Graham_NA

Yes, I have the third badge. Like I said, 2 to 2.5 million total. Not sure when I picked it up, maybe the late twenties?

Well I think a debt badge is better because like I said this strikes me a compensatory measure more than anything. If you want to scale it back, sure, but I think going to damage badges would be tricky. For example I think I was in the late 30s before I picked up even the third damage badge on my SR scrapper (it was a long time ago, I took a break at level 38 around issue 4 and only recently came back to make 50) and never made the 4th badge so I'd imagine defense-based stalkers and brutes would be in the same boat.

It really comes down to what the devs are trying to achieve with this badge. Most of the accolades have a specific goal and/or are oriented towards a specific subset of players.

No. I'd estimate I'm between 2 and 2.5 million damage total on that badge. I don't expect to see the 4th damage badge for a long, long time. I only have 860-odd HP at level 37 so it doesn't take much to kill me. An in-mission defeat gives me 10,500XP of debt if I remember rightly.

Well I just earned Deathless on my level 37 plant/thorn Dominator and I haven't been trying for it. I solo at Villainous and I don't have a bad build although it's not a perfectly optimal build either. That might be more a commentary on Dominators than anything else, but hopefully it does put some context on when the accolade is achievable. In fact if issue 7 went live today I'd be awarded the accolade.

Personally it looks to me like this is a balancing measure for people with weak builds or who are otherwise having trouble with the game. I don't know if the boost is big enough to matter but that's the impression I get. Changing to the damage badge would be a really bad idea because defense-based builds take less damage than resistance-based builds, and damage taken is not really a measure of difficulty.

I earned the Pirate badge with my dominator long after level 14 (I was in the mid-20s if I remember rightly). The first and only story arc she gave me was the Malachai's Files arc. The enemies in the missions were all grey to me. Her contact bar was not complete when I was finished with the arc but she wouldn't give me any more missions.

So, I can confirm you can get the second arc after level 14 and that you only need the Pirate badge for it.

Henri Dumont must be 20-24. I just went to him at level 25 and he gave me the greeting text and followed it with the text for being out of missions.

I only needed to do 3 newspaper missions and 1 heist for Drea The Hook to get introduced to Mr Bocor, and similarly for Desdemona The Glint in Cap Au Diablo to get offered 3 contacts (I chose Krylov - Dr Shelly was one of the other two choices).

Even if you reduce it to 2 newspaper missions I don't think it will make a significant impact to this problem. I didn't get to do any Mr Bocor missions - he immediately introduced me to The Radio beause even though I soloed all the Drea The Hook material on Villainous I was well into level 10 after the heist. I'm not sure how many story arcs I've missed.

The reason is simply that I spent almost all of my Mercy Island time on big pick-up teams. The sheer size of the spawns, the lack of XP debt, the Arachnos Lab missions with Hellions that spawn +2 enemies, the repeating of missions when not everybody's progress lines up, it all makes it easy to gain a lot of levels in the course of doing those first two story arcs.

I really enjoy the backstory of the game. However, there is not a big enough surplus of story content to cover multiple playthroughs of the game specifically in search of it. As such I'm not teaming any more and won't until I feel confident I'm in no risk of outlevelling contacts.

If you broadened the level range for low-level contacts (eg. make Mr Bocor accessible up to threat level 12) that would help a lot more. It would also give players more options at any given time and allow pre-travel-power teams to run more missions before having to run back to contacts.