Best Way to Spend Merits

As the title goes, what is the best way to spend them? Random rolls for recipes, salvages and so on, or build up enough to buy the rarer recipes.

It really depends what your goal is. If your goal is inf accumulation then either random rolls or direct buys of rare recipes are good. Random rolls tend to be better value in the long run but direct buys are safer.

You can do random rolls and get direct-buy prices,if you're under level 41...

They're in short supply for a variety of reasons.

I don't have big, expensive builds so I have to find something else to do with my money. Bribing people to create lower-level rare recipes is one of my projects. I would estimate I make about 50% of my money back selling them- every once in a while someone will roll a LoTG or a Stealth or an Impervium Armor: Resistance, but mostly I'm paying good money for bad rolls. That's why I pay in advance.

I didn't know you were still doing that Fulmens.

Save up, but LotG +7.5% for...I think 280. Or when upset you can't get something off the market, stomp over to the Merit Vendor and blow huge merits finishing a set.

I strictly random roll.

I refuse to spend 275 merits on ONE thing, when I can use those merits to probably acquire a number of things I ALSO need.

This character doesn't need a Mako's proc? No biggie, one of my other characters can use it. I've finished entire builds with random rolls NOT made by the character whose build it was.

Banshee: Yup!

Certain recipes, no matter how long I waited, never seemed to come up on the market, so I would save and save and buy those via merits. Otherwise, I strictly gamble stuff up. Even if the immediate character can't use it, I'll either give it to an alt who can, or craft it and stash it in the SG/VG base for sale to another member.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

I *think* they are quite close now. Last month buying was better than rolling, but now I think rolling might be better.

In both cases, you must know what level you are rolling towards and how much the respective recipes are worth and how often they appear, versus the direct purchase of other recipes.

Before the BotZ nerf, the Level 10 BotZ -kb IO was selling for 200-300M, which was way easier than rolling up a bunch of random recipes, crafting and dumping them. Since then prices have retreated a bit, so rolling might be a better monetization of merits.

I just use a rule of thumb of about 1M per merit. If you're doing better than that then you're doing OK.

The best hedges are minimum level Numina and Miracle procs and LotGs +7.5% (not sure if all levels are equally high) if you are looking to purchase, but those have retreated from 200-250M to about 150-175M AFAIR.

Rolling: some decent recipes, some good demand for others, cheap cost but you have to craft all that junk. Harder to control level range selection.

Direct purchase: control exact level, most merit costs are too expensive, easy to craft single purchases.