Why are mercs utterly useless on hell ?.

I had a5

Frenzy merc with 2×Grief, CoH, and

Um'd Gface. If I took the extra 30 sec to proc

Fade on him (not as much of a hassle as some people make it out to be), he survived Ubers. Only took 2-3 purple pots too.

Most likely either youre undergeared or you gotta figure out how to position & play your merc better. Or adjust his gear depending on the scenario. Or youre trying to bite off more than you can chew.

I had a1 merc on another build too with

Um'd

Shaftstop,

Rockstopper, and Harmony and she had no problem surviving

Baal waves either, when positioned correctly. No problems surviving Trav runs with her either, again when positioned correctly. Just gotta find the missing piece of the puzzle dude.

ceving wrote: 6 months ago

And of course you have to feed your merc with Shift + 1-4.

People forget potions are part on the game. They are usefull in many cases. You have to use them.

That's same with weapons repair. "Oh no, I'll have to repair my weapon if I don't use a

Phase Blade".

all my mercenary use the same stuff,

Eth Insight,

Eth Treachery, andy helmet. they survive fine, they are not in the game to carry you, mostly just to give you free Insight.
also if your kill speed is slow they are going to tank longer and die.
the only times my mercenary dies is when we find a nasty pack with crazy aura/damage modifiers and he gets oneshotted alerting me of danger so I can escape or kill them before they can attack me lol.

On my best character, I run an act 2 might merc with Pride in an ethereal +15% ed base, ethereal

Andariel's Visage socketed with +15% IAS / +20 something % fire resist jewel, and Fortitude in ethereal

Sacred Armor with ~900 base def. He's constantly buffed with

Battle Orders,

Battle Command, and

Shout. An absolute tank of a merc, but he was more expensive to equip than the character he supports lol

IMO, no matter how good your merc is, it's incredibly helpful to have access to

Teleport so that you can reposition it as needed. Summoning necros often run Enigma to do this with their skeletons & golems too. The AI in this game was coded back in maybe the 1990s, so NPC fight IQ leaves a little bit to be desired. They just don't understand good positioning in a fight, and that alone can make it harder to keep them alive.

Sean wrote: 6 months ago

IMO, no matter how good your merc is, it's incredibly helpful to have access to

Teleport so that you can reposition it as needed. Summoning necros often run Enigma to do this with their skeletons & golems too. The AI in this game was coded back in maybe the 1990s, so NPC fight IQ leaves a little bit to be desired. They just don't understand good positioning in a fight, and that alone can make it harder to keep them alive.

It would be nice to have something that has been experimented with in another old game called Throne of Darkness, where you had an option to put a "tactical positioning" of your party members (that are AI controlled) from a list of different choices or even create your own custom one. It offered you to position, for example, your casters and shooters in the back and tell them how to behave. It would have been nice if they ever introduced something like that to the D2R, where you could choose "stance" and "behavior" of your Merc and/or summons for example. Yet another oldie that offered something along those lines was Dungeon Siege -- so it's not a good excuse of coding being old and all that Tbch ToD was made in 2001. and DS was a 2002. game while original D2 came out in '00. But I think that idea existed before as well... Can't remember.

At the risk of going a bit too much off-topic, but there were JRPGs in the 90s that had behavior settings for AI party members. Granted, the settings were extremely simple for the most part. The Star Ocean series is one example - you could switch between party members at will (you always controlled one yourself), and the others were AI controlled, and you could give them basic instructions (such as flee from everything, focus on protecting party members, focus on healing party members, preserve MP, all out attack YOLO). I'm sure there are better examples.

ShadowHeart wrote: 6 months ago

At the risk of going a bit too much off-topic, but there were JRPGs in the 90s that had behavior settings for AI party members. Granted, the settings were extremely simple for the most part. The Star Ocean series is one example - you could switch between party members at will (you always controlled one yourself), and the others were AI controlled, and you could give them basic instructions (such as flee from everything, focus on protecting party members, focus on healing party members, preserve MP, all out attack YOLO). I'm sure there are better examples.

On a more recent game, Guild Wars has a similar system.