Risk of Rain UO Mercenary

Several really close calls with this video.

The Mercenary is pretty poor at unlocking Origin. The only skill of his that's not pretty continuously important is Whirlwind (Or Laser Blade, in some situations, but it doesn't change the point much), so Distortion is pretty consistently a problem. He's a melee class, so Overloading enemies are a huge threat, and his only options for trying to bypass this are both on long cooldowns, with Blinding Assault having lacking damage per target and Eviscerate lacking splash, which means that Overloading enemies can end up making the early game just about impossible to get past with bad luck. Both of his splash options require exposing himself to danger -even with Blinding Assault providing temporary invulnerability, there's still brief windows where he can take damage- and his only 'escape hatch' tool is Blinding Assault, which means that trying to efficiently tear down swarms means taking away your ability to escape if things start going wrong. He's not remotely lethal enough to make up for these flaws (Point of contrast: Sniper) and he doesn't really have any significant advantages in relation to a run attempting to unlock Origin.

He still took fewer tries than the Commando, but as always luck is a factor and furthermore the Mercenary was one of the last classes I really focused on trying to get an UO run done with (The Commando was one of the first I focused on), so I had a lot more experience with the ins and outs of UO runs.

Most striking is that while he's not nearly as bad as CHEF is in skill unevenness, Eviscerate is so important for raw damage output, ranged damage, damage through walls, damage up or down cliffs without risking being hit, dodging Spite Bombs, giving you time to think, giving you time to leverage passive damage effects, allowing you to provoke fast attacks and thus create a window of safety, and on and on that a substantial component of success in a run is how often Eviscerate is being disabled and when. If it's disabled unusually often, you're in trouble. If it keeps being disabled during fighting and then re-enabled when you're not fighting, you're in trouble. It simply does too many things that are vital.

Also, something I discovered while working on the Mercenary's videos is that there are a number of moves where attempting to open a Command Chest will instantly interrupt the move. I had one run where I got Massacre and I died because I figured I'd be able to use the invulnerability provided by Massacre to safely pick out the chest's contents and instead it left me completely helpless. Which was especially frustrating because I'd been hoping to show off cases where Massacre is actually useful -it can be quite good in a Kin run if you manage to get an Ancient Scepter and end up facing off with something fragile and swarmy, such as Clay Men.

Alas.