I think luminary and the mercs are low effort crap

The mercs don't spawn enough during the campaign or early maps. When they do, there's like two usable ones, and that's assuming they don't have any movement skills that break their shit AI.

Been stuck with a low level merc, I've been using scarabs to try to get the ones I need, and could also sacrifice one of my atlas trees to block literally everything in hopes they spawn, but that would suck. Apparently there will be an atlas node for luminaries so your merc deals more damage to other mercs, that just seems like yet another terrible bandaid "solution".

I thought mercs not going core was because GGG wanted to improve on them, maybe add some new ones, maybe fix the AI, maybe let us customize them more, but NOPE, they just got added back as they were. Actually, they're worse than they were, now it's a league mechanic only for the scion because who would risk their character getting one shot to "hire" them for 3 or 4 maps? I've seen people posting they get instantly deleted with like 8k life and 8 end charges. Mercs are now an afterthought accompanying a very subpar ascendancy for the scion. I expected better