Gigaburger

Believe it or not they've spoken in discord that they will likely never make upgrades automatic, for the simple fact that they want to promote keeping pets alive instead of making them disposable. We are likely to see more changes to balance out these reduced cooldowns.

Just did mission 3 of Watkins story arc. When I got to the final room with raverobber in it, whenever I stepped onto (or hovered slightly above) the concrete floor, my character stuttered massively. It was nearly unplayable but I realized I could just walk around on the metal flooring and pull targets.

Testing on a level 29 mercs/traps MM using only SO's. Going on +0/x0. Missions 1 and 2 were fairly easy, as you'd expect for a MM. Caltrops and poison gas ensure nothing really got to even touch me, not even the zoombies. Though I did get hit by 1 zoombie explosion, and it wasn't nearly as punishing as on live, where one explosion could kill half of my henchman. But it did seriously wound my henchman and I had to react quickly to every zoombie afterwards to prevent a wipe. Mission 3: There is a bug, at least on this test. I'd have to replay it to find out if it is consistent. In the final room, where Raverobber is located, the entire concrete floored area makes my character stutter an insane amount. Not my henchman, not the mobs, but just my character. It is nearly unplayabled. Hovering slightly above ground, you will still stutter. So going about 5 feet off the ground was necessary for me to react, however as a /traps character this presented problems. Raverobber himself was quite fun and challenging for me. He managed to kill my commando, all the T1s, and a T2 before I could down him. Luckily with the MM changes I was able to prevent a wipe by resummoning and equipping, while also not going completely empty on endurance and still capable of using other abilities to slow him down. Have not gotten any further so far.

Double mercs damage across the board, and their single target damage would change from last place, to second-to-last place lol.

I gotta agree with you here. We are not going to see a merc overhaul for a long time. That would take so many man hours from the devs and I don't want to rush them into it. I just want something that makes them bearable to play. Thats it. I really do love how they almost never stop firing. I love the showers of bullet casings. I love their aesthetic and I LOVE my memories as a young teenager who mained a mercenary mastermind back on live. I will be perfectly happy with a simple damage buff if that is all that the HC dev team can do for us in the near future. Recharge times, I have no idea if they can mess with that without breaking the AI or not. I am not educated in any of this stuff. All I want is to be able to join a group and feel like I am contributing in some way other than my third-rate support abilities because my merc primary quite literally is nearly useless. There is no worse feeling, when your group is mowing down mobs, and a straggler runs off, and you sit there and struggle to kill (arrest?) it. It is frankly embarrassing. I am just begging for any simple change that can make them bearable to play in the short term. I will gladly, and patiently, wait for whatever changes they decide to make for masterminds in the future if I can just play my favorite powerset and not feel like a waste of a party slot.

So instead of changing the recharge of LRM from 4 minutes, make it a literal nuke in terms of damage? I am oddly okay with this.

All I've ever wanted was recharge times and damage numbers to be improved. I'm looking for a quick and simple fix myself. I'm okay without the medic changes for now but ofcourse I believe mercs need an overhaul at some point. But for now, I'll take whatever buff we can get, small or large. Fingers crossed a developer will take it into their hands and be our savior!

This is what we need to be even remotely bearable as merc MMs. People do not realize just how terrible playing mercs is. Whenever I join a team I feel like a complete burden and it's hard to enjoy the game. But I enjoy mercs thematically and it was my main back on Live. I've seen these charts and I feel like even they do not do complete justice. This chart which I got from the discord from @黒の色 (Dunno if he was the creator or not) shows the ST dps breakdown of a beast mm. Note that this includes the dps of the MM themself which is the difference between the total of this chart and the total of the above chart. The TIER 1 wolves alone do roughly the same DPS as the ENTIRETY of the mercs lineup. The tier 2s alone do almost 30 dps MORE than the entire merc lineup. I think this does a pretty good job of showing our plight and just how desperate we are for ANY changes at all. No one wants to feel like a burden to their team, and a merc MM is essentially just his secondary set as the damage they are outputting from the mercs is almost completely negligible. I really hope we can get some love soon because it is so hard to force myself to play this game when my favorite powerset is so far behind every other set.

I honestly don't know how to slot TA at all. I'm not home yet so I'll take a look at this build when I am. Honestly what I think I wanna go for is juggling mobs using oil slick and bonfire from heat mastery. With KB - KD slotted, I could both keep mobs locked down via KD to stack assbots burn patches and help my survivability. But I don't really know what my uptime would be on those abilities. This will be my first serious build as well so I'm definitely not sure what set bonuses to aim for, and what is actually obtainable as end results go.

Itll be my first time going to 50 with TA on any toon. But I was enjoying it on my level 38 beast/TA and didn't really enjoy traps in my bots/traps mm. So I wanted to see how well I can make it work. I'm thinking of grabbing bonfire instead of electric fences, strictly to keep with the burning patches theme between oil slick arrow and incendiary missiles. I'm aware I'm going to have a rough time, so don't try to talk me out of it! I'm just here to have fun.

The only thing that can make utter garbage useable is twice as much garbage. I read that in a fortune cookie once I think. Vote yes for Mercermind,

Doubling the dps of mercs puts it more closely in line with necro. It still wouldnt come close to thugs, but its a start. I approve.

One of my favorite parts about robots was that they have the jets when you use group fly. Super cool, and makes traversing mission maps without resummoning much easier. However, pets do not fly as fast as us, and I suspect its because of our inherent swiftness that upgrades flight speed a smidgen. Would love to not have to fly backwards and stop-go-stop-go all of the time.