solo merit farming

I've got a super-aoe farmer, but he's fairly lackluster at merit farming on his own. I was theorizing that Stalkers might be exceptional at this.

When grinding stories, the goal of speed means I wouldn't be setting the difficulties up any, so I'd be looking at -1x1 or +0x1. I think Stalker stealth to run to objects, and extreme burst on low population groups would make Stalkers the fastest at this activity.

What do you experienced Stalkers have to say?

Stalkers are Ideal for the 'Spy Hunt' Flashback.

5 defeat boss groups,

then a timed defeat all

You can log off during the timer even without it affecting your merits

Hmm, now that I've had time to think about this, would a Stalker be better at this activity than a Widow?

As far as I recall you can run the same flashbacks without reduced merits.

I did the Spy Hunt arc on my 50 stalker (down to lvl 14 obviously) and I completed the defeat all at the end. It took me 41 minutes to earn 16 merits... Not sure if it's worth it and if I log out for 1,5 hour to let the timer run out I can't call it "farming merits" imo.

Im not sure I understand.
So you run the Arc, dont finish the kill all and just let the timer run out? And you still get the merits? Don't you HAVE to kill all to finish the arc?

I thought Catwhoorg pretty clearly answered those questions in his prior post.

1) yes
2) yes
3) no

I like the sound of this a lot, thx for the tip.

Did this twice last night on my Stalker with Grant Invis and a teammate on my second account.

Run 5 missions quickly, take the sixth. Log out and go to the gym. Come back and do it again.

Thanks for the tip, Cat.

I got a strange little thumbsup from the universe the second time - I applies the Tarot Card buff to myselves and both characters got The Fool, allowing me to race through the missions even quicker!

Wow thats very cool. Sorry for my ignorance, just seemed odd, but hey there are plenty of things in CoH that are MUCH odder than that. Time for some major merits. Thanks to you all! Happy New Year!

Not too much into farming/repeatedly running the same arc over and over, but what's the "Spy Hunt" flashback? It doesn't seem to match up to anything in the Wiki description.

Ah, thanks much. I was looking on the listing of story arcs.

FYI to anyone trying this. If you are +1/+2 you get 2 bosses, which is a little difficult. Other than that, great merit farming arc. I suggest up drop diff to +1/+1 or +0/+1.

If you want purely merit farming (not caring about recipe drops/etc), "The Horror of War" arc is nicely farmable. I do that arc with either my scrapper or my dominator in ~30 mins or so (scrapper is a bit faster) and get 18 merits. No logging out and waiting for a timer.

Granted both of those characters of mine are 'IO'ed out' for the most part. The 'hard part' is defeating 5 EBs solo, if your toon can do that, then you can do the arc. The 5 EBs are Silver Mantis (really the hardest to defeat), Hro-Dtozh (however you spell it) and Nemesis; oops, also there is the Manticore automaton EB and the Positron automaton EB.

Hero side there is the "Division: Line" arc that gets you 33 merits...I did that in 1 hour and 8 minutes...I could probably get that down quite a bit (first time through I was seeing where it took me (zone wise) and what not...now knowing it has lots of icky travel times I could drill that down by using mission tp, etc).

Ran the Spy Hunt Arc a few times over the past few days. I kept it set to spawn bosses, but its -1/+1. Finished the 5 boss kill missions in less than 15 mins (love my MA/Nin). Easiest merits Ive seen. Probably couldve compelted the kill all and done the arc again in the time it took for the timer to fail, but oh well.

Lots of great information and tactics in this thread, thanks to all of you that contributed your strategies. I have always had a hard time getting merits for the good stuff and now I have some options to try!