivability a bit in that the aura on it would knock meph's adds around and hence drop their dmg, too.

bubix wrote: 1 year ago

On a different but relevant topic, what makes

Lilith so deadly?

She just hits like a freight train on crack by comparison. Plus if you leave her

Succubus adds up, they can amp you which gives

Lilith a very real chance to 1-shot even a decently geared smiter all of a sudden. And the poison doesn't help I suppose.

Saw a video yesterday (can't find it anymore unfortunately) about an act 5

Frenzy merc with really good gear (

Eth forty, Grief, Last Wish and arreats) that survived the ubers and lillith, and completely went HAM on shit... dude was not dying because of the lifetap proc life leach and how fast it attacked with the

Fanaticism aura from the smiter on... that thing was nuts.

MalystryxVoF wrote: 1 year ago

and how fast it attacked with the

Fanaticism aura from the smiter on

A Grief/Last Wish

Frenzy merc caps out on attack speed after the 2nd or 3rd

Frenzy stack (depending on how good/bad the Grief is and assuming no other IAS). Beyond that point,

Fanaticism does nothing for their attack speed actually. It merely bumps their dmg/ar.

some guy on youtube having an act5 merc solo uber, so merc can do a bit more than surviving at uber albeit very expansive

weegee wrote: 1 year ago

some guy on youtube having an act5 merc solo uber, so merc can do a bit more than surviving at uber albeit very expansive

Well, only with a VERY lenient definition of "solo". There's plenty of vids of A2 and 5 mercs "soloing" ubers but at least from all the ones I've seen, they all interpret "solo" as constant gear switching, throwing countless pots at them, still telestomping with them, taking care of adds so the merc doesn't have to and so on and so forth.

I have yet to see a merc actually solo a run in any of them.
It certainly would be possible..but your average YTer as expected sticks to taking the cheesy easy way out, rather than figuring out a real solution.

Either way, solo or not, mercs on ubers are highly underrated and can certainly stay alive and be of actual use. Just needs to be built right.