Re: Which armor is better for Merc?
Well, since you have both choices essentially available, I'd suggest making the Stone.
At the very least you can try it and see if you prefer it. If it turns out you don't... well presumably if you have an MF sorc you're going to want to build another character eventually, so having an extra merc armour sitting around isn't really a loss.
Especially since you say trading is slow there... no sense having perfectly glitchable armours sitting around rotting.
I would like to note two things though:
1) If you're lowish level, it doesn't matter what your merc's got, Meph will kill him. He won't hit often enough to keep the slow consistent, and he won't avoid hits often enough to stay alive. This is doubly true if your damage isn't that hot, as obviously the longer the fight the more damage the merc has to sustain. I often run Meph mercless until the mid 80s... a couple seconds spent dodging instead of killing vs a couple seconds spent running over to res him + a bunch of gold that could be handy for gambling.
2) Even if you're highish level, Andy eats mercs for breakfast. I dunno, I don't run Andy much if ever because it doesn't seem like either the time:reward or risk:reward are very good so I haven't really experimented with the best way to keep the merc up vs her, but I'm yet to try a setup that seems to work all that well.
Hell, even my singer barb, who was capable of providing solid BO&shout to the merc, and hitting Andy with Battle Cry for massively reduced damage, and tanking andy himself, had trouble keeping the merc up through the run.
I have the Shaft atm, and using it. Before I was using treachery/duress, and they just totally suxed vs Andy/Meph, fade never kicks in (2% chance).
Yeah, Treachery is definitely not my first choice for meph running unless I've got CTA or a BO barb, in which case the merc should be ok anyways and he'll poke that much faster.
The other choice I forgot to mention is Durry's shell. I'd never up or Um a regular one, but it's good enough the way it is with the life/res/str/cbf that given the choice between a regular durry's and a regular shaft, I'd take Durry's pretty much every time. An eth one is totally worth applying runes to, especially if you've got CV insight/infinity strength requirements to worry about.
Also what makes GBane so attractive (non eth version)
Damage Reduced By 15-20 (varies)
Magic Damage Reduced By 15-20 (varies)
Does the Magic Damage, and damage reduced by 20 actually do much
Yes.
Yes it does.
And no, you don't need Sols.
Google