most people prefer to combine bugged treachery with eth reaper and 40/15 gulli. In terms of tankability and survivability, treachery can never out-shine a fort merc. Especially at baal where merc is susceptible to decrepify. To compensate the loss tankability as compared to eth fort/eth andy eth insight counter-parts, treach merc boost their attack speeds and the chance to proc ds and cb, which means as long as their merc keeps attacking despite the slow from the curse, they will leech everything back eventually. But it all depends on situation and especially if fade didn't procast just in time.
Fort merc do have better raw damage per hit and is able to tank very well but as merc are very much depended on by Hdins to take on wave 2 and to make it worse, the slow from baal, it takes bloody long time for fort merc to kill. It won't die, but when compared to treach counter parts, he's slower in killing despite of having a better raw damage per hit.
Talking about the disadvantage of fort, let see what's disadvantage of Treach merc.
Treach merc lacks the ability to provide meditation, so players have to accept the fact and drink more pots. Also when Wave 5 Listers spawned with Fanatism and the Hdin just so happened to be the only killer machine with 7 leechers, plus the decrepify from baal, high chance that the merc may not be able to pull through inspite of having more ias and cb/ds. On the other hand in the similar scenario, fort merc though may seem slower in killing, but will survive well.
Also if you are not using bots to tele to throne but doing it manually without map hack, treach merc will have problems tanking souls and will die especially if the hdin keep running out of mana to tele. Especially souls spawned with fanatism, there is no leech for attacking undead creeps, mana on hdin is burned with no meditation, souls everywhere on lvl 2 and lvl 3, teleing madly trying to find the exit, this is phuck. This comes from extensive experience of testing so this is very questionable if the o/p claims treachery is better for merc he may like to explain that or post a video how his treach merc tank souls.
Also, Treach Merc may only be useful for baal runs, but when comes to other adverse environments for instance uber tristram, it will never survive.
It is a matter of preference. Hdin with treacher merc must know when to pull to safety and let the merc recover, and on the other hand, Hdin with fort merc may be slower than treach merc when taking on Throne, but overall able to survive any adverse environments in d2.
I owned and have both treach and fort merc configurations and this comes from experience..
I think players have the freedom to choose what they want for their merc and as for me, I choose fort. To me price is not an excuse especially I am a non-ladder player. I would understand if this is a fresh ladder. I too, if I am poor on fresh ladder I would definately choose treachery as the choice of armour for my merc. But when I got richer, I will definately switch treachery out and put on a better armour for him, which is fort.
This post was edited by Jaxz on Nov 29 2011 08:34am