SO when are we going to get mercenaries?

Mercs your favorite part of D2?
No thanks. Why should an exile pay for protection?

In the past GGG has said they would like to add mercenaries. They would require a ton of work to actually implement so they won't be added for quite a while at best.

Yes it would be great to have some but lets do a mix of tl2 and diablo kind, the tl2 part comes where your pet or merc can run back to town and sell stuff that was always a nifty idea, and the diablo part would be that the pet or merc fights for you.

Mercenaries would be very interesting but Chris recently said it's not close... That's a "to do" thing that we'll probably get more concrete information on within the coming months after this game launches.

Can someone explain why you think mercenaries are so good, for example in Diablo 2?

I'm curious because I don't like the idea at all. I prefer just playing my own character and not force every character to carry along a side-kick. If the mercenary serve special functions, it seems to be that'd be something that would better to somehow incoroprated in the design of your own character instead.

Just a thought. If mercenaries are implemented at some point, how about making the player spend his own skill points to give the merc abilities/usesfulness? This way, it'd not be quite so mandatory to have a mercenary, because if you didn't spend skill points in your merc's tree, it'd be very weak. But if you did, you'd have a strong merc but a weaker player character. You'd be essentially speccing into the mercenary as if were a part of your skill tree.

Have to agree, I can't stand AI allies. If there is an enemy in front of me, I want to kill it, not watch an AI do it for me.
I even turned off the pet in Torchlight 2 for the most part. But it was worse there, it felt like the whole game was balanced for the use of a pet.