Improving Mercenaries

I understand it may be difficult to program Mercenaries to use the specific talents or combinations players selected when building their character. However, it's should be possible for Mercenaries to use talents according to their weapon.

For example, despite particular builds a player chooses in building their character, if that character is equipped with say a Magic Device, it should execute talents in the Magic Skills by default when used as a Mercenary.
Such a feature would greatly improve quality of life in game, & raise player appeal to hire Mercenaries in their party.

Thank you for your time & take care.

 

Hmm, I'm not exactly sure what you meant by talents, but stuff related to weapon type bonus only reflected upon the use of active skills. Stats-related on the other hand, does applied in the form of ATK and HP. Damage intake is calculated by range system, the more the mercenary away from the target, the greater the damage it would take. Which I think is simple, but good enough. Yes it would be quite troublesome to program the whole thing. If you take stats other than atk and HP, for example, evasion, dodge, critical rate/damage, they would need to take account on many stuff. I don't think they would do it anytime soom, given they also kinda ditch pet system and leave it as it is

 

You're right in failing to understand.

This improvement would have nothing to do with stats outside what is already used in the Mercenary System. The only change will be weapon equipped by the Mercenary would allow it to use the Skill Tree associated with the weapon type. For example, a Mercenary with 2H or single 1H will use the Blade Skills tree. A Mercenary using a 1H & Shield would use the both the Blade & Shield Skills trees. A 2H with a Dagger will have to the Blade & Dagger trees.

However in following with current equipment traits, Magic Devices in the Subweapon slot will be inert with every weapon it currently is.

In this way of utilizing Skill Trees in accordance with weapon(s) equipped, programming Mercenary function shouldn't be so different than what they do with pets or enemy NPCs such as Bosses.

 

I see your point. As its an older system than pets, mercenaries doesn't even get treated the same way of pets as they don't even get auras' buff. Pet skills have skills which basically the simplified version of players' skills, and has limited slot. Boss patterns are programmed solely for each bosses, making it a one time-work. Doing the same would need a lot of work since weapon-specific skills also have some buffs so you would also need to apply other status aside from HP and Atk. Unless you want to ditch the ailments and status increase from the buffs and simply use the damage formula. Also the skills associated with each weapon type isn't exactly equal, even if you simply use the active skills and ignore the buffs. with pets, they made a whole new set of skills including buffs and all pets have same state as they can choose any skills they want regardless of weapon type

Indeed its actually viable and you can even add the behavior just like pets trait, such as they can avoid aoes and have skill pattern. It would need a rather big update, though.


The problem is will they actully consider do it as they might think its redundant to have similar system as pets already have it and no need to address it further. Mercenary is already convenient as it is. If it becomes more useful than pets then it might beat the purpose of having pet system since you can simply use your alternate character or your friends'/guildmates'. Pet users worked their ass off to have decent utility from their pets. They might as well enchance the pets instead

 

Although I understand where you're coming from, Mercenaries will never make Pets redundant. Pets are & have always been more of a social feature. It's why Pets are almost never used in groups & rarely ever match player level cap; unlike Mercenaries.

The only Pet I ever encountered that matched player level cap was Ganglef.

I was tremendously fortunate to find one with a cap of 170 on the CB. Believe it or not, it cost only 10k. It must've been a mistake on the seller.

 

We can only wish they would be improved, but Mercs haven't been touched in ages. Would be nice though.

 

It probably wouldn't be to difficult for them the figure out how to code that in being that they already do it with pets, though I can imagine that it might take a lot of time.

 

Pet system is mostly misunderstood(like personal stat can have an effect inside a party) merc can only do autos and most of the time easyly configurable(change gears to affect hit and aspd will affect aggro generation of mercs) only skill that is defaultly used is a staff passive(really wish katana mercs can do sakuchi tho). Sadly the merc system is mostly untouched since its creation. And i hope before they even think of doing that they first improve pet system first.