Exploding Penguin
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I've noticed that a lot of people don't play merc that much, which is surprising since it's got a pretty versatile skill tree. I can understand why it's underpowered though, as passive armor stands no chance to passives like blood lust and adrenaline isn't as useful as a second pasisve such as deadly aim or shadow arts. Here's a couple suggestions on rebalancing mercenary classes as well as adding in a couple new things to make the class more interesting:
Surgical Strike Increases with Dexterity: Merc has literally no skills that increase with dex...that's ridiculous. Especially since there's a high base dex requirement for max passives of both armor types, and stun grenade is a terrible stun even though it increases with dex. Changing surg to increase with dex would create some ideas for really interesting builds as well as mod caster merc builds (the bunker + surg merc builds with high tech). When the caster builds are modded, they no longer have severe advantages against classes without debuffs and becoming malfed only reduces damage from bunker, with mercs also having intimidate to counter BHs and their smoke.
Hybrid Shield: Atom Smasher gets removed and replaced with this buff, which increases dexterity and technology both by a moderately small amount each. This skill increases with strength at a very slow rate of 1 more dex/tech point per 7-8 str points and increases at a +2 dex/tech points until level 7 where it goes to +1 dex/tech points. The point of this is to replace a neutralization-based skill with a tanking skill, they should have a similar responding action from the opponent in terms of damage received over the battle. Also, mercs have no buffs on defensive stats, leaving them at a hugh disadvantage considering that assault bots were nerfed to 65%. Note that TLMs still keep atom smasher, this only happens to normal mercs. It also increases with strength, to replicate the similarity that atom smasher also increases with strength, as well as mix up tanking builds a bit so that this can't be abused with max hybrid without some decent strength.
Artillery strike increases with technology: Replaces the fact that plasma rain got moved from tech to dex. This also makes merc caster builds more interesting, as well as decreasing the power of the previous caster type because bunker was physical and surg was energy, creating a situation where you can't guard against such things with a buff. Now this can easily be countered by using reflex/def matrix. I'll also suggest some other things later that would greatly influence support and make it far more effective, so this is a counter to that as well.
Sniper Shot: Another new skill to replace adrenaline. It's similar to deadly aim as it increases the effectiveness of both the gun AND auxiliary, but in a different way: it increases critical hit chance. This skill levels up at a consistent rate like shadow arts, and increases crit chance of both the gun and auxiliary at .5% per level for a max of 5% crit chance. Also increases damage at .7% per level for +7% damage on both aux and gun at max level. This benefits all builds greatly . However, it requires base strength.
Adrenaline: Couldn't come up with a better name, so I'm reusing an old skill name. Bunker replaces the place of double strike on the skill tree and this replaces bunker's old place. This skill is a great neutralization skill as it removes a large amount of the opponent's rage while striking and damaging the opponent. It removes rage based off of the opponent's max rage and can be reused every 5 turns. Level 1 of this skill removes 20% of the opponent's current rage, and rapidly increases to removal of 60-65%. This attack also costs 0 energy but can be blocked. The reason is that there are way too many offensive skills on merc, making it a full-on offensive class that's hard to make tank builds with at high levels.
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