Geas

Hey guys, just curious, when was the change made to mercenaries so that you can only hire one now? Might have missed it but didnt see it in the news/updates. Also if anyone could answer why the change was made.

Thanks!

There have been several upgrades to the Mercs in the past making them way stronger, which in the end lead into "single char teams" (one quite mediocre char plus three mercs) that were able to raid literally every high level area in Geas.

As the high level areas were never designed for such teams, and also never were designed to be raided by single weak or mediocre chars, we had only three options to regain balance there:
A.) Tuning all high level areas up to some level being able to defeat these "single char teams", which, as a consequence, would force every player to hire mercs in the future, OR
B.) Tune down all mercs massively, OR
C.) Tune down the overall "single char team" fighting power, which we finally decided to do some weeks ago by reducing the amount of mercs a single char can hire.

louis wrote:There have been several upgrades to the Mercs in the past making them way stronger, which in the end lead into "single char teams" (one quite mediocre char plus three mercs) that were able to raid literally every high level area in Geas.

Thanks for the quick response Louis, but hmm I dont think i could agree with this having used mercenaries quite extensively. Even with mercenaries, one is still limited by what they can defeat on their own (in terms of high level areas).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're implying that mercenaries are being used so one can hunt in areas that they could not on their own. For a low level areas - bugbears etc. - yea sure that's true. But having used the plate-wearing mercs for ghost spiders and pale ones, they are pretty horrific at tanking. So looking at those high level areas, well, no mediocre char could go there even with mercenaries as they would need to tank those creatures.

I might be biased on this because I have used them a lot for mining, it already takes me several hours for one trip and well, if I have to use one mercenary I dont want to know how long it would take me now lol.

The way I see it, mercenaries dont change the difficulty of creatures one can fight, but just how quickly one can kill them. and besides that, someone needs high team combat to even hire 3 mercenaries (again someone who would not be mediocre in my eyes)

also in terms of rp, well I really enjoyed that there are npc's you can hire to help with hunting. Not always do I want to play with other pc's or is it realistically possible to often ask someone to join me on a mining trip for 4-5 hours. So it's nice to be able to play in a sense that I could pay npc's as mercenaries.

iunno again I might be biased because I'm only looking on one side but I feel that the change that you can only have one mercenary is too harsh. If anything, I would like to see if you could at least have two mercs at say 80+ team combat

Hmm, from what I know team combat never played a role with mercs. But then again, I can be wrong.

@Fernao :
Team combat skill indeed played a role, the lower the team combat was, the less mercs you were able to hire, and depending from which side you look at it, this is either totally logical or totally unlogical.

@Aenima
I think that we both agree, that - if you eg look at the xxx cave, the programmer of this cave had someting in mind back these days, maybe he designed this area as something, that is nearly impossible to be raided alone - in return, this area offeres maybe a very huge or expensive reward - theoretically spoken, of course. And this cave was created before the first merc decided to start his business in forostar.

If somethin in the game is now changed in a way that breaks the developers initial idea, adjustments are mandatory:
A.) either by reducing all rewards in this area significantly (to rescue the last little bit of game economics)
B.) or by restoring the original developers idea in some way.

As option A is not really an option (we would have had to change x Areas), option B has to beimplemented, and we chose the option of reduding he fighting power of one man teams.

By the way - I totally disagree that the mercs were as useless as you describe them, a team of the right three mercs can take down nearly anything, regardles how strong or skilled the char in behind is.

Additionally, and I agree here, the mercs were also speeding you massively up, allowing you (maybe also against the developers idea) to earn ridiculous amounts of resouces in a very short time, which - just to add this - additionally breaks the entire little rest of our game economics.

In the end more than enough reasons to change something, and if I were you, I maybe just would be glad that I was able to benefit from a little imbalance before it was fixed

While mercs can be tanks, thay can be used in other ways too. We have seen people hire 3 archers and tank themselves. And three archers are a devastating force.

Mercs are intented to be a help, not a solution to everything. Some areas were not meant to be visited by a single char. They were designed for larger teams and should encourage team work. All these mercs do not encourage teamwork anymore, since you could do nearly anything alone with a couple of mercs.

I guess that's just the way I enjoyed playing sometimes, but fair enough I guess.

also, I wouldnt call 4-5 hours 'a very short time' haha, and to "earn ridiculous amounts of resouces" only took me to get extremely high mining to do that =P

ah well I tried lol, hope you guys can take into consideration at least changing it to being able to hire two. thanks again for the replies

Given a large amount of time anyone can turn their character into a very strong character. I think Aenima is just on of those instances where he can abuse everything that is available to him and become a very strong character.

I guess making a mercenary on every corner with a bow was a bad idea... and thats why most of the older mercenaries didn't use a bow or sucked with a bow.