Really neat, but probably more trouble than it’s worth for online play or restricted to offline only, and in terms of online play, the devs have specifically stated that they have no interest in more ways to not play in a group. However, there are many issues and limitations that would crop up, such as hotkeys to use potions on the merc, which means it would be limited to only your main mercenary and you would have to restrict healing the other mercs to preserve parity between m&k and controller play. When another players joins the game, all but the main merc are sent back to town just like D3 does with the Follower choice. Then have the game scale back down the difficulty each time a merc dies and rescale back up when you revive them.

Your character and main merc (the first) would count as players 1 (default), then each additional scales game difficulty by 1, which would make full party at players 4 difficulty, with the drop bonus of players 3.

If you could hire all 4 merc types, you would need new UI on the hiring NPC to reflect being able to dismiss mercs to stand in town (like D3) and re-recruit when you want. I’ll admit, this could be neat not just for offline single player, but for online Battlenet as well, and could be a way to compromise on having player’s difficulty selection online. Bad news : I wont do PlugY (infinity stash) for Diablo II Resurected because Blizard doesnt allow modding (binary editing).

Diablo 2 multiple mercenary mod