mercs keep taking aggro and die..Follow

I am playing a mage, I will put merc on passive pull let pet get it. I let pet tank mob until down to 90% or 85% mob health put merc on assist. Merc grabs aggro tries tanking rogue or warrior dead does not last very long. I figured ok maybe what they do so figured leave let me try wizard it gets aggro stupid just stands there and let's mob kill it. Very frustrating I know not as good as player but come on, seem like pointless after level 65 or 70 only good merc is cleric that way it can buff and heal mob while I nuke away. I guess only way can fight, and also find if grouped with someone else same level I use tank and they use cleric merc it does faster than my pet. I would think tank merc would be a little better than my pet but seems my pet is better at tanking especially yellow and red con mobs.

I run 3 box of druid , necro ,wizard and use 2 healer mercs and 1 caster dps merc. I pull with druid for singles and necro pet tanks. I stack 5 necro dots and when mob hits 95% life my wizard starts nuking and my dps caster merc starts nuking. Pets holds mob 95-99% of the time, and when a caster does peel, the necro pet takes back aggro very quick.

This is with my wizard casting best ethereal nukes and the merc dps caster on burn mode.

mercs are messed up as of after patch. i run 3 toons healer mercs seem to be ok and can change their stance from reactive to passive. the caster mercs however canot be changed except to burn. i haven't been able to change to balanced and if they are not in burn mode they just sit there passive. i have tried to zone/rezone, log off and back on, nothing is working. the dps casters , when you try to change stance, stay highlighted green, so, balanced and passive, both stay highlighted green. will there be a fix for this? thanks

Just rebooted , logged back on, caster mercs were both set for balanced stance, after logging back on, both were back at passive
Edited, Apr 22nd 2015 11:48am by Edditude

Edited, Apr 22nd 2015 12:45pm by Edditude

Thank you all for the replies. Yes pet taunt is on pet even has summoned weapons which states increases opponents hate toward you or something to that effect. Yeah guess warrior is meant to get aggro regardless no matter the role, can be set to no role, main tank, or main assist still aggro dead, with warrior I understand that. But Rogue and Wizard dps class they should not get aggro die just stand there let mob beat them to death. The cleric at least is smart enough to heal move out of the way. I just let people know don't waste there time, money or merc. The pet I am using is air or water.

Hmmm... That's strange. Maybe check the merc stance? I know that the tank merc can be set to like aggressive mode (which means he'll taunt and whatnot). Wizards have a burn mode. Not sure about rogue though.

I thought so. Just been ages since I used one. I know that if they're set that way, you really need a human played tank to keep agro off the merc. Wouldn't surprise me at all if a mage pet wont work in that situation.

[quote=Edditude]mercs are messed up as of after patch. i run 3 toons healer mercs seem to be ok and can change their stance from reactive to passive. the caster mercs however canot be changed except to burn. i haven't been able to change to balanced and if they are not in burn mode they just sit there passive. i have tried to zone/rezone, log off and back on, nothing is working. the dps casters , when you try to change stance, stay highlighted green, so, balanced and passive, both stay highlighted green. will there be a fix for this? thanks

I experienced the same thing since the Wed. patch. Caster and melee dps mercs now do nothing in balanced mode, and only perform in burn. There was something about mercs in the patch, time to do an in game bug report I guess.

Hah. That actually does make sense. Can you put the merc into burn mode when it's ordered that way? What about passive? Sounds suspiciously like someone took a coding shortcut.

I use two melee mercs and have been working on getting one up in "Subtle strike" merc AA and the other up in "Silent Arcanum" . Both is to reduce the amount of hate they generate. I had problems controlling agro using melee or caster mercs, but went with melee because it seems like melee mercs were easier to handle agro wise. But even then I was using /mercassist after I got good agro with tank instead of letting them jump on the mob at will. That helped greatly. With gear and AA upgrades, I was able to hit /mercassist right when I got the mob to camp and still hold agro on my tank. When they're on auto, it seemed a lot of times they'd start hitting the mob before I even turned my tank around to start fighting.

The merc AA's also helped a lot. My one melee merc with subtle strike lvl5 is obviously better at keeping her agro down compared to my other melee merc with no points in subtle strike ( I used all of that mercs AA points in getting silent Arcanum for when I switch to caster). It's interesting watching the agro meter and how the mercs play with it. My melee merc with subtle strikes usually stays low on that list and when she gets above 90%, she /evades and drops it. I also set her back to autoassist and she does great DPS and almost never grabs agro. I think higher points will have them staying close to where they almost grab agro, but don't (more DPS).

I've considered going to both caster mercs, but having tried; caster and melee merc; caster and caster merc; melee and melee merc....I don't really notice much difference in DPS. I'm not running a parse and all the parsing I ever seen point to caster mercs as being much better DPS, but all those parses are from 2013 or older. I use a /disc on every fight to bump up my tanks AC and to tell the truth, I seem to finish with more time left on the disc on average using two melee mercs than I do using two caster mercs. So it would seem I am not killing any faster with caster mercs, but the sudden drop on the health bar of the mob is pretty cool when the mercs start dropping bombs.

Well, I went ahead and downloaded a parser (Gamparse) and ran one DeadHill HA. I don't really know how to combine all the fights in the parser to give an overall parse of every fight for the HA/time-span. All I'd be able to do is link each individual fight. But it's pretty clear caster mercs are pretty far ahead on DPS compared to melee mercs. I even have the melee merc on auto, so she jumps on the mobs ASAP, while I hold the caster merc back till my warrior fire offs all of his agro disc and it's still not even close. There are a few fights where the melee merc came out ahead, but the caster merc is usually not far behind and that only happens when I was a little late calling /mercassist. And even though I am holding back on the caster merc, the majority of the fights, the caster merc comes out ahead and many times....far ahead on DPS. I suspect once I get all or enough silent Arcanum AA's to reduce the casters generating hate and can have 2x caster mercs on burn and autoassist, it'll be pretty ridiculous DPS. Agro is not to much of an issue with only 3 points spent on Silent Arcanum. By the time or IF, I lose agro, the mob is less than 20% health or dies in the run towards the caster.

I was seriously going to go melee merc and caster merc, but now it will be 2x caster merc. I will work on getting the melee merc AA's, after I get casters done as a just incase I do some high MR named or something, but for everyday trash mob killing, it's caster mercs all the way.

I think lvl96 was a pretty big DPS bump too. I noticed before the caster merc was doing @60k a nuke. Now she is over 100k a nuke. 2 caster mercs doing that....yeah

In all fairness though, I do have my enchanter with his hate reducing aura and twincast aura up which helps casters.