Mercenary Contracts

A mercenary contract is a custom item that drops from world mobs and summons a hired fighter who follows you and fights at your side. On a shard this size it is how a solo player covers the party roles nobody is around to fill.

How to use one

Double-click the contract in your inventory. That is the whole action.

• The contract is never consumed. It stays in your bags and you summon from it again.
• 60-second cooldown between summons; a blocked attempt tells you the seconds left.
• One at a time. Summoning again dismisses the mercenary you have out.
• The Porter skips the cooldown entirely, because dismissing it is how you collect your loot. Minoseeks covers it on its own page.

Contracts used to answer a double-click with "Drop deed on open NPC slot to use" before anything else could happen. That dialog is gone. The client decides it from the type of item it believes it is holding, so a contract now borrows a scroll rather than a hireling deed — a scroll is used, not slotted. Nothing about how they work changed; the server always read the real item underneath.

Commanding it

The pet window on your HUD drives it: dismiss, stop attacking, toggle assist, rest. Assist is on by default, and you can hand it an attack target as you would a pet.

A class pet takes that same window. With a pet out, those buttons drive the pet and the mercenary fights unordered on its own.

Where they drop

World mobs on the standard regional loot tables. When such a mob rolls loot, a contract is the result 1% of the time, or 2% in a hotzone, and a hotzone rolls one extra chance besides. That is 1% of the loot rolls that happen, not of kills, so contracts come up rarer than one in a hundred. The six archetypes share that band, so roughly one contract in six is any particular one.

Mob level caps the rank

A contract's rank can never exceed the mob's level divided by ten. A level-50 mob never drops better than rank 5. Mobs under level 10 still drop rank 1. Under that cap the quality roll takes the lower of two attempts, so low ranks dominate even on a high-level kill; hotzones raise the cap by one before the mob-level rule applies.

Rank 7 needs a level-70 mob, and everything written for this shard stops at 65. Treat rank 6, a level-60 mercenary, as the real ceiling. Hunting higher-level mobs is the only route to better contracts.

What it looks like in your bags

The client can only draw items it already knows, so a contract borrows the appearance of a stock scroll; the reason is on client changes.

The rolled name is real, and reads like Krag Lv50 Healer — a rolled first name, the level it summons, and the archetype. The rank, 1 to 7, shows where the client displays a contract's rank. A contract sells to a vendor for real gold, and selling destroys it, rolled build and all.

What you get when you summon

Level is rank times ten, so rank 4 summons a level-40 mercenary. Health is 60 per level, putting a level-60 at 3,600. Casting strength scales with rank, up to what the spell allows.

Archetype	What it does
Guardian	Tank. Pure melee, no spells.
Blade	Melee damage. Pure melee, no spells.
Healer	Single and group heals, plus stat blessings.
Oracle	Buffs, thorn chants, damage over time.
Destroyer	Direct-damage casting.
Porter	Does not fight at all. Carries loot for you — see Minoseeks.

Beast kits

Guardian and Blade are the two pure-melee archetypes, and either can roll a beast instead of a humanoid: Cave Bear and Dire Wolf on Guardian, Great Cat and Dire Rat on Blade. Beasts use the large named-mob models and carry a species name, so a rolled contract reads Greymaw Lv30 Dire Wolf. They wear no armour and no runes, which means a summoned beast's stats are exactly what its own row says - nothing is added on top.

Beasts are kits inside those two archetypes, not extra contract types, so adding them did not change how often a merc contract drops or dilute the other archetypes. They are calibrated against the humanoid kits in the same pool, so which one your contract rolled never decides whether it was a good contract.

Starter pacts

A new character is given four pacts - Wolf, Bear, Cat and Rat. Using one summons that companion and destroys the other three: that is the choice. A starter companion is rank 1 forever and cannot be upgraded by any route, which is the price of getting one at level 1. They are worth no gold and cannot be sold.

Race, equipment and runes roll from a small pool inside each archetype, so two rank-5 Blades differ.

It can be killed, you can dismiss it, and it disappears when you log out and when you die. None of that touches the contract, which keeps its rank and rolled build through all of it. Dying with one out means waiting out the cooldown before you can bring it back.

What it does in a fight

It holds a formation slot beside you, sits when you sit, and recalls to you if you get more than 300 units away.

It adopts your current target, and with assist on it retaliates against anything attacking you or it. Casters pick a random harmful spell in range every 10 to 15 seconds, on monsters as well as players. A healer heals the worst-off ally below 75% health and heals before buffing. Buffs cover your whole group, and it will not re-cast what you already carry; support runs on its own timer, so heals do not queue behind attacks.

It fights players you attack, outside safe zones and cities. City guards ignore mercenaries, and other players can kill yours. Inside a safehold, safe zone or player city it follows you in but never picks a target of its own. It takes no loot, and its killing blows pay experience to you and your group as your own would.

Farming better ones

"Better" is rank, archetype and the rolled kit. Rank you can steer: hunt the highest-level mobs you can handle, and prefer hotzones. Archetype and kit you cannot — both spread evenly at every mob level, so the only route to a Healer is to keep killing until one drops. Nothing rerolls and nothing upgrades.

Rough edges

• The borrowed base name shows through in interface text that ignores the rolled name.
• The pet window is filled once at summon and not refreshed afterwards, so treat it as a snapshot.
• The pet window is shared with class pets, and the pet takes precedence.

More detail on known issues.