Thoughts..

Game performance is bad

Mercs are useless and die even more than I do.

GGG never fails to disappoint. Come up with good mechanic, and fuck it up in the delivery. Dont even know why I hoped this league might be better.

I don't know why anyone thought the mercs were a good mechanic conceptually, though? This is a bad implementation of a bad idea.

I'd already be quitting the league if not for the endgame rework. The mercs stuff is just "something which sucked in Diablo 2, ported 30 years into the future without an update or fix to what makes it fundamentally broken."

Problem 1 - Players and mercs use the same pool of items. It's insane to me that GGG got this one wrong, because they got it right with the Heist hirelings. There was no possible way this wasn't guaranteed to create a balance issue.

Problem 2 - Different mercs have different items they're allowed to use. Because there are "best" items you want to equip to your mercs, this instantly means 95% of the merc archetypes are DoA because you just can't give them the OP stuff you want them to wear.

Problem 3 - Mercs benefit from YOUR buffs, auras, etc. So now every single character has to also be a summoner, unless they're just going to ignore the mechanic entirely. Which, honestly, most people should be doing, because...

Problem 4 - Your mercs use gold, aka the same resource as Kingsmarch, and give a far worse return for that investment. Hiring a merc makes you a little tankier or helps you clear maps slightly faster. Neat! But their impact is marginal, because it has to be; unless you're prepared to just abandon a map if your merc stands in burning ground to death, you have to build a character which can clear content on its own. So the mercs are, at most, a minor added convenience. Compared to Kingsmarch, which summons money and items from the aether as long as you keep it supplied with gold.

Seriously, how did this league make it out of the break room where it was pitched? All four of these problems have solutions which could have been solved simply by not designing the league the way that GGG did. And that version of Mercenaries might have been great! But the version we got... I don't even know if it can be fixed, guys. I've been playing PoE for a very long time, which is the only reason this isn't the worst league mechanic they've ever done. But it's definitely in the #2 slot. I'm just beating up every merc for their lunch money at this point without even looking at their gear, and I see myself not even bothering to do that much by this time next week.

If anyone has to ask: Talisman, obviously.

seems GGG is not than smart what they tought xDDDDDDDD