Pic pretty much speaks for itself:


So some notes on the pic:
- Aside from Natasha, the lowest level hireling heals for the most (Beleth, lvl14)
- Beleth also has the most sp, and carries the most mana pots out of any of the low lvl hirelings. She likely has more then the epic ones even.
- Beleth is probably the only clr/fvs hireling who wears a deathblock item (see that in the log - did not show up for any others, tho that kinda spam doesnt belong there anyways imo). Useful in the quest we did (Beholders dispel deathward).
- Epic Hirelings are rather bad.

Also brought them all into VoN3 Epic Casual to test them in a pretty tame setting. Was as incredibly easy as expected. I left all of them on default mode, let them fight as they pleased, let them tank all the bosses. None died or even really came close to it.
Here's the performance results

So asides from the awesome Beleth who tends not to try to kill things and focuses on healing, the mighty epic hireling was outkilled by the lvl14-16 ones. Andaro also managed to waste the most SP and accomplish very little.

I also tried it on epic normal after to be sure, the results were much the same.

So yes, Level14s could complete Epic VoN casual/normal given some time and hirelings (if they were allowed to enter), argueable the toughest epics. If turbine allowed any lvl to enter epics, i've no doubt we'd see achievements of lvl5-10 characters solo'ing epic normal, possibly even hard.

And Beleth preferring not to attack is actually very much so a GOOD thing, as you generally do not want your hireling healers to get agro. She was also the fastest to respond to my ailments such as getting held a couple times, quickly clearing it with a remove paralyses. I do not believe any other hireling even has this spell except Tempys. Though none of them made any attempts at removing each others paralyses, they did heal each other some.

Some other noted U14P1 unrelated things:
- The "graze" on a 2-9 for melee was implemented. This may mean the new system is in for melee too, meaning melee gets a huge nerf in a few days when this goes live.
- Still no epic fragments in von3ec.