With the addition of Loadout slots I’ve really enjoyed experimenting and tinkering with various setups for each career. Where previously I had to judge which build I liked the most for a given career and just played that, I was now free to explore all the options a career had to offer without having to deal with constant build swapping. I was surprised by how many of the talents that I previously dismissed (cause they didn’t fit my favourite playstyle for the career) were actually really cool and build defining. Almost every career had a plethora of options for a variety of builds. Some just straight up powerful and efficient, some just very flavourful and fun. A simple example to illustrate my point:
Hunstman’s ranged weapon choice heavily determines the talent setup and each build feels very distinct. Wanna blow enemeis away up close with a Blunderbuss? Well, Blunderbuss has long reload, so you’ll want Keep It Coming, Thrill of the Hunt, and probably Head Down and Hidden cause it feels like you can barely get any shots out at all within the usual 6 seconds of your career skill. Wanna pretend you’re an Outcast Engineer by taking the Repeater? Make 'Em Bleed will have good uptime with the volume of shots you put out, Burst of Enthusiasm will generate meaningful amounts of THP while you’re gattling away, and Blend In helps you make great use of the free ammo reload you get on the Repeater when you use your career skill. Wanna be THE sniper? Longbow or Handgun (if you want to not have to sweat about Stormvermin shields) with One In the Eye. Thick Hide and Concealed Strikes.
Huntsman is far from the only career with this level of richness in talent and gear setups. Almost all careers have this in spades.
But this seems almost entirely absent from the Mercenary. It’s not that it’s a bad career, not by any means. But his Talent options simply do not provide much of an ability to create distinct, flavourful builds. Taking it row by row (skipping the generic lvl 5 and lvl 15 Talents, of course):
Lvl 10: The More the Merrier! - Limb-Splitter - Helborg’s Tutelage
To start with, Helborg’s Tutelage just doesn’t fit. A guaranteed crit every 6th strike means ca. 12.5 % crit chance (that’s the first time it procs, then it triggers every 5th strike, upping it to 20 % crit chance). Mercenary already starts with 10 % crit chance as a baseline due to his Perk. So what we’re measuring is: is the ability to free up a Property slot on the Trinket and weapon worth sacrificing a Talent for? The answer is a resounding no. The reason being, The More the Merrier is an astounding 25 % power increase in most situations on higher difficulties. No Properties on Trinket or weapon are going to rival that. Mixed hordes, patrols, Chests of Trials in Chaos Wastes, even a monster fight will benefit in some way from the power increase, ranging from 5 to 25 %. Then there’s Limb-Splitter. In theory this could be a good talent, and there are some weapons that do benefit from it, like the Executioner Sword, which doesn’t have as much cleave as one might expect and can get stuck in hordes on Cata. But in general, Kruber’s selection of melee weapons is sufficiently solid and free of single-target weapons like the one-handed axes that he’s generally not in need of extra cleave, especially so on a career that already has extra cleave as one of its Perks. The More the Merrier is such an outlier in terms of power on this row you’d need a serious, serious reason not to take it. And the other two talents don’t really offer a compelling reason to do so, as not only do they not compete in power, they do not open up an alternate playstyle either. There’s very little reason to pick a different weapon just cause you got the option to take Limb-Splitter or Helborg’s Tutelage. Zealot has the exact same guaranteed crit talent, but on him it’s an enticing option because it’s a net increase in crit chance (Zealot doesn’t have the 5 % crit chance increase Merc has) and also interacts very well with the Repeating Crossbow (guaranteed crit every 2nd volley, infinite ammo sustain). Kruber’s arsenal doesn’t give Limb-Splitter or Helborg’s Tutelage the space they’d need to be relevant, and both either conflict with or are made somewhat redundant by Mercenary’s Perks.
Lvl 20: Reikland Reaper - Enhanced Training - Strike Together
This is where one would expect things to get quite interesting and distinct, as the lvl 20 rows always dramatically impact the way the career’s core Passive Ability works. But like with lvl 10, it’s not really a contest. Now, with Reikland Reaper one would think it would combo with The More the Merrier to create a great Elite one-shotting build, like 2-handed Slayer gets with Skull-Splitter and Trophy Hunter stacks. But since both the More the Merrier and Reikland Reaper require a horde or at least a decent enough group of enemies nearby to function, unless you’re trying to pick an elite in a mixed horde or fighting a patrol, you’re not really going to have the opportunity to make use of that, and you still need to activate Paced Strikes in that situation to attempt it. You’re probably not too concerned with cleaving 3 enemies with a patrol on your tail, so the Power stacking fantasy doesn’t quite come together. More often than not, you’re just overkilling Skavenslaves. Now, Enhanced Training does have some potential with some of the slower weapons that have good attack angles, like the Greathammer or the Executioner Sword. There, Paced Strikes gets to make up for the weapon’s downside of low attack speed, and the weapon makes the higher target requirement irrelevant thanks to the good horizontal sweeps and high cleave. But why have 20 % increased attack speed at extra cost when you can have 40 % at no extra cost? Sure, it’s not all stacked on one person, but Strike Together is still just a numerically superior option, made more versatile still by the fact it doesn’t have to be all about horde clear. You can focus on horde, while your allies are DPSing down a monster, now 10 % faster thanks to the attack speed you provide. It’s really no contest. And once again, not only are the two alternative options inferior in terms of power, they do not open up much of a build opportunity either. It would be fine for one talent to just be better than the rest if the others offered some very different gameplay, but they don’t. It’s not like Lingering Flames, Famished Flames and Volcanic Force, which each synergize with completely different weapon setups. You can be playing pretty much anything with any of these Kruber talents, except for maybe Enhanced Training, since some weapons struggle to meet the 4 enemy limit due to low cleave or poor angles.
Lvl 25: Stand Clear - Blade Barrier - Black Market Supplies
Oof. So to begin with, Stand Clear and Black Market Supplies are just copies of WHC’s talents on the same row (Charmed Life and Always Prepared, respectively). That’s bad enough. The fact these copies are also pretty generic talents to begin with just makes it worse. Black Market Supplies does have the redeeming quality of being on a career with increased crit chance and a high ammo weapon (Repeater), which makes a more ranged playstyle with Scrounger a possibility. WHC does have the same feature, but his high ammo weapon (Repeater Pistol) is considerably less powerful than the Repeater Handgun, so there is some extra reason to take this option on the Mercenary over WHC. Except Huntsman can say the exact same thing. Huntsman also has baseline increased crit chance, this time as an aura. He also has even more ammo capacity without having to sacrifice a talent for it, has double effective range, and also sustains ammo better by havving innate Conservative Shooter as a Passive. So even if Black Market Supplies did make for an attractive playstyle option for Mercenary as a potential ranged DPS, it’s not really offering a new playstyle, it just does what Huntsman does, just with worse range capabilities and better frontline presence. Moving on from that, not sure which build exactly yearns to sacrifice a talent slot for 20 % increased dodge range. More often than not you don’t notice you even have it. It’s not the worst of the worst of generic talents (there’s stuff like Shade’s movespeed at lvl 25 or Zealot’s power talent at lvl 10), but it’s most definitely up there. It’s arguably even worse on Mercenary than it is on WHC. WHC with some weapon setups might have to reach for higher mobility to compensate for the poorer crowd control, but Kruber doesn’t have these issues due to his weapon selection. That all leaves us with Blade Barrier. Who says no to 25 % damage reduction that’s up through the most chaotic parts of the game? And why isn’t this talent on row 20 with all the other Paced Strikes talents? Then at least there would potentially be some competition to Strike Together if you wanted to go for the flavour of a frontline tank, rather than a pure killing machine. It still wouldn’t make sense power-wise but at least the flavour incentive to pick something else might be there. But on row 25 it just makes the other talent options look even worse than they already are.
Lvl 30: Walk It Off - Ready for Action - On Yer Feet, Mates!
Compare this row of talents to what I mentioned with Huntsman, where we had Concealed Strikes for the dedicated sniper, Head Down and Hidden for the Blunderbuss to get as many shots out as possible in the small window, and Blend In for the highest frequency of free reloads on Repeater. Three distinct options for three very distinct builds. Once again, Mercenary has none of that. Neither of these three talents is straight up bad, there’s no clear outlier that overshadows the rest as has been the case with all the other talent rows. But none of them really redefine the Mercenary’s playstyle or incentivise new build directions either. Sure, you can get 25 % damage reduction for 10 seconds. Granted, a good bit of that usually goes wasted as enemies are knocked on the ground for a few seconds when you use it, but there are use cases for it (when caught in a gas cloud, for one, or after your team gets tossed out of a Blighstormer vortex, if you somehow end up landing close to each other). Ready for Action just gets you the most crowd control and THP generation over a period of time, so in terms of pure efficiency, however dull it may be, it has its place. On Yer Feet, Mates can be the run saver (and a bit of a newbie trap, too) and definitely found its niche in Versus. But neither really inspires or cements together an entirely different build the way Huntsman’s or, say, Pyromancer’s lvl 30 options do.
Now, Mercenary isn’t the only career with this problem. As I’ve touched on, some of the Shade’s, Zealot’s and WHC’s talents could use a look, but on those, it’s generally an isolated case where there’s a stinker or an uninspiring option here or there. On Mercenary (and in my opinion, to some extent the Foot Knight too), this seems to be omnipresent. No build really feels dramatically different with his Talent options, no Talent screams to you “play Mercenary differently”, “use me with this weapon you wouldn’t use otherwise”. A part of it could be down the Kruber’s weapon selection, where all the melee weapons are generally solid enough that they don’t create the opportunity for a specific talent choice to really allow them to shine, you can really do well with anything and you can’t really focus on a specific role, like Elite one-shotter, monster killer, etc. And I think it’s a real shame.
The Loadout system really opened the game up for creativity and experimentation, but Mercenary’s talents don’t really provide the options to create truly distinct, flavourful or experimental loadouts. Even if all the talents on each row were balanced to mathematical perfection, the Mercenary overall ends up feeling more or less like the same build regardless because there’s not enough uniqueness in the Talents, only generic % boosts to one number or another.
