The expert Mercenary has trained in a hundred thousand ways in staying alive and a hundred thousand more in making the enemy dead instead. In even the heaviest lead-fights, a Mercenary has the grit, the perseverance, and the sheer strength of will to carry on.
Survival is rule number one; when all is said and done, and the dust has settled, what's a million dollar's pay to a dead man?
## About
A custom perk deck designed and commissioned by Kuzidas, coded by Offyerrocker.
The Mercenary Perk Deck is designed for the seasoned Death Sentence veteran, with defensive benefits that scale according to difficulty. This deck works best with the ICTV, but can work with a low concealment LBV setup as well, at the cost of needing to spend skill points on armor skills to benefit from the perk cards.
A core design principle of this perk deck is that being one-shot is not a fun experience.
Damage calculations for Mercenary:
Spoiler!
Scar Tissue recalculates damage so that no single attack can do more than your maximum HP in damage. (It has no effect on attacks to your armor!) The formula it uses, for incoming damage D, max health H, and actual damage taken A:`A = (D*H)/(D+H)`
The result is that for smaller damage hits like 20 or 30 damage attacks, the damage is reduced by a tiny amount, about one or two points. For hard hitting attacks (read: snipers and DS heavy swat) the damage is significantly reduced—for example, DS heavy swat will still deal 225 damage to your armor but if they attack your health, they will only deal 128 damage! This means it is extremely unlikely that your health will be fully depleted in less than 2 hits.
This perk deck is designed to enable heavy armor setups with powerful self-sustain buffs to compensate for limiting you out of berserker and low blow. Take it with the ICTV to bring faster handling to heavy weapons and strong survivability, or stack armor skills on an LBV to lessen the effect of the perk deck but retain access to low blow crits. Strong Side will extend your survivability quite a bit, but you will need to reach cover and take a moment to heal before making another aggressive play.
## Perks
1. Scar Tissue
Years of battle have made your skin tough. Take greatly reduced damage from heavy hits to your health so that no single attack can kill you.
You gain 15% more health.
3. Keep 'Em Coming!
Your armor is loaded with pouches that keep your equipment easy to reach. Gain 1% reload speed and 2% weapon swap speed for every 4 max armor you have.
You gain 10% more armor.
5. Walk It Off
When your health would become 0, it becomes 1 instead, and you gain 2 seconds of invulnerability. I'm sure you will be fine...
You cannot sprint while under the effects of this invulnerability.
This effect cannot occur again until you are restored to full health.
You gain 15% more health.
7. Salve Lining
The inner layer of your armor is lined with coagulant agents and hemostatic gel. After having armor for at least 2 seconds, heal health equal to 5% of your max armor every 0.75 seconds so long as you have armor.
You gain 10% more armor.
9.Strongside
When the going gets tough, turn to your strong side and tough it out!
Whenever you take damage to your health that leaves you at half HP or less, regain armor equal to the amount of damage you took.
This cannot occur from the same hit that triggers Walk It Off's invulnerability.
## Feedback
Feel free to leave feedback in the comments.
If you have a bug to report, please give as much information as you can about the circumstances of the issue, and attach the crash log, if applicable.
I'm not the kinda guy to sneed feed and seed with "cheat workshop" and not give feedback, so personally the 0.75 sec healing of perk 7 is busted, man. I would double the time to 1.5 or 2 secs, because you never want a perk deck to be a down-right upgrade to another perk deck (muscle), and just do what one does better, or you get anime pfps dropping "cheat workshop" without playing the mod. I like the premise of the deck, but perk 7 needs a rework imo. However, I do like what the deck is going for, its rather unique and I think once things are tweaked, you'll be sailing smooth.
I know what you mean, and it is a straight upgrade to muscle (except for the panic and drawing aggro), but I didn't mean for this to be compared to muscle. No one is acting like muscle is a top tier perk deck, and I think comparing it to Leech or Anarchist is much more fair, and in that respect I think healing to full in ~15 seconds of convservative play mirrors regaining your leech ampule (or getting another charge of anarchist invuln) in a similar amount of time. It feels crazy when you put it next to muscle, because when people think health regen, they compare it to muscle, but there are other ways (better) decks make you survivable. (Heck even Grinder heals much faster than muscle).
The actual number values are all placed next to each other in scripts/upgradestweakdata.lua and you are welcome to lower the values to whatever you are comfortable with when you play with the deck. I'm still personally playing with the heal values myself, but I don't want to push out a new version of the mod every time I'm playing with a little tweak. If anything of this deck is on the chopping block to get nerfed it will likely be the heal over time speed or the amount of armor you need for 1 crit (maybe 12 armor per 1 crit). I'm not going to touch cards 1, 5, or 9.
Thank you for your feedback!