Mercenary is a slow, clunky, terrible mess of a class

I knew it was going to be hit or miss, but not LITERALLY hit or miss. 50-100% of the time when firing on a target the character will just freeze even though you are literally spam clicking the fire button. Until you move or do a roll and try again he still won't fire.

I was 'sold' on the gun style that said it was more rapid fire than rangers, but honestly it's really not faster than Rangers.

When you switch weapons you should be able to have a different type of ammunition ready to fire. It's already extremely taxing and tedious you even have to switch weapons or change ammunition and manage that combination just to do the lowest end of average damage compared to other classes.

Because of how slow his rate of fire is, the only thing you can literally do after shooting once or twice is... ROLL!

Shoot once or twice... ROLL! Shoot once or twice.... ROLL! Shoot once or twice... ROLL!

and inbetween that pattern, there's like a 100% chance the character will freeze up and fail to fire or the animation will randomly have a delay on it and you have to cancel it to... ROLL!

Whoever tested this and thought it was fun should be unironically EXILED from all gaming projects in the future. You are a terrible designer.

So many other aspects to comment on about how bad it is. So many different types of ammunitions are basically the same overall with one being clearly stronger than the other.

What type of 'fantasy' is inserting cold ammo and then inserting explosive ammunition that unintuitively synergizes with that cold ammunition? It's tedious gameplay with no rewarding aspects at all.

I really don't know how a dev could fail this badly. Like there should at least be some other buff you get when switching ammo to make it exciting. Like 20% move speed buff for 2 seconds or something. Or your next 2 attacks after switching ammo have 50% chances to not use bolts or have 50% increased effectiveness. The way it stands most players are just spamming one ammo type, rolling around over and over, and then launching 6 sets of grenades when a monster or boss staggers. It's a terrible loop.

Shame on these devs. Probably the worst class I've ever seen in any ARPG in my life.

Its not about the class. The game is just bad, default skill doing more damage and is instant other than other skill which have 2-3 sec animations and lower damage. If POE 1 is 10/10 POE 2 is like 2/10 at this state of the game.

Yeah i was really excited about mercenary but after getting to level 20 i've kind of hit a wall where if I dont freeze and explode i can barely kill a pack without dodge rolling 50 times

Not any better today, it's a terrible mess.

I agree with everything here.

Yeah, I just finished Act 1, needed massive help... and am at a point now, where even blue mobs, some white ones.. pose a problem. I can see the idea of slowing the gameplay down... BUT needing 1 minute for a simple pack is just too much. ^^

Spent 2 hours on one of the mausoleum bosses, until a friend rescued me from that mess.

Mercenery is like godlike. it's like 20x stronger then witch / minion.

I've played through most of acts one and two now as a mercenary duo and we have had a very different experience from everybody here, apparently.

What skills are you guys using? Because I'm playing around the Heat system and taking out entire rooms of enemies at a time. I switch to gas grenades with corrosion support and high velocity rounds for bosses, it chunks the hell out of them and lets me stay mobile. My buddy is doing some kind of scattershot HVR stunning build with all the terrain ricochet business? I don't know the details, but it's damn effective as well.

I've actually started doing boss carries for people, it's more than strong enough for me to beat bosses even with the extra player penalties in place. So, while i'm not gonna say every mercenary skill is good (I haven't even tried a lot of them, and it's more than reasonable that some of these skills don't really work in early access) it's definitely untrue to say mercenary as a whole is bad. There are some incredibly powerful skills and combinations, so if what you're doing isn't working maybe try something different?

I am certainly on the side of it being a miserable experience. From what I've seen, people posting reviews and videos are showing dps ratings of ~300+. My rapid fire is only a little over 200. I'm assuming it's completely gear related. I have had zero luck in getting any drops, so my damage is pitiful and it takes me ~8minutes per boss attempt. Either way, if you're going ammo build, standing there for 1-2 seconds per reload and then another 2 sec to fire is an absolutely miserable experience.

Hit level 50 today, doing 4.5k DPS just with rapid fire(not including the reload damage boosting skill). dipped into archer start nodes and now 5 level from the start of the crossbow tree at the bot of the Passives. grind it out. Was doing grenade build till 49. its heavily weapon intensive.