Infamous Mercenary Rushing Farm

Overview

The creator of this strategy used Mercenary hunting to make over 100 divines in the first two days of the league, and rates it as one of the strongest league starters at every level of investment and every map tier. The appeal is that it needs almost no juicing — the loot comes from the mercenary itself rather than map density, so it works on cheap white and yellow maps from day one and scales naturally into red maps.

How it runs

Roll Mesa in the bottom-left quadrant, rush the boss, kill the mercenary for the rucksack, and leave. That is the whole loop. With the atlas point that fills the rucksack, every kill pays out. Early on the creator simply burned through their stock of low-tier maps this way to fund their first few divines of gear, then moved to tier 16s — higher tiers give better average loot and noticeably better rares, worth picking up while your currency base is still small.

From tier 16 onward, add the Trove Scarab of Infamy. It makes the main mercenary infamous, which is where the better loot comes from, and also spawns two wild mercenaries alongside them.

The wild mercenary catch

The two extra mercenaries carry a real drawback: kill the main mercenary first and they become untargetable NPCs, taking their loot with them. They have no icon and the main mercenary is always on top of you, so most players will lose them most of the time — the creator estimates they failed to kill them in roughly 80% of maps, so their reported returns are not inflated by them.

The one workaround is damage over time. A DoT applied before the main mercenary dies will still kill the wild ones and drop their loot after they become untargetable, though few builds have the DoT damage to land that reliably this early in a league. Treat the extra mercenaries as an occasional bonus, not part of the expected return.

Pairing it with Domination

The strategy layers onto the creator's earlier Templar Astrolabe farm. The Astrolabe can roll a modifier making the map boss drop two to three additional scarabs; when it does, run that map with a Domination Scarab of Terrors setup and Domination specced, spawning many bosses that each drop scarabs. Those extra scarabs ignore atlas drop increases but do respond to scarab-chance altars, so take the blue altars.

The creator's rule was to commit only when the modifier rolled three scarabs, skipping two-scarab rolls and bad layouts, otherwise continuing the mercenary rush. Both halves share one atlas tree, so there is no swapping between setups.

Anomalies are quadrant-specific, so running Mesa only ever uncovers them in the bottom-left — worth knowing if anomaly targeting becomes worthwhile later.

Atlas tree

The mercenary cluster is the core: take the chance node rather than the full cluster, plus the two nodes making each mercenary drop two items, the node that fills the rucksack, and the unique-chance node. Mercenaries need little investment beyond that, which frees the rest of the tree for the Domination half — eternal world altars for the scarab-juice chance, emphasized stability so the Astrolabe map does not disappear before you run it, and the extra-scarab-from-bosses node. The creator's full tree is linked in the video description.