How to be invincible with Mercenary

With the release of V1.0 a new item allows Mercenary (and some others) to be completely broken with just a few stacks.

It's that easy

0: Much easier with the Command Artifact, but still possible normally.
It will also require a lot of Lunar Tokens.

1. Access the newt altar on any stage and go through the blue portal after the teleporter event.


2. Purchase any spikey-boiz known as Purity. It is unlocked by beating the game (final boss) on Monsoon. You'll need at least 4 to get Mercenary's Evicerate down to a 1 second cooldown, 6 for Blinding Assault. Having both abilities down to 1 second will give you much better mobility, you can just alternate them to dash across every stage.


3. Now you'll be tapping the R button for the next hour since you can't just hold down that ability. The cooldown starts when the ability is cast and continues to cooldown during your invincibility. You have brief invincibility after it ends, which is just enough time to cast it again.


4. Collect items that increase your damage, such as attack speed, critical hit, on-hit items, and Focusing Crystals. A shaped glass or two is also fine, just remember you can still get caught off guard and sniped when you aren't dashing, especially with the command artifact. Learn item positions to collect them as quickly as possible. Items like Topaz Brooch will give you buffer hp when not dashing to collect items.

4.1. Because of the way unlucky rolls work, on-hit items may be less viable, especially since you have a lot of Purity. Raw damage and attack speed will benefit you the most.

5. If you have enough items proceeding Purity, you may have enough time to burst down Mithrix during phase 4 before you lose your infinite cooldown. Now that the boss is immune during the item stealing, he'll be boosted by all those focus crystals so you may need to carefully use your dashes to go in and out or use active items to slowly tick him down from afar.

How good is it on other characters?

Definitely get 1 on Artificer. It doubles the shots she can fire with her primary before she slows down and makes attack speed a more valuable stat for her.
Once all your shots are used you can use your secondary, and by time your secondary fires you're at full charges on your primary again.

It's useful on anyone with short cooldowns, allowing them to spam abilities without needing backup mags or Brainstalks.

Ramifications of Purity

Check this guide to understand why this isn't an end-all-be-all item for cooldown based characters and how heavy a consequence its negative effect has.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2423723052
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2199096892

[AWildCheeseFish]

Basically, purity instantly kills items like atg or ukelele but makes your skills twice as powerful. I assume that makes it better early game and terrible for late game, but in normal runs it's pretty annoying to build up proc chains anyway.

[Uxot]

"beating the game (final boss) on Monsoon"

Sure no problem... -_-

[Zephera]

If you get lucky with purity spawns as well, purity loader is a pretty fun build. You lose the typical proc chains that you'd normally have as loader, but your shift becomes INSANE, especially if you have the quicker and shorter alt shift alongside a hardlight afterburner. You can practically hold down your shift and be constantly flying around the map and throwing out hard direct damage, alongside item damage that are guaranteed to proc, like on kill items.

[GMiz]

I just tried this out with Command and got a 57 leaf Clover and this build was absolutely broken.

[BeastK]

if you want to understand luck and how purity actually works then look up a guide for purity, ive even made one that goes in depth on exactly what it does and what it affects. As you said luck doesnt affect chests since you otherwise would get an exponential growth of clovers then.

[Lunacy]

I have also instakilled Mithrix with 6 purity.
It's A build on Merc, but not great on everybody due to the procs.
I could just infinitely stack blight with Acrid because minimum cooldown. His secondary became my new primary.
The luck doesn't seem to affect chests and shrines, since I still got reds out of small chests with 6 of em.

[BeastK]

you do realize that just one purity takes down some major items on hit chance like atg missile to 1% proc chane and another purity after that makes it 0.1% and essentially making it obselete.
This is much weaker than just getting good proc chains and kill chains but sure if you want to call one thing that doesnt scale well and only works on one character with his worse choice of ability good then sure you can call it that.

[Delusional Dunmer]

Finally someone who understands how to use this. Everyone is saying this item is trash but when build right can be completely broken.