Old mercs > new mercs?

As a fairly new player there seems to be more of a demand for the older mercs (canis, bots, incinerate, frozen golem etc). Is it just the player base was smaller back then and not a lot of mercs available now or are we seeing mercs with skills that don't really fill holes like the old ones did? Maybe with the exception of lilith.

Thoughts or opinions?

It's a mix of both. The game was tuned much differently when I started playing. OHKO were the name of the game, and everything could do them. CXB raid was finally where it got out of hand, and the player base started shrinking because fights would very very rarely last longer than 1 round as the first proc won the fight in almost all circumstances.

So now they have scaled back on the power of mercs, and are starting to balance the game away from that sort of damage scheme into a more strategic one, releasing mercs like Niobe instead of Mordeo and Howitzer instead of Jackson Omega.

That's why old mercs will be better than new mercs. They were meant for a different time. Little by little they will get weeded out of the game, or consolidated into the hands of so few elite players that other than pvp match 15 during pvp event you won't see them too often. But I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for a Jackson or Hellcat V2. They are relics of a time long gone by when this game was something much different than it is today.

^^ agree. There are some that have surfaced which were originally dismissed as a poor merc that over time have shown their worth during events (Keys, Sirens, Eves, Cannonbacks, etc). Others were hailed upon initial inspection, but when the developers adjusted various aspects behind the curtain the "bright shiny luster" of the perfect merc shows weaknesses.

I think it truly depends on what mercs you have, what events do you prefer, do you pay anything or are you purely a free player, what squad layouts are available, and more. Some of the newer mercs will certainly show their worth over time. We shall have to wait and see which ones.

Too bad I didn't play from the start, they had some great mercs back then. :')

Whenever you started this game, it wasn't early enough. I started during Frozen Golem Raid (no lethal, just golem), and I got 1 r1, which I sold for something like 15 ac. I joined in time to pick up a couple of bots in the CXB event, which helped a ton, but too late to pick up any of the big early lethals like hellcat and jackson (or even fista, though that was a weird event savage cell).

It is always tough to start out a new game. New players that start today are at a disadvantage because they are new, and just starting out from scratch. Not because it somehow "less fair" than it was back then. When you have been playing as long as I have, you will have the sort of squad I have, or at least pretty close to it. You just have to put in the time and work, and play smart.

I have said it before and I will say it again, this game may be frustrating, but if someone can point me to a free game where someone who wasn't paying could be as competitive as they can be in this game, I would be very surprised.

True story, and I'm not frustrated because of what other people have. I'm just trading my way up ( and getting some mercs here and there because people are quitting. ). It's going great so far, bought a CXB-2000A Head lvl 1, leveled it up to 70 and then sold it for 8 AC. Just takes some time to sell and some leveling, but I also got some nice profit. :') Been selling LOTS of mercs lately with some very nice profit.

I remember no one wanted Hellcat at first.
They were going for 80 AC +25 PS.


I was going to trade my OPE Golem for one but Davethebads told me golem was better.

So ended up keeping Golem.
And he ended up getting a Hellcat.

I remember that too ^^

Only I was DESPERATE for a Hellcat regardless. I knew they were going to be incredible, people just didn't see the chain buff potential.

But at that point I was still a new free player, without 2 ac to rub together. By the time I had 100 ac just sitting around people were selling her for waaaay more than that.