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expansion: Seeds of Destruction - mercenaries
this is old news from August 18th but I havent seen it posted at these forums
from EQVault news
Mercenary Information
Player Fyndal posted:
What is known so far:
1) One mercenary per person
2) Restricted to group content only at the moment.
3) Mercenaries take up a regular group spot
4) They follow you around and are not controllable, they follow a basic AI that you can toggle how aggressive they are
5) The healer type *will* rez you if you die
6) The group box is changing to show everyone your mana and endurance, which lets you see your mercenary's mana/end so you don't go attack something when its oom
7) Tank type will try and take aggro from anything that has aggro on you
8)They can die.
9) There is only going to be a healer and tank types to start.
10) Mercenaries have an hourly upkeep cost in platinum, to go along with this, all plat will now be weightless (monks rejoice), so you can carry around a million plat on you apparently (sell those droppable coin pouches while you can =P)
Developer Steven Klug responded:
RE: Persistence--Once you hire them they are yours until they die or you dismiss them, or you run out of money. We are evaluating whether you will be able to resurrect them (if you have that capability).
RE: Do they stick around eating plat--yes. You'll need to carry the money around (though it's weightless now).
RE: What happens when you die--If you stick around in over mode the mercenary will attempt to complete the battle and will res you it wins. However, it is a healer, so if you died, it's not likely going to be able to finish off the foe by itself. If you respawn, the merc will re-appear with you at your bind point (if it is still alive).
more...
Hey guys, I was at Fan Faire so I haven't had a chance to read the forums.
Some questions I've seen that haven't been answered yet.
Will merc healers heal pets? Yes, they should.
Are they restricted to SoD content? No, though most will likely require that you own the expansion.
Will they count toward requirements for missions? This is the intent, though we're still investigating to see if there are any technical issues with that.
Will the AI suck? I hope not. Maddoc and I have been putting a lot of time and effort into this. Though certainly, we have tuning knobs that we can use the make for better or worse performing mercenares (you get what you pay for).
RE: Concerns about people preferring to use mercenaries over players due to mercs not wanting loot: We've discussed some ideas to address this problem, but the consensus was that making mercenaries take item loot would be very unpopular. Please discuss any other ideas you guys have on this.
RE: Concerns that making them require plat will cause mercs to not be usable by the players that need them the most. While this is partially true, we do intend to carefully balance the costs. Players without much in the way of funds will likely be able to hire cheaper mercenaries that may not be as powerful or have as responsive of an AI, but that can still give them a big boost in power, thereby enabling them to start earning more plat that they can eventually use to hire a better mecenary.
What does it mean that mercs are not allowed in raids? Well, as they are part of your group, you have to dismiss them in order to for your group to join a raid.
Why only Tank and Healer? We're going for quality over quantity. The AI system is very extensible and we will be able to create all kinds of nifty AI's in the future. DPS is next on the list, but we're not willing to say when it will be available yet.
next post:
Wow, I think you guys are going to quickly overwhelm my ability to answer all of your questions!
Answers after the questions:
Are mercenaries ignored if you do a coin-split with the /split command?
Yes.
Also, how aggressively do they follow you around? I already have a sprit-dog riding my leg and getting in the way when I'm trying to loot. Will I now also have a mercenary standing directly in front of me?
Mercenary movement is very context dependent. When you're not in combat, however, they follow you similar to the way pets do. The distances are easily tweaked if they become an issue. In combat, they try to position themselves in good tactical positions that will depend on their type and what stance they are in.
Does the tanking mercenary do more than just taunt to hold agro? Or does it just taunt like a pet would and leave it at that?
It will do more than just taunt.
If a mercenary kills a mob after you die, will the mob's corpse poof like it does if a DoT kills the mob after you die?
I suspect there will be some cases where the corpse may poof if you did not contribute to the fight, to prevent you from going AFK and letting your mercenary grind XP for you.
Will a mercenary sit down to med? (And more to the point, can you prevent that since sitting is a sure way to die in some zones).
Yes, caster mercenaries sit down to med. You can prevent them from doing this by putting them in the "Do nothing" stance (all mercenaries have this stance).
For the healer mercenary, can you give as an idea of how effectively it heals? What I mean is, will it generally use fast heals whenever your health reaches a certain threshold or will it blindly chain-cast CH?
This greatly depends on the situation and quality level of the mercenary, but in general it will try to cast the most efficient heal it has that will land before it estimates you will die.
Can a mercenary change its mind and interupt its own casting to cast a different spell?
Yes. This comes up fairly often if you get bursty mob damage with the healer AI.
Will the mercenary complain if I choose to send him to certain death without buffs while I execute a "Brave, Brave Sir Robin" manouver if I do a bad pull?
You can't really send him anywhere. Mercenaries currently will not attack mobs without the mob being aggro on the group. This could require some skill for some of the more squishy classes, but then, most of the squishy classes can solo pretty well already (soloing being the main situation where this would matter).
Will (future non-tank and non-healer) mercenaries understand the concept of root-rotting? I'd sure hate to get a necro mercenary to help with dotting and find out that it prefers nuking or some-such. I guess this questions could be better worded as "can there be a dotting only version of a caster DPS mercenary if you happen to make a caster DPS mercenary".
The sky is the limit as far as making AIs. I'm sure we'll have fun making them for quite a while as long as they are popular.
RE: Requests for a "fair share" payment method--we have discussed this as a possibility, but we didn't think it would be very popular. If during beta we get feedback to the contrary we can re-visit this idea. It is something that could take a fair amount of coding time to do correctly though, so I'm not sure at this point we could fit it in even if we decided we wanted the option. I'm certainly interested in hearing more feedback on it though. That case of fighting the named mob and having the mercenary ninja the cool loot is something that we felt would leave a sour taste in player's mouths. Now, of course, they could simply dismiss the mercenary before fighthing the named, but perhaps they wouldn't be able to take the named without it. Yeah, there's a lot of things to think about with that particular solution. How to make it non-exploitable could be very tricky.
-- Kwill @ Monday, 18 Aug, 2008
Comments
interesting but paying an upkeep an hour? Also, this has to indicate the beginning of the end; not because it's a bad idea just it's like a concession people can't make groups anymore indicating declining numbers and that.
As much as I will enjoy this personally, I think it's a mistake - not because of what it means, but because NPC henchmen discourage grouping. Sure, you may want to group, but other people who might group with you if they feel you need their help are more likely to let you go it on your own.
Even if that isn't the case, it adds a factor of embarrassment when asking for help. If I mention I need a group, is someone going to resond with "l2merc" or something equally rude? Probably not, but why risk it, I'm not in the mood. And so on.
einexile the meek
Vacuos, Winterlong, Vaciante, Eicosapenta
Atlantean, Tyranny, Malton
I think one thing it does help is the newcomers or returners that dont have high lvl or established characters to depend on. If they know they can start a char and always have atleast one other person then they might feel more apt to play or log in.
Also i think it encourages grouping in a certain sense. As you know today in everquest, lvling up is tough by yourself. Most zones are empty and if there are people in the zone, chances are they have a higher lvl with them. But If you find another player of your lvl then your group just doubled its numbers. Groups wont die off when the tank or the healer have to log off.
People might go back to zones or camps that require grouping since now theres, "in theory", twice the amount of toons to play with. Some people might not feel the need to go off to the zone/camp that is soloable. Smaller guilds will have easier times grouping together since now they can fill empty slots. Two or three friends might actually start up/come back playing EQ together now that they know they have a fighting chance.
These are all the GOOD points i could think of. I know theres just as many bad ones. But hey, I think that Sony realizes that theres really no chance of bringing back a huge player base. Atleast they are doing what they can to cater to the lower guys that are trying to hang in there.
Although perhaps they could still incent people to have full groups of people with perhaps a person having both them and their mercenary in a group getting reduced xp(by the reasoning some going to the mercenary). This would perhaps encourage people to get another person if they're available instead of a mercenary.
(By the way don't these mercenery's reduce the incentive to multi-box and thereby reduce revenue from people with multi-accounts?)
I think the end of full groups atleast at the lower lvls has been around for a while now. And helping people get around that in any way is good i think.
Also i dont think it effects multi boxing too much since im sure there is a big difference between a box and a merc. Gear + actual control > merc any day i think.
just a update for you,
The Merc's upkeep is every 15min NOT 1 hour, if the healer-tank merc gets killed you can revive them at the cost of the upkeep but you do have to wait a set time (2min to 4min) , the healer will revive you if you die but only if the mob you was fighting is dead, if the mob is hitting on the healer he will not revive or kill the mob if you have not got it set to attack. To me it looks like the merc takes a good 20-30% of the exp, this is how i come to this -- fighting solo on the test for 30min with double exp working on AA's got me 12 AA's /// 24hours later doing same thing only this time with merc i got 7 AA's. Also as i can talk about Beta now the Magi+pet+healer merc kicks butt, Monk+healer merc sucks, healer+tank merc sucks and thhis was fighting lvl 85-86 named mobs in the new zones, other class+merc you will have to do your self to see how they work.
well hope that helps a little and sony has lifted the NDA of us beta testers so we can talk about it.
Naiar 80 cleric Antonius Bayle
My husband is still playing EQ1, and he's loving his healer merc as a mage. He feels that the upkeep is a trivial amount of money. They can also be suspended when you don't need them. In addition to rezzing you, they also buff (and heal, of course) you AND your pet (unlike, say, steadfast servant, which ignores pets).
I've been full of questions about them.
I think I am driving him up a wall.No firsthand report here, though. Alas, I've moved on. 
...
This is where I draw the line: __________________.