[Autumn]

I think that mercenaries should be nerfed, there's no reason they should exist to trivialize the levelling experienced based on half thought through opinions that grinders would grind anyway, the mercenaries as stated provide a very powerful boon to the low level grinding experience that promotes less party play and more solo grinding. It is never too much to ask that players should be asked to get people to co-op more often, it promotes roleplay in its most bare bones and newbie friendly experience. It helps much much more in that regard that people would tend to think.

I don't think they should be taken out back and shot in the knees, they exist as a talent pool to help out a ton in encounters, and after all you have to actually get those mercenaries first for them to matter too much, but given that LEing is a thing these should be changed to reflect that, so here is what I propose personally:

1) (Nerf) Adding Mercenary Level Scaling - 

Effectively this removes the ability to have mercenaries at a level higher than your own, this includes for end game when you've recruited lvl 80-90 mercenaries from dungeons having naturally higher scaling than your own.

This would cull down their usage in trivializing the grinding experience almost entirely, as they will be on the same level as you, and serve as an alternative to youkai during this time.

2) (Nerf) Removing Auto-heal from Mercenaries - 

As Mercenaries heal automatically after every fight and never truly 'Die' unlike youkai do, they cannot be subject to attrition at all, which just makes them better than Youkai in almost every regard, a grindylow will never get sapped of their FP, a snakeman twinblade will never be punished too harshly by just getting slapped in a fight.

Removing their Auto-Healing will help this a lot, I would say they can gain food regen from players like normal mercenaries tend to, as well as being fully restored by inns, to note, if a mercenary 'dies' they shouldn't be revived until the player has rested at an inn.

3) (Buff) Adding Levelled Skill Lists to mercenaries - 

As to compensate for the mercenaries levelling according to the player, and for them losing their auto-regen out of a fight, they should be given their levelled abilities so that they may operate truly as they're effective, for example, a firespitter would be much more impactful if it died, but had all of its passives. Or a Vect Wasp having Bouncing Stinger would start to make them pretty effective to have as well.