When you are coming back from gloom wood, there is no way to avoid the mercenaries there. If your not a mage you cant invis and if you can not hide that well then it is impossible to avoid them. Even if you manage to avoid them, what I have seen is that they still see you and follow you through the at.
This is the map right after a starting area, and the number of mercenary that are there already makes it a not near starting area, but the damage they make with one hit makes that just one of them is already to much.
To my opinion that area needs to be rebalanced to low levels chars or take the mercenaries and push them back further back, since all that you find in that map is a low level cnr. Once you go from there to the gloom woods you spawn them and by the time you go back to fort Vehl they have wandered close to the transition.
And just to give you an example, my lvl 15 char Lex died there once and barely made it through an other time.
