M2E+Desperate+Mercenary

"There are no desperate situations, there are only desperate people." -Heinz Guderian
 * Desperate Mercenary, Outcast Minion**

=__Overview__=

toc Desperate Mercenaries are cheap Mercenaries who are willing to work for any faction that is willing to pay their relatively low fees. However, you get what you pay for...

=__Mobility__=

With a Walk speed of 5 and a Charge of 7, Desperate Mercenaries are fairly mobile for being such a cheap minion.

=__Offense__=

The Desperate Mercenary has both a gun and a sword! He's not very good at using either, but at least they have decent damage spreads of 2/3/4 each. His Brahk'blade even has a Critical Strike trigger, so that could be useful.

Desperate Mercenaries also possess the Wild Firing action, which allows him to make two Refurbished Collier attacks against different targets, but at the cost of -2 **Sh**. This only takes a single AP, however, so if your opponent is out of cards you can sometimes get lucky by just spraying a barrage of shots at the enemy and hoping to hit something.

Once the Desperate Mercenary has taken a wound, his Frantic ability kicks in, giving him a +flip to all of his attack flips. This helps to mitigate his otherwise low **Ml** and **Sh** stats, so hitting a Desperate Mercenary with a weak attack of your own to "encourage" him can sometimes be a valid tactic.

=__Resilience__=

The Desperate Mercenary has a decent Defense, though his Willpower is a bit on the lower end of things. With only four wounds, he's not very difficult to kill, though his **Take...this...to...my...son...** ability gives you a soulstone when he does get killed, so long as you have a friendly Master or Henchman within 3" of him when he dies.

He's also Disguised, which gives him a bit of survivability by preventing him from ever being the target of a Charge action. Not being able to be charged is a good thing.

=__Tactics and Tips__=

The Desperate Mercenary is essentially the sort of model you hire when you just need a warm body on the table, such as to hold down a table quarter for Reconnoiter or to run around dropping scheme markers when more important models are distracting the opponent.

Once he's taken a wound, his Frantic ability kicks in and makes him a halfway decent opponent, so if you have a model that can deal a point of damage to him right away, it will help him hit with his otherwise low scores. Of course, this also leaves him with only three wounds remaining, which means that he's only one good hit from the grave, so be careful if you choose to use this tactic.

Wild Firing can actually be a good way of putting out a fair amount of damage onto weak models if you wait until the end of the turn when your opponent is out of cards. A Sh of 2 won't be very accurate, but with enough shots - and ideally a +flip from Frantic - he might hit something once or twice.

=__Playing Against Desperate Mercenaries__=

If you actually want to kill a Desperate Mercenary, it's usually not that difficult. Most of the time, however, there will be more important models to worry about, so Desperate Mercenaries have a habit of slipping through the cracks until they actually accomplish something.

If you're going to take them out, try to do so at range; Disguised forces melee-focused models to waste an AP walking into melee with the Mercenaries, and your opponent is sure to be happy to see you waste multiple AP to deal with such a cheap model.

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