Everquest Seeds of Destruction Mercenaries
With the release of the Seeds of Destruction expansion pack, Everquest introduced mercenaries - these are NPC’s that you hire to take into battle with you. This is an absolutely massive game changer! It basically means that any class can solo now with the aid of a mercenary. Currently there are only two types available and I have tried both and they are both awesome!
What are Mercenaries?
An Everquest mercenary acts like an additional player in the game. Unlike pets, they are part of your group and cannot be directly controlled or only in a limited way. For example, the tank type mercenary can be set to passive (where he basically does nothing) or aggressive where he will taunt any mobs that engage the group. However you cannot tell him specifically which mobs to target. Similarly, the healer mercenary will cast buffs and heals when it sees fit but it makes its own decisions to do so, and you yelling, “I need a heal!!” doesn’t help 
However, unless you get in a really sticky situation the mercenaries do very well. The AI programmed into them is actually quite impressive. For example, I have a level 60 druid and I have a tank mercenary for her and I took them into the Crypt of Nadox to camp a druid item that drops there. Some of the mobs there will enrage when their health gets low and when enraged they will riposte every hit which means that if you are meleeing the mob you will die very quickly. The standard tactic is to simply turn off attack when the mob enrages and turn it back on when they are no longer enraged and I was delightfully surprised to see my mercenary tank do just that! In some ways its even better than a real player because he knows exactly when these things happen - he knows as soon as a new mob engages the group whereas a real player needs to be on the ball to notice these things.
What Mercenary Types Are Available?
Currently there are only two types of Everquest mercenaries available - a healer and a tank. They are cleric and warrior classes respectively and they do just what you would expect them to do at their level. The warrior will taunt mobs, the cleric will buff you and heal you. Incidentally the healer is also aware of pets so if you have a pet class it will also buff your pet and try to keep it alive.
Sony have stated that more mercenary types are expected to be released later but they expect some ‘tweaking’ to be done so that won’t be for a little while yet. Rumors suggest that a DPS based class will be next.
How Do Mercenaries Work?
When you buy a mercenary it is always at your level and it will level up with you. I noticed that when my druid levelled to 60, her tank mercenary got himself some whips instead of his swords so they upgrade their gear as they level. The cleric will also upgrade his spells as he levels. Note that this is automatic - you don’t need to equip them or buy spells for them.
The mercenaries always follow you around. If you are a caster class and you gate, they gate with you. With my druid I wondered if I needed to do a group port to port him around but I don’t! I just port myself as normal and he magically follows me. If I die, he will appear with me at my bind point. However note that the cleric mercenary can rez you if you die though I haven’t had a chance to test that yet thankfully!
You can ’suspend’ your mercenary so that you are not charged for his services when not required but once suspended you will have to wait 5 minutes before you can unsuspend him. Note that with the cleric mercenary the first thing he will do when out of combat is make sure that you are fully buffed. One tactic I have seen people doing is to hire the cleric mercenary just for buffs and leave him suspended most of the time. This works out cheaper than donating for buffs in Plane of Knowledge
Your mercenary can die just like any other player however their death works differently to ours. Basically when they die they behave as if they have been suspended and you cannot bring him back to life for 5 minutes. However when he comes back he is fully functional and does not suffer from ressurection sickness like players do.
How Much Do Mercenaries Cost?
There are different tiers available. Upon purchasing Seeds of Destruction, Apprentive Tiers I through V are unlocked and so is Journeyman Tier I however to unlock higher Journeyman tiers and Master tiers require that you complete quests from the expansion pack. Each tier costs more than the last and the higher level you are the more expensive your mercenary will be.
There are two costs involved. There is an up-front hire fee which basically buys your mercenary. At level 58 the Journeyman Tier 1 mercenary cost be 1,200 pp. I don’t remember exactly how much my cleric one was. I believe it was around 350pp at level 30. You only have to pay this fee once and then you pay an upkeep fee for every 15 minutes that they are active. Note that unlike tribute timers, the mercenary timer stops the moment you suspend him so you literally only pay for exactly the amount of time you have him active for.
At level 33, my J1 cleric merc is costing me 8p 1g and at level 60 my warrior merc is costing me 25p 8g per 15 minutes. At those levels the money is easily recouped through regular hunting.
Are the Mercenaries Effective?
I suppose it depends on your class and your play style but for the druid and shadowknight that I am currently using them on they are brilliant. My druid can solo very effectively but using a root/dot method it is quite slow. At level 59 in Blackfeather Roost it was taking me several minutes to kill one mob. However with my tank mercenary I can let him tank away whilst I keep regen and a damage shield on him, I dot the mob as usual and throw a heal on the mercenary if I need to. Being a warrior, he doesn’t have the damage output of some of the other classes like a rogue for example but he kills way faster than my druid could alone! The result was that I was getting xp several times faster than I was alone, I was getting much more loot in the process and he pays for himself many times over.
Also, having a mercenary allows you to do some things that you simply couldn’t do solo. Druids for example shine in the outdoors where they have room to kite and have to be careful indoors. Crypt of Nadox for example was doable but tricky. If I got adds I had to succor out of there but with my mercenary he can happily tank 2 or 3 mobs at once which I simply couldn’t do otherwise.
Similarly my cleric mercenary allows my shadowknight to take on much tougher mobs, to go into places where adds would mean that he would be overwhelmed and of course, avoid downtime. Before mercs came along I was burning through a lot of potions (also awesome, I’ll write a post about those too!) and I still had downtime between fights. The healer merc grouped with a class that can tank opens up a whole new dimension to the game.
Filed Under Everquest Features |
Tagged With everquest, mercenaries, mercs, seeds of destruction
Related Articles
No related postsComments
One Response to “Everquest Seeds of Destruction Mercenaries”
Leave a Reply
Great guide, thanks.
BTW, check my comment on your first post. I made some suggestions for expanding this merc guide that would have helped me just after installing Seeds of Destruction expansion. Things like, where are the Cleric mercs vs. the Tank mercs.
Keep up the good work!
-=VRMan=-