by Drem » Thu Nov 08, 2012 12:26 pm
yeah, it did. it made it make casual players feel good. there's still a ton of better gear, obviously, and you need it to take on the really hardcore shit. like drem's level 85 for instance, but can't use any of his augments because they're all pay-to-play pieces of equipment. so his stats are like 3/4 what they should be and i can't even handle a mob in the new feerrott hotzone for lvl 85 from house of thule expansion. it's easier to get to high levels, but it's still hard to be "good", you gotta put in a lot of time. all the stuff we used to know is now basically ez-mode tho, yes
mercs you buy in PoK from certain NPCs. if you press alt+F and look for <race> Mercenary Liaison and you can hire mercs from those dudes. most have a second race that isn't listed in the find window. like i think Ogre liaisons sell lizardmen mercenaries but the lizardmen can only be DPS mercs. some races can't be healer mercs, some can't be warrior mercs. i think Gnome liaisons sell kobold mercs. stuff like that. Wood Elf liaisons might sell brownie mercs but i think they can only be casters.
anyways, there's only four classes for mercs. and a few tiers, but if you're playing free-to-play you can only take the shitty apprentice mercs. dunno what tier it lets you go up to, but V is the best. it'll cost you about 15p every 15 minutes while your merc is out. when you aren't using it you suspend it and it doesn't run its timer down
at lvl 30 you can probably only take a certain tier and it would cost even less, like 5p per 15 minutes. the mercs level up with you and their weapons will change as they level up, even though you never get to know what they are. but you can't outfit them with outside gear, or do anything to them at all really besides turn them from passive to balanced modes. i make hotkeys for those for easy switching. if it's on passive you can go and pull and get aggro and FD and all that and your merc will never get aggro. only if he's on balanced mode and fights with you
if you're used to not having a cleric you should take the rogue dps merc because it makes you solo about twice as fast, and on balanced he won't ever take aggro. the cleric doesn't do any damage whatsoever, so it sorta leeches xp in my opinion. tho it'll also help you be able to take on shit you couldn't without it, so it depends on what you wanna do. if you're in a group with others, the cleric merc will battle rez you too, so that's pretty nice
that's the gist of mercs i guess
oh and when they die you just wait a few minutes to bring it back