Everytime I've tried to use these stupid things to fight Dragonfly it's just an unfun tedious chore to try twisting the game into working properly. This is supposed to be basically the main draw of Wurt, upgrading her base statistics from the King and gaining access to guards; yet their AI is so bad it's basically trial and error to get them to function in a way that results in something other than disaster.
They wander extremely far from their spawnpoint and you can't control them at all, so if you're trying to corral them and they get loose the only way to get them back inside is to feed them, but that also makes it borderline impossible to leave the corral to try to lure something like Dragonfly into it because the guard you befriended will shove into you as you're trying to get back into; and if it gets out and attacks the boss, then it attacks the guard, then all the guards will run out of the corral to fight the boss. If you try blocking them in before they run out, which is barely possible because they react so fast, you then still have to condemn that one guard to die outside which lowers your teams DPS as a whole. Wurt is a merm, yet she can't intelligibly communicate with her own people to perform any kind of competent or remotely strategic maneuvers despite the fact that these are both intelligent creatures with language, and are supposed to be trained warriors, and this is her entire gimmick. These aren't spiders, they're actual humanoid beings with language yet there's zero way to communicate with them at all. And they're guards, these aren't random creatures wandering about their property; these are guards, they're supposed to be guarding not going for a stroll across the countryside while a Dragonfly oblierates a merm child in the distance.
Wurt is a merm yet merms don't care if she's getting attacked. She's also a child, and they still don't care. There's absolutely no justification for this beyond the developers just didn't bother to code that in. And what it means is that if you want merms to fight ANYTHING, you have to recruit all of them. Which again is borderline impossible to do within the confines of a corral because you can't leave it to lure an enemy inside, because they'll all chase after you and leave it. Alternatively you can try screwing with the broken AI targeting, trying to get an enemy to proc off you and instead attack a guard so the rest of the merms will suddenly start caring that their own kind is under assault. Which also is borderline impossible because depending on the enemy their AI will not switch targeting off you even if they're being hit by something else while you actively run away. Running in circles for ten seconds while merm guards hit the boss, and it doesn't bother to attack them at all it just keeps chasing me while the rest of the guards I didn't befriend just watch. But then when I try to get the boss to focus me so I can kite it while the merms attack it too, it suddenly stops paying attention to me each time I kite and hits a merm instead; which they can only survive a few hits of before they die and the team DPS goes down.
Merms don't even react to any enemy creatures, or their comrades being in combat unless they get hurt. Again, more baseless illogical behaviour resulting from incomplete design. They'll walk around spiders, giants, dogs, anything without reacting to it despite the fact that they are supposed to be GUARDS. Even the most basic creatures in this game react to the presence of other monsters yet creatures who are the core of a characters entire gimmick couldn't be bothered to have that basic feature coded in. So if you're trying to fight something that isn't aggressive to them, again you have to screw with recruiting them all or trying to get the creature to attack them just to get them to participate in a fight. Even if their fellow guards are right beside them, in the middle of a fight, bystanding guards STILL won't get involved unless one of the fighting guards takes damage because that's the only proc the developers bothered to put in for their entire combat behaviour.
And, not only does it cost a bunch of resources to spawn these awful things in but you have to constantly babysit the King or else he'll die and they'll lose all their power, along with Wurt.
It's honestly bad enough that Wurt's core gimmick is literally something every character in this game can already do, recruiting allies to fight mobs; specifically bosses. She moves fast on swamp, other characters can just build road to move fast too. She can summon the King, but has to babysit him constantly just to keep up a statistic boost other characters either have on spawn or can acquire far easier. Yet the thing that's the most actually applicable and useful, having superior followers to kill bosses with (Which Winona already has so this is once again a redundant gimmick), is potentially inferior to the vanilla because the features on this pay to play characters gimmick are still not even completed to the standards of the vanilla.
Also she should be able to swim, and be immune to wetness insanity. Because her species spends all their time in a moist swamp and her wetness barks actively support her being wet, yet she is driven insane by it like any other character; and she can fall into the water without any negative benefits because she canonically can swim but it's just not in the game as a controllable feature. Doesn't matter if that would make her too "powerful" compared to characters who can generate infinite food or double damage, the canon of the actual game supports these features but they just aren't in the game because meh. Could of given her a perpetual wetness state like the Womp mod that she has to regulate, or anything to give her more downsides.
I purposely avoid rants because they usually accomplish nothing since if the developers aren't working to fix this, then this one rant likely won't change anything. But when I straight up have to FIGHT the game to try to make merm guards perform basic combat routines vanilla followers I didn't pay for can already do, I need to point this out somewhere.
