Mercenary equipment

The Call of the Forsaken expansion introduced mercenary equipment, gear you can put on your mercenary.

“	New Mercenary Equipment will also give you incredible options to equip your mercenary in different ways. Are you looking to help your tank mercenary survive tougher fights, or perhaps keep your healer mercenary from running out of mana? In either case, there will be equipment you can discover that can help! Just like Mercenary AAs, equipment will be shared across all of your mercenaries.	”
— Call of the Forsaken: Mercenary Alternate Advancement and Equipment

As of the Night of Shadows expansion, the best mercenary equipment is "Vigilant", which is obtained in The Burning Lands zones.

Obtaining[edit | edit source]

From a Daybreak forum post by CatsPaws (lightly edited):

If you pre-ordered the Call of the Forsaken expansion it came with lower level merc gear called Vestments of the Forsaken. If you did not, then the lowest level right now is level 75.
Each class of merc has their own gear, although they can be worn by all classes. The Casters is Sorcerer's, the Healers is Soother's, the Rogues is Assassin's, and the tanks is Defender's. Due to the cost in The Bazaar and the rareness of the drops, the higher level merc gear is often just used for the slot, not the class. In other words, my healer and tank mercs might have some sorcerer stuff because it is more common to find and cheaper to buy.
There are only four slots on each merc ear, neck, shoulder, belt
So starting at level 75 you can get merc gear from the NPCs in Ethernere Tainted West Karana with "Crude", next level is 80 and is called "Simple" then at 85 it's "Rough", at 90 it's "Ornate", at 95 it's "Flawed" and at 100 it's "Intricate" and finally at 105 it's "Elaborate". All of this gear is no trade and bought with Marks of Valor which are dropped from the Heroic Adventures in that expansion.
Also at level 105 you can buy "Elegant" from the merchant in Lceanium in Empires of Kunark using Sathir trade gems. This gear is also no trade.
The dropped gear for level 105 is called "Vigilant" and is the best you can get. It can be dropped in The Burning Lands or bought and sold in the Bazaar.

Slot changes[edit | edit source]

Originally, mercenary equipment had the following bugs:

Tank mercs who wear a shield have reduced aggro generation
Rogue mercs who receive two weapons reduce their DPS (by half). Tank mercs also have lower dps with a shield, but tank merc dps is already so low the difference in dps is unlikely to matter.

In the February 15, 2017 game update, changes were made which also fixed the above bugs:

- Mercenary equipment has been simplified and improved:
- - All existing pieces of mercenary equipment (excluding the Vestments of the Forsaken) are now 'Faded' items that can be converted to newer equivalent level and archetype items.
- - Vendors that sell mercenary equipment now sell the newer items.
- - The stats for all levels of mercenary equipment have been improved significantly.
- - There are now four archetypes of mercenary equipment corresponding to each of the four mercenary types: Defender, Soother, Assassin, and Sorcerer.

- - Mercenary equipment slots have been changed from head, chest, primary, and secondary to ear, neck, shoulder, and waist in order to correct a bug that would cause melee DPS and tank mercenaries to become less effective when wielding primary/secondary equipment.