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To me DPS builds mean high single target damage. Great Hammer fits as a DPS weapon for Mercenary because its light attacks have very high damage and stagger strength (without any buffs they can interrupt most elites' attacks). Still, once you learn the heavy attack's pacing and when you get used to starting the chains with push attacks, you can hold the frontline just as well as with Bretonnian Longsword and Executioner's Sword. The main difference being that instead of killing very quickly, you stagger the enemies.
It's a very tricky weapon to learn, I also hated it for a long time, but once it clicks it becomes super fun to use.
I recommend you to try the "Chad Knight" builds in this guide for Foot Knight. They even outperform Mercenary in terms of damage while also reaching great stagger breakpoints. They are very "greedy" builds though, as in they have to be played extremely aggressively to work properly.
Mainstay is definetly better when it comes to damage if you spam pushes, but Enhanced Power is more consistent, so it's not really a bad choice.
If you play around your team, then Strike Together is a beast; otherwise Reikland Reaper is plain better. In Legend, specially when playing with random people, it rarely has any value. But in Cataclysm playing close to allies is the best strategy 99% of the time, that's why I favour it in the builds. It highly depends on the playstyle and awareness of each player though.
Loosing Opportunist can be a big deal if you are facing a big group of Plague Monks, but I like the different approach. Still, to me the career skill is better used to prevent damage altogether by staggering enemies rather than to mitigate it with the THP or the damage reduction. Not that it's a bad talent, it's just a different way to gain value from it.
I got far better DPS and overall tankiness, by far, with Bruiser build (with your version or mine).
Only downside I see is the relatively slow career skill, and the inability to full stagger monsters and Elites, for that I prefer Foot Knight, but it's very low damage on that career, and slow weapons are unuseable to my taste...
I tested out Mercenary in Legend, and found out a Bruiser build I prefer, with :
- Enhanced Power instead of mainstay (wich is negligible damage bonus against already staggered enemies, instead of getting extra stagger/damage overall especially on bosses), and scales very well with extra power from other talents.
- Reikland Reaper instead of Strike Together, wich ensure getting to useful breakpoints and is a very nie addition to monster/ranged DPS when needed.
I found the attack speed bonus to not be very useful for allies, 10% is pretty negligible no matter weapon speed, and everybody is likely playing Swift Slaying anyway (or high speed weapons).
- Walk it Off instead of ready for action, using weapon (Spear and Shield) with Resourceful Combatant, wich is more or less halving career skill cooldown, making it about 45-50s, and allowing to buff teammates with damage reduction.
Huntsman is a ranged career so it can't really get any melee weapon to a point where it can be considered super strong. Still the best choice.
Foot Knight on the other hand makes specialized weapons more balanced. Spear & Shield is op because it's very strong at everything, so the difference is not as noticeable. Nevertheless, it's super strong on him too, just not interesting when it comes to making combinations with talents.
I don't think it's worth loosing the stagger breakpoint on Plague Monks' combos for that. You can always do a regular push after blocking the overhead and stagger them.
If you have vs. Chaos on a shield weapon and you charm, you can stagger chaos warriors when blocking their overhead attack.