Mercenary

Tactics

 * An explanation for, as the skill description can be confusing for some: It deals 6x110% damage to the nearest enemy. If that enemy dies, the ability chooses the next nearest enemy, dealing the same damage to them. This continues until an enemy survives the damage or there are no other nearby enemies to target. Accordingly, this helps the Mercenary deal with large crowds of small enemies, such as Lemurians.
 * Because the Mercenary suffers from rather low damage, the key to mastering him is learning to use his skills not only to damage enemies, but to use the time spent invincible to dodge more powerful attacks. Learning the patterns of bosses and strong opponents and using or  to avoid most damage is key. Utilizing the low cooldown of  on top of abusing his long amounts of time spent invincible.
 * A typical combo for the mercenary is to into a group of enemies,  out,  through them and repeating for the remaining dashes followed up by another.
 * can be used to get up to places the player might normally not be able to, as it does a small jump.
 * Items that reduce cooldowns, such as or, are extremely effective on mercenary as they give you the ability to stay invincible nearly indefinitely.
 * combined with decent critical chance is devastating against Magma Worms since will reset its own cooldown enabling you to literally climb up a magma worm, dealing incredible amounts of damage.
 * A near-exploit situation can be achieved with a combination of and  causing you to "fly" endlessly using, hovering above enemies and remaining out of reach from their attacks. A demonstration is available here.
 * Like all melee classes, items like, , and help to increase his damage output when he is in the thick of the fight.
 * On-hit items, such as the and especially the, work well for Mercenary.  and  put out a ton of hits, each of them calculated separately, so he gets a lot of chances to activate these bonuses. The  in particular lets him damage entire crowds with.
 * When 2 are stacked on the Mercenary, it allows him to perform a constant Faux-"screw attack" by bouncing on the heads of enemies with . This greatly increases his ability to remain relevant past the 3rd or 4th stage, allows him to chain  into his  consistently, and removes the need for his normal attack.

History
Mercenary