by Abazzagorath » Mon Mar 09, 2009 7:02 pm
Did I ever state that anyone that didn't box a cleric was lazy? Of course not, don't be ridiculous. I simply said that it was lazier to drop a boxed cleric you already had and use a cleric merc. Would it have been less offensive if I said "easier"? I mean, you're sitting here telling me how a real cleric is better, so if you have a cleric box, and instead use a merc, then by definition aren't you being lazy by using something less effective in order to have an easier time playing?
I do not have a problem with the concept of mercenaries. What I have a problem with is mercenaries that are extremely easy to obtain that outplay real people in terms of their tanking and healing capacity.
I never claimed they were perfect, or if we could raid with them merc clerics would replace real ones. I said what is my opinion, that mercs are far too powerful.
Mercs should have been "group fillers" for short groups, it was how they were advertised to us. Instead, they are perfectly capable of main healing or main tanking in korafax, and that is bullshit. They should not have that much capacity.
As I said before, mercs should have come in 3 flavors:
1) Healer merc that is balanced around allowing a non-healing class to solo better
2) Tank merc that is balanced around a healing class to solo better
3) DPS merc that is balanced around a self-sufficient class to solo better
To that point, when grouped only with you, they should take zero experience from the kill, to encourage people to use them to "solo" rather than punish many people.
And that would have allowed them to play support healer, support dps, or tanking in a pinch in lower tier zones. How absurd is it that a few missions capable of being done in one afternoon nets you a character that allows most people to "solo" in the discord theme zones (top group zones in the game)? How is that reasonable, fair, or leads to better gameplay?
I have met zero people that "came back to eq" because of mercenaries. What I have seen is the amount of people that did stuff by themselves and not bother to group, has increased dramatically, people have let bot accounts expire, and the lack of groups available have resulted in some people quitting or scaling back their play time.
As an example, this weekend, we had around 40 people on (non-raid day), and people couldn't get a group in guild and were talking about how the game has become a ghost town. There were plenty on, but they were off boxing by themselves.
People that couldn't solo/duo a lot of stuff and thus grouped are now solo/duoing. People that boxed a few accounts are now filling their group out with mercs, and the group situation is worse than ever.