Merits hero side

My experience is exactly the opposite - my hero's tend to have more merits than my villains. The catch here is that I make an effort to run the hero story arcs as I level up and while you don't get a lot of merits compared to villains before L10-12, by 15-20 you have caught up quite a bit and by L25+ you tend to be way ahead hero side vs villain side. Whine and complain as much as you like about all the running around you do (and it IS a pain) I would trade a few of the faster arcs redside for more merits, or I would have before GR was announced and I can take my redside characters blueside.

Without running TF's most of my hero's have enough merits to buy an LoTG +recharge or one of the +recovery uniques by the late 20's, early 30's. By the late 30's, certainly by level 40 I can accumulate enough for a second LoTG + recharge, Numina or miracle unique. I cannot even come close to matching that on villain side even WITH SF's added in.

A quick primer in getting merits heroside:

L1-10: Run David Wincotts and Flux the Outcasts arcs in the hollows (15 merits)
L10-15: Run Julius the Trolls and Talshak the mystics arc in the hollows, also do the Vahzilock Pollutant plot (L10-14 science contact) and the bonefire arc (L10-14 natural contact). 59 merits
L15-20: Run Tsoo Shenanigans (L15-19 magical contact) and The Mind of a King (L15-19 science origin contact). I also throw in the two faultline arcs cause they are fun, if not worth many merits. 42 merits with the faultline arcs, 31 without.
L20-25: Run both striga arcs (stephanie peebles and Long Jack), The Tsoo Coup (L20-24 mutant contact). 57 merits. You can add in the Wheel of destruction (L20-24 magic contact) and/or Hand of Iron (L20-24 tech contact for another 14 merits each).

By L25 it is simple (if not easy) to have 173-200 merits and the merit rewards for story arcs just get better after that. Yes, it takes a lot more running around than the same number of arcs would redside. However, without repeating arcs in Oro and/or adding in repeated SF's I know of no way to get this many merits redside. Which tends to screw over a solo character - and while I do a lot of TF's these days blueside the SF front is still pretty dead redside.

EDIT: Just an FYI Bad_Influence but with the new abandon mission feature you can take a mission from a contact, then abandon it, then talk to the contact again and frequently they will offer you different missions. It is actually fairly easy to juggle a contacts missions this way until you get offered their story arcs, although you generally have to run at least 1 side mission for them before you can get the story arc.

You do realize they did some work on both of those with I17 right? They adjusted the low level contacts not to send you so far afield nor into territory higher than you should be traversing and contacts now give you their phone numbers a lot earlier (usually after one or two missions).

I didn't mind the old way, though. I'm weird, I like being sent around to see the city.

But I'm mostly Explorer, so being goal-less is part of the gig.

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

An excellent example of exactly what I meant re the easy acquisition of merits. I realize playstyles differ, but from my point of view, soloing in the Hollows is just.... gah. I don't want to be sent to the far side of the Hollows as a level 4.

I realize that I *could* go to the trouble of forming a team, and trying to lead them through the various Hollows story-arcs. This is a thing I choose not to do; I'm willing to forego those merits in the interest of leveling up quickly and getting the Safeguard jetpack.... and just generally getting the hell out of Atlas. Plus as has been mentioned earlier, if teamed then not everyone gets those merits.

What, if any, effect the new Jetpack recipe will have on my equation is currently unknown. But this strays from my original point: as a hero, I'm saying "no thank you" to troublesome/distant lowbie mission arcs. As a villain, I'll run them - even back when the Eliminate the Infected mission was all the way across Mercy.

Its VERY common for my level 20ish villains to have over 150 merits, just from running contacts. My level 20ish heroes have 50 or fewer - usually fewer.

Once I have access to a travel power I am more amenable to being sent noodling and doodling all over Paragon on what amounts to sightseeing journeys; cape mission, I am looking at you. Prior to 14, no wonder so many people hit the sewers.

Hmm. This has not been my experience, but I have admittedly not tried it that often.

but heros can make it up wit hthe Tfs every five levels up to leve l40. Villians have renault, ice mistrel and that spikey chick SF which each of them mostly give less merits than the hero side Tfs which do tend to be mroe missions and thus more merits.

Originally Posted by mauk2 Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words. "Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L!

When was the last time? 99 forevers ago

I am delighted to hear this issue has been addressed; my lowbie heroes might actually peek into the zone for once, instead of avoiding it with the fervor of vampires avoiding daylight.

What? They don't sparkle?




Ok kidding, kidding.

I personally still avoid the Hollows. I am not fond of hazard zones anyway, and I have already did the missions once, and did not enjoy them. Forcing myself to do them again makes no sense. At best I do is take Wincott's missions and auto-complete them.

Been thinking about this awhile now, but I would love for them to drop all the street hunt missions and the hazard zone missions that are not connected to a story arc. I hate being sent into Perez to fight CoT at lvl 7, or being asked to delve deep into Boomtown to take on Clockwork at lvl 12. I mean the spawn size alone can wipe most of my toons out, never mind that many of the spawns are Orange and Red.

Actually, this has been corrected as well. Now that we have concurrent missions, everyone on a team gets completion credit if they have the same mission as the active one. And since the contacts in the Hollows always give the same missions in the same order, all you have to do is catch up the slower teammates, and you can run the entire zone once, and every one gets the credit, and the merits.

Not to mention that there's a trainer and a couple of shops (one at each door) in the zone as well. I'd like to say there's a hospital to boot, but even though I JUST ran that zone on a lowbie blaster solo, I can't really remember where I went the one time I died.

Apparently, it's been so long since you've been in the Hollows, that you've forgotten what it was like even back then.

First, there is no way you were ever sent to the "far side of the Hollows as a level 4." Before Issue 17, you couldn't even enter the Hollows until Level 5.

The only difficult parts of Wincott's or Flux's arcs before the Hollows revamp in Issue 16 (or was it 15?) was the street hunts, and if you knew where to look, even those could be easily done.

I've been playing for 3 years, and I've done the Hollows with 3/4 or more of my hero characters because it's easy XP and quick levelling through a painful level range - regardless of the fact that I play solo most of the time.

Go back. You'll probably discover that you like it a lot more than you think you will.

Unfortunately, this isn't true for Julius and Talshakk. As recently as last month, I've had to run a couple missions from those two multiple times because they were offered to different teammates in different orders. However, the shuffling is minimal.

Heh, I actually like the Hollows. I generally skip the initial contact, street hunt to level 5 or 6 and start the Hollows arcs. By the end of it I'm usually level 14 or 15 and have 30-some merits already. Then I run Posi and Synapse and start working on the contacts that will get me to the Freaklympics and Freakshow War arcs (a couple of my favorite arcs in the game, either side)

After them I'll run Croatoa. Occasionally I'll run Striga if I find myself in the early 20s with nothing to do.

Redside I generaly just follow whichever contact I feel like running at the moment, no particular rhyme or reason to it.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I am more inclinced to follow the new Faultline missions, and try to get the early badges rather than deal with the Hollows. I like the Ourobos stuff, and enjoy being able to go back and do missions I missed.

(Devs!! Please allow for Ourobos mayhem and safeguard missions, and please allow the redside to get the glodbrickers pack from Ourobos!!)

As for TFs, I prefer not to run those at all. Some of my toons want to run the Katie Hannon run for the hat, and the Imperious TF(?) for the armor, but that's it. My first experience with a TF sucked.

The tanks and other players were very good, and new what they were doing, but it took us 5 and 1/2 hours to run it. We did not schedule for it, so it ruined our day.

In the end, each to their own.

At least the Hollows has a story arc in it.

This is my experience as well. Started two characters at more or less the same time. One a scrapper and the other a stalker. Mind I wasn't actually trying to see who could get the most merits but I like running arcs and they leveled up more or less simultaneously.

By level 30 the scrapper had run all the safeguards plus Wincott, Flux, Starbuck, the Vahz Plauge, Temblor, Yin and even managed to get Monte in (60 at level 20) then Delilah, Agent G, Larson, 2 Sheldons and Bower for a total of 146 merits (I outleveled Skipper so those 10 weren't technically before 30). Not up to the 173 but still a respectable number since I was also running radios and safeguards too, then again I gave myself an extra 5 levels.

By level 30 the stalker had run all the mayhems plus Burke, Creed, Radio, Lunata, Percey, Marino, McNight and Brass (67 at level 20) then Dubrowski, Crash, Wade, Maros and Buzzsaw for a total of 117 merits. I might have gotten one more contact in but I had to run newspapers in Nerva to get one and ended up outleveling it (then switched to St. Martial because I wanted Hardcase).

Actually the scrapper had 204 from running a Synapse and the Stalker had 130 from running a Tarikoss but I'm not counting task forces for the test.

Of course all of that is completely subjective but I'm not sure how I could have run more arcs than I did without turning off experience. Hero side could have been better if I hadn't bothered with radios after level 10 but since I did it made a good comparison with the villain who was forced to do so (exception Lunata, Buzzsaw and Wade).

Another caveat is that I'm getting this from looking at the souveniers and adding up the merits. I could be mistaken on the exact numbers.