How to Edit Your Mercenary in D2R with D2CE (Hire, Resurrect, Gear)

D2CE has a dedicated mercenary dialog for the jobs players actually need: bringing a dead mercenary back without paying the in-game resurrection fee, hiring one, changing mercenary type, and setting the mercenary’s level and experience. The dialog also shows the mercenary’s gear, and the final D2CE release (2.22) improved exactly this area — it reads all supported mercenary slots, including mod-enabled ones. Here is how each control works, including the two rules that surprise people.

Step by step: the mercenary dialog

1. Close the game, back up, and load the character in D2CE. (Start points: the D2CE user guide, save file location, the download page.)
2. Open the Mercenary dialog. It shows the mercenary’s state, type, level, experience, derived stats, and equipped items.
3. To resurrect a dead mercenary: uncheck the Dead checkbox. To hire a mercenary when none is hired: check the Hired checkbox. The same checkboxes work in reverse — unchecking Hired dismisses (“fires”) the mercenary.
4. To change mercenary type: use the Type control — but read the rule below first: type can only be changed while the mercenary is not equipped with items.
5. To set level and experience: edit the mercenary’s Level and XP values directly. The hard cap is in the next section.
6. Save with CTRL-S and verify in game: the mercenary should be present, alive, and wearing what the dialog showed.

The two rules that catch people out

• Type changes require an unequipped mercenary. If the mercenary is wearing gear, the type cannot be changed — remove the equipped items first (move them to the character or stash), change the type, then re-equip. This protects you: different mercenary types use different gear, and a type change over equipped items would strand equipment the new mercenary cannot use.
• Mercenary level cannot exceed your character’s level. D2CE enforces the game’s own rule: you may set the mercenary’s level and XP, but not above the character’s level. If you want a level 90 mercenary, the character must be level 90 first — see editing character stats or making a level 99 test character if that is the real goal.

The other statistics shown in the dialog — the mercenary’s attributes and combat numbers — are read-only: they are derived from the mercenary’s type, level and equipped items, not typed in directly. To make a mercenary stronger, change the inputs the game itself uses: level, XP, and gear.

Mercenary gear and slots

The dialog displays the mercenary’s equipped items in their slots, and you work with that gear the same way as character items: items can be created, imported and exported as .d2i item files using the workflow in creating items with D2CE, which is the practical way to hand a mercenary a specific weapon or armour piece without finding it in game. The v2.22 change matters here: that release added logic to read the supported mercenary slots and update the dialog to display all of them, including mod-enabled slots — so on saves from mod setups that enable extra mercenary equipment slots, current D2CE shows the full picture rather than only the standard slots. Keep item properties within the game’s limits, and remember a mercenary can only benefit from gear its type can actually equip.

A resurrected mercenary returns without the in-game gold fee, but if you are rebuilding a treasury as well, see adding gold with D2CE. As with every edit: if the character misbehaves afterwards, restore the backup and re-apply in smaller steps; if the file will not open, start with the unreadable-save guide and the Patch 3.x compatibility status. More one-job guides: the guides hub.