Whoop, just reached 100% Mercenaries achievements, that last one for 1000 tasks completed took a while.
Now that the bragging part is over, here are some tips that might be useful for others:
- Whenever you get a task that involves getting killshots on enemies, sometimes multiple enemies in one move, using ability that does crap all damage, or otherwise hard: bring Cookie along and just keep summoning the fish endlessly. You can get 10-30 kills per fight that way, until board is full of the aoe damage fish that finishes the fight.
- If your task requires you to do a very big hit with an Attack, or finish a battle with very high Attack power, it’s handy to bring Cariel (+10 attack every 2 rounds) or Rokara (+7 attack every 2 rounds) along to make it easier.
- If your task requires you to kill Dragons: go to Blackrock Mountains, first couple bounties there have Dragons about 50% of the non-merc trash packs (rest are elementals and dwarves).
- If your task requires you to kill Demons: go to Felwood, bounties 4 (Xaravan) or 6 (Lord Banehollow), 100% of the non-merc trash packs are Demons.
- If your task requires you to kill Beasts: run heroic Barrens. All bounties there have lot of beasts, more than anywhere else, but I would recommend Mad Bomber if I had to pick one, as that one has 50% non-merc trash as Beasts. Outside Barrens, Yeti Hunter Ranel in Winterspring has about 33% portion of Beasts too.
- If your task requires you to prevent healing (e.g. Galvangar task 9), go to heroic Felwood and run Xaravan. The boss fight demons try to heal for 50 almost every round.
- While you can finish most tasks just fine on any Bounty, I would actually recommend running them in Felwood/Winterspring: the bounties there are still very easy and fast to complete, they have Mystery (i.e. chance for new Task) on them always, and they actually give pretty decent pile of tokens too. Eventually when you start reaching the point where you have all the rares maxxed out and mostly need legendary tokens, running a very fast Bounty with 6 legendary chars always gives you ~15 tokens to one of those 6 anyway. Which is essentially equally good as a guaranteed legendary token pile from doing one of the very hard heroics, you just do them a LOT faster. Barrens is an option too, but only after you can’t get literally anything from the Felwood/Winterspring loot tables anymore, or if those are too hard for you for some reason.
- All bounties beyond Barrens gives you 5 piles of tokens: 3 of them are based on the bounty, 1 pile always matches one of your team members, and 1 pile is totally random. For normal difficulty, you get about 65 (Felwood) - 85 (Alterac Valley) tokens per run, of which at least half is likely some useless crap you’re maxxed out on anyway. Going heroic, the token amount grows slightly to 100, regardless where you go. Heroic also guarantees that one of the three bounty based tokens to be legendary, except in Barrens and Felwood. On the other hand, you’re less likely to run heroic with 6 chars that are all legendary and none of them maxxed, so you waste your team-based tokens a lot more. Not to mention wasting a truckload of time and/or risking an unlucky failed run when going after heroics. Sad to say this but Blizzard: you’d need to at least double the token gains from heroic to make them worth it. Feels ironic to say this, but killing pigs outside Orgrimmar (=Barrens) is actually one of the best ways to “level up” in this game.
- Looted treasures: you probably know already what to pick and what not, but for any newer players as a tip: Double Time treasure picks a random ability of your char and uses it twice to random targets, meaning that it may actually damage your own team instead. Lot of the mercenaries have all three of their abilities saying they can target “an enemy”, so those are totally safe to grab Double Time. Meanwhile, if the ability just says “deals 15 damage”, that’s the stuff that hits your own face with Double Time, so never ever pick it. How would you remember which char has what when the treasure shows up? Well, other than taking notes, you can’t. Bad game design.
- Boons picked up on the way: most of the time they just ruin your own life. Your team you brought with you is designed to beat the boss anyway, so you don’t need Boons to help. But picking a Boon on the way can turn a trash pack into death trap, and losing a team member may cost you the boss fight. In short: never ever pick Boons if you’re not 100% sure you can manage it. More bad game design, pretty sure Bliz thinks them as buffs. The only time they might be useful is on some ultra-hard heroic fight that you literally can’t beat any other way than with lucky boons & treasures.