It’s been a long time since the last league, are you ready for this brand new challenge league?
I believe that old players who have been following the original game know that in Path Of Exile 3.26, a new league mechanism has been added, Mercenaries of Trarthus. This highly anticipated league introduces what players have been eager to know since the release of the game – Mercenaries. These mercenaries will accompany you throughout the game to kill enemies and collect loot for you.
In this guide, we will introduce the specific mechanics, rewards, and viable farming strategies of this Mercenary League. Before starting your new league journey, be sure to do everything well!
Recruiting/Exiling/Plundering Mercenaries
First, you will encounter a mercenary in each area and can choose one of the following three options: recruit, exile, or seize POE currency and items they carry.
Then you must defeat them in battle, and if you accidentally die in battle, they will teleport away. Please note that you do not have a second chance!
Recruit
Recruiting a mercenary is always the main reason for all of us to come here. It allows you to hire the mercenary permanently by paying gold. However, you can recruit up to three at a time.
Exile
The next option allows you to banish the mercenary you defeated and prevent any mercenaries with the same attribute type from spawning in the next 10 areas. This is useful if you want to find a mercenary with specific skills or equipment in the later stages.
Plunder
Finally, you can capture the mercenary’s items. You can choose to take one of their equipment or choose to take everything in their pockets. After all, the loser has no say!
It is worth mentioning that the mercenary’s equipment is of high quality and much better than the rare equipment you randomly pick up on the ground. So, you should definitely take a close look at the items of each mercenary in the campaign, because it is likely to contain some very valuable upgrades.
How Does The Mercenary Work?
After recruiting, you can choose a mercenary to fight alongside you and accompany you to complete the game.
The mercenary will accompany you in all types of games, including boss battles! It’s worth noting that mercenaries don’t count as minions, they’re considered allies. It’s unclear if they count as party members, though.
If a mercenary dies, they leave the area and can’t return, meaning you’ll have to clear the rest of the area on your own. However, if you want to keep using the mercenary in a later area, just pay the gold fee to revive it in town.
Mercenary Pros And Cons
Mercenaries have a rather strange feature in that they count as half a party member when adjusting the game’s difficulty and rewards. This means that when you have a mercenary, all enemies have increased health and drop more POE currency.
In theory, the damage and support that a mercenary brings you should be enough to make up for the increased monster health, and more importantly, since the mercenary isn’t actually another person, the extra loot is all yours!
The only downside is that unique monsters have 50% more health, and their powerful damage can easily kill you in one hit. So if your mercenary isn’t doing what it should, don’t take it to challenge Pinnacle Boss fights.
Fixed Level
When it comes to customizing your mercenaries, they have some limitations.
Because mercenaries don’t level up, their level is permanently fixed at the level they were when you recruited them. This means that if you want higher level mercenaries, you have to keep recruiting better mercenaries.
Equipment
As for mercenaries’ equipment, they actually have a full set of equipment when you recruit them. This equipment can be replaced, but once replaced, you can’t get any of the original equipment back.
In addition, mercenaries can only use equipment that matches their attributes. The mercenaries you can recruit in POE 3.26 have either a single attribute or two attributes. If they only have a single attribute, they can equip any equipment with the same attribute. But if they have two attributes, they can only equip equipment with any combination of those two attributes.
Infamous Mercenaries
There is a small chance that the mercenaries you encounter are Infamous Mercenaries, who not only have better equipment, but also have their own Infamous modifier on their equipment. These mercenaries may have other bonuses, such as a higher chance of getting Trarthan Gems, or more POE Divine Orbs from defeated bosses, but we can’t confirm this yet.
It’s worth noting that your chances of encountering Infamous Mercenaries scale with the area’s Item Quantity, so they will scale with map juicing as well.
For the special bonuses these mercenaries can offer, in addition to the aforementioned Infamous modifiers, there are also Trarthan Gems, and exclusive unique items that you can’t get anywhere else.
What’s The Impact On The League Economy?
With all of this in mind, I think it’s clear that mercenaries will have a tremendous impact on the economy of this PoE 3.26 league.
Many of the common unique items will now be very expensive. This is because there are a lot of unique items that can provide powerful auxiliary functions, but are not worth giving up your character’s own equipment slot.
With the emergence of certain special equipment combinations on mercenaries, the price of random special equipment will most likely soar throughout the league. So grab and hoard some special equipment that you think may be in this situation, and there is a good chance that you can earn thousands of PoE Divine Orbs by flipping them!
Best Farming Strategies
Finally, let’s talk about the farming strategies that will allow you to take advantage of all of this.
I think the most effective thing you can do in this league is to increase the rarity of items and use Magic Find (MF) strategies to get a lot of special equipment. As more and more players are eager to get more special equipment, their prices will soar, especially Blight gear may end up being very profitable.
It is also worth mentioning that you may want to focus on those league mechanics that can maximize the team’s rewards. Because league mechanics that provide rewards through fixed drops will not scale, while those that simply increase the number of monsters will scale rewards, you can better improve your single-player team rewards by focusing on these mechanics!
That’s it! Mercenaries will become your most trusted companions in Path Of Exile 3.26 leagues, so it is crucial to understand how to recruit mercenaries that best suit your play style and use them correctly! In any case, hurry up and make your mercenary build and start this new journey of exploration!
