Re: PDR Merc feasible?
But If you can get your hands on it, I won't mind trying to equip an act 3 merc with:
- Jewelers armor of Amicae with 4 sols (53 PDR)
- Jewelers Monarch of Amicae with 4 sols (53 PDR)
- Jewelers circlet of Amicae with 3 sols (46 PDR)
This would give you 152 PDR. And should be enough to give you enough physical immunity to totally neglect damage from the minions of destruction.
There are a couple of problems that I can see with this:
1. Act3 mercs don't have enough Stength for a Monarch - you'd need quite a bit on your sword (socketed Fal runes?). That's the minor problem. The big one:
2. Could such a merc actually kill anything? Having tried Act3 mercs a few times, I'm pretty sure the answer is no.
Also, considering Lister always spawns with Spectral Hit, all he needs is a conviction aura and all of that PDR and tanking ability is negated by the elemental damage. Ditto for most elemental attackers (good luck negating Gloam's ~400 lightning damage with the mercs lacking resistances). Or anything with two of: Cursed, Extra-Strong, Might aura would have a chance to do quite a bit of damage to your merc - only the merc couldn't effectively fight back.
So I still don't see much point because, while an invincible merc sounds like a great thing, it's probably not going to happen without an extreme amount of effort. Mephistophelez's point about trying to help him stay alive for Nihl runs makes sense, but that's a specialized scenario and I'd bet that even then he'd still die sometimes. Personally, I'd rather that my merc could at least kill things when I need him to, and that he'd tank at a tolerable (but not perfect) level.
And actually, having the merc get pwned once in a while can make it apparent to your character when a particularly nasty pack has spawned - without having to learn the hard way. I know I've had that happen on a few Countess runs when an archer pack just destroyed my merc in a second or two, but watching Waheed get pwned alerted me to the fact that I had to become a lot more cautious this run, and his death saved my character in the process.