Useful Tips for Choosing Mercenaries
Many combinations can work, as long as you have all bases covered you should be fine with whichever mercs you prefer.
That being said, here are some personal opinions based on the mercs I’ve used:
- Fox – Best Stealth specialist, as she can have a 2nd try if her initial attack fails, her accuracy isn’t that great at the start though, and forget about her ambidexterity, dual weapons kinda suck, try to get her a silent rifle ASAP and grab stealth kill perks.
- Livewire – Cheap mechanic, great unique skill, kinda bad accuracy and very squishy, she’s nice early on, and later on there aren’t many high mechanics other than Vicki so you might feel forced to take, or re-take her eventually.
- Kalyna – Starts with a rifle, that alone makes her worth taking early on, she can cover as your team’s mechanic for a while, but her stats really aren’t that good, and I heard she keeps asking for raises, so you might not want her as a long term merc.
- Grizzly – Decent, cheap merc, gets a lot better when/if you can get him a LMG, but, then again, ammo will be an issue.
- Barry – I’ve slept on this one, the free grenades he produces are GREAT, and I mean, capable of wiping out entire patrols in a couple of throws kind of great, he’s also the cheapest explosives expert, Barry is awesome.
- Igor – Good melee merc early on, kind of a pain to level up if you try to take him later on.
- MD – Bad fighter, can work as your medic if fox isn’t avaliable.
- Buns – Can replace fox if stealth isn’t your thing, the skillset is rather similar.
- Blood – Another melee expert, with better reliability if you don’t ♥♥ up.
- Grunty – Cheap merc, good for ambushes, if you give him a sniper he might kill a random 2nd target along with your stealth guy before combat starts.
- Hitman – Cheap elite merc with high accuracy and bad aiming bonuses (dex), pretty good fighter.
Anyway, just make sure you have a decent medic, a very good (90+) explosives expert and a very good mechanic, the rest is personal preference, I’ve also played a bit with the higher tier mercs, Raider+Raven are permanent additions to my team and they work really well together, the legendary mercs seem to be very strong too, but I don’t think they are worth going bankrupt over, if I couldn’t afford to I’d at least get Scully and Reaper.
The Meta starter is usually livewire, Barry, and MD and your IMP character. Main reason is they fill your toolset basically mechanic, explosive, and medic respectively and they’re cheap at first with giga wisdom so you can train them and made them become gus tarball without the cost. Your IMP merc should maxed at marksmanship, wisdom, agility, dexterity, leadership. Dump mechanic, medic, and explosive since those hired merc will fill that position and get the trainer perks so you can teach your merc the marksmanship and leadership. Also trainer perk gives more benefit when training merc