I've been kind of enjoying AC: Odyssey lately and it has been my first foray into the franchise. It was a random decision because there were so many options available in the PS-Plus catalogue that I just picked one of the full games that wasn't "Black Flag" because a friend of mine said that one was annoying. I don't know if that is true but I know he and I agree on a lot of things gaming related so I just chose one of the other ones.
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In this game you can do basically whatever you want. If you want to run into a town and just ransack the place go ahead! Want to indiscriminately murder the population? That's up to you in a lot of situations. In other situations you have to destroy grain silos in order to destabilize the current leadership of whatever region you are in and because it was given to me as an objective, I went ahead and did it. Even though I tried to remain hidden I guess my actions were witnessed by a lot of people and I was reported to a couple of mercenaries who were now tracking me. This is a fun way that the game kind of enforces some level of law and order on you because some of these mercenaries are actually quite tough and in some rare instances you will find yourself being stalked by someone that can kill you in just a couple of hits.
While some Dark Souls type people out there might be able to parry their way through this situation I am not that good of a gamer so one day, while running away from two mercenaries that were quite close to me, I accidentally stumbled upon a nice little cheat that at least up to this point, has worked for me every time and it is quite effortless and easy to execute.
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It involves an always unmanned guard tower that is just outside of the city walls in Pagai, which is one of the first areas you will end up going to anyway just after the starter island where they allow you to learn the game. Just to the west of this city is where you will find the guard tower.
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It's quite easy to lure mercenaries to this position because if you fast travel to the port here, they somehow manage to teleport as well. I suppose if you can magically fast travel, it is only suitable that they are able to do the same.
So what you want to do is to keep them about 50-75 meters away from you, so that they can pick up on your trail but still this is far enough away that they will not be able to use any sort of ranged attack on you. Once it becomes evident that they are heading in your direction towards the west wall, climb up to the top of the tower. The road, that they will almost certainly walk down while tracking you, is within arrow range. When they get near, they normally will not have spotted you yet and you can hit them with a couple of pot shots so that they now know your position.
What you need to do now is back away from the edge of this tower so that they cannot hit you back with their own arrows. But now since your position is revealed they will inevitably climb up the big ladder in an attempt to trap you on top of the tower. You will see their outline climbing up the ladder, even through the wood provided you already used Ikaros (your eagle) to reveal their position. When they get to the top of the ladder there is a brief moment where they are still attached to the ladder and unable to defend, when they get to this point you simply use "Spartan Kick" which will launch them off the side.
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When falling from this height, and they always will since it is unblockable, they will suffer 40,000 HP damage when they crash into the earth below. I haven't had a single mercenary survive this but in the event that they do, you just wait a while until they climb up the ladder again, and you repeat the process again. I have managed to kill a mercenary that was 10 levels higher than me using this technique and it is really quite amusing that you could have 2 or maybe even 3 mercs all attempting to get at you at the same time and they will all suffer the same fate.
This could end up spoiling a bit of the game for you so I would say only use this technique if you are being stalked by a mercenary that is going to have the upper hand in combat against you. I'm not saying this will work for ALL of the mercenaries because I haven't faced all of them. But I have successfully dispatched around a dozen of them using this method.
Why does it work?
Well, I can't say for sure but when mercenaries "fast-travel" they tend to do it to the same places that you do. So when you fast travel to the Pagai ship dock, they are going to do exactly the same thing but just after you get a fair distance away from it. While they try to make it look like they are genuinely tracking you - IE looking around and moving in a sporadic pattern eventually making their way to you, this is just the AI making it seem more real. Obviously, since this is a game, they are very aware of where you are already. The reason why they will climb the ladder is something I don't really understand but it may have something to do with the fact that the tower is too tall for them to use any sort of throwable explosives and they can't hit you with arrows because you have cover on all sides.
It works because it does and the enemy AI isn't exactly super in this game... and that's all I really need to know :)
So yeah, they are going to die from fall damage and you can do this over and over and over again.
So if you are playing clean and not sinking ships in the wide open sea out of fear of the mercenaries getting on your case, well, fear no more!