Post your Controversial Takes Here

I'll start..

BiS merc gear for end game farming is not Andarial's/Fortitude or Andarial's/Treachery or Andaria's/COH. It is Cure / Gladiator's Bane.

Cure
1) In D2R, your merc's main job is to be a walking aura farm, not to kill things. Gives you a very useful aura for all characters, not just ES

Nova sorc. However, based on my experience it also IMPROVES THE MERC'S SURVIVABILITY vs. Andarial's or leach helms. The benefit of leach is more than offset by not having cursed

Amplify Damage DOUBLING the merc's damage taken pretty much non stop, as well as the reduced poison duration. And of course it very much improves your own survivability as well.

When you fly around with TP killing boss packs every couple seconds and the

Amplify Damage curse lasts for ~1 minute, without

Cleansing you are cursed nearly all the time.

Cleansing I believe reduces curse duration much more than the stated 39% reduction due to how the game applies it. I haven't timed it, but in practice it seems to reduce it to 7-10 seconds.

Note - the formula for

Amplify Damage duration from monsters in hell is 5 + (3*slvl), where slvl = mlvl/5 + 1. So for a level 90 monster it is 5+(3*(90/5+1)) or 62 seconds.

Gladiator's Bane
2) Perhaps the more controversial take. Gladiator's Bane lacks all the things you typically look for in a merc armor - Life Leach, Resistances, Percent Damage Reduction, IAS, Increased Damage. But in my experience, it is "best by test". Maybe it's the 30% faster hit recovery, or maybe it's the cannot be frozen, or maybe it is the 50% poison duration reduction, or maybe it is the 20 integer magic damage reduction, or maybe it is the 20 integer physical damage reduction, or maybe it's the insanely high defense - but I find when my merc wears this, he stays healthy better than with the other options. If you want to max out resistance, you can do so with an

Um rune or jewel in a socket, but I haven't found that to be necessary for most uses. Relatedly, integer physical and magic reduction are extremely underrated, they effectively provide an average pct damage reduction of around 20-25% in hell against your typical enemy.

Combined, these options have zero leach, but when your character is high level and kills things fast, the merch barely has time to leach. And if you watch it, Merc regen is somehow amazingly fast even without

Prayer, the leach is simply not necessary.

CHANGE MY MIND:
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