The Tactician feels way off.

Hi.
I really like the idea of tactician. Ballistas, Minions, Companions, Banners.

BUT!!!

I'm not going too deep into Banners being useless cause everyone knows. Change banners make them usefull and let tactician carry them on their back or sth.

The totem node is very unfun and useless for mapping. Please change it to an actually usefull node like +1 totem or make totems fire attacks faster if you have attacked recently.

The Minion skill has to get the Companions tag. There is NO! Minion support nodes in reach on the passive tree.

The "Watch how i do it" node, as far as i know, does NOT! work with totems. How is anyone supposed to know this? Anyone that hasn't played POE1 intensely will never assume this. This needs to be changed and at least this node should work with totems.

There is just too much anti-synergy and things not worth taking in this Acsendancy right now.

Yeah it feels super weird how little any of this synergizes. Banners don't even gain honour when your totems make the kill for you.

I haven't ascended yet but now I'm not really sure what to do, somehow I feel like one of the other ascendancies could potentially be better for ballistas, just not sure what actually works for totems or not.

I think it's most likely a bug.Just checked War Ba.nner works great with totems.It also says allies in his description.It's a shame that GGG most likely won't pay attention to this topic because they don't care

Wait for respec ascendancy and run for it. Merc is one of the least popular classes. With gemling gutted, witchhunter was a terrible deadeye and the whole armor, evasion being mostly trash and still is this ascendancy is riddled with bugs and is aimless.

Pin is great but 4 points to make it do 0 extra damage feels really bad. The pin mechanic falls off once player power is clearing trash and even rares quickly. Bosses are only where it shines and sadly bosses cannot be pinned more than once.

Minions? What minions or nodes Merc has nothing, suppressing fire should buff all your minions/companions/allies sort of like temp buff witchs spike.

The 50% reduced spirit is too good for 2 points.

All totem and banner and ballista nodes are terrible kiss/curse design, vision nodes. Gemling and witchhunter hardly have these types of nodes.

Tactician feels like a class thrown together with remaining nodes that do nothing

Deadeye is the completed class, it utilizes the signature weapon Crossbow better than Merc. All Merc sub-classes are for customers to beta test, even developers don't give a shit.

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Brotmann444#3772 wrote:

usefull node like +1 totem

Bad ideas like that lock you into specific ascendancy.
If you have 4 totems + 1 means 25% MORE damage.

You need to understand where the line between "useful" and "broken" is, before adding such suggestions to the forum.

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GrognakBarbar#3576 wrote:

Yeah it feels super weird how little any of this synergizes. Banners don't even gain honour when your totems make the kill for you.

I haven't ascended yet but now I'm not really sure what to do, somehow I feel like one of the other ascendancies could potentially be better for ballistas, just not sure what actually works for totems or not.

The weapon damage transfer is more than broken.

"

Bosses are only where it shines and sadly bosses cannot be pinned more than once.

I don't think that's true. I'm pretty sure I pinned the same boss more than once. I think it works the same way as freeze where after the first application the boss gets temporary resistance, but then it wears off after a while. If you couple pin with electrocute and/or freeze, the boss will be immobilized quite a lot because of the ailment rotation. Tactician's pin is actually quite powerful, especially with my ripwire ballistas to back me up. I'm running a tactician with disabling pin and spirit reservation buff, just ignoring all the totem/banner stuff. It's pretty decent.