A-Merit farming using Tip missions: Is it viable?

So there was a discussion yesterday on Victory Badges about what was the best way to buy IOs using merits. Reward merits (R-merits) compared to Alignment merits (A-Merits).


My suggestion to the person asking was to use tickets/merits to get most recipes and only use A-Merits for purples/pvp-Os that are ultra-ultra rare (the ones that there are 0 on the market).

A few other people spoke up stating that A-Merit farming was super fast and a viable way to farm recipes. They went on to state that they could run all 5 tip missions on a character in 30 minutes. Which would equate to a LoTG 7.5 after 4 days of farming, while only investing 2 hours to get the LoTG.

I was wondering what everyone else's experience has been with tip/morality missions. I know, I have not been able to run them at an average rate of 5 minutes. I have also seen people go 6 missions without getting a morality mission to drop.

The other way to look at A-Merits would be someone buying them 1 a day at: 20 Million fin and 50 R-merits a day. After two days they have spent 100 R-merits (1/2 of what a lotg would cost with R-merits) and have only spent 40 million inf. That actually would seem to be not too bad of a deal, 40million to cut the required R-merits in half.

So, I'm a little torn, I still think 'farming' A-merits for unique recipes may not be that effective but buying them maybe. What do you all think?

Ive been running tip mishs at -1/x0 for speed. I run with my SPines/Fire Scrapper blueside and DM/WP brute redside. Considering you must obtain the tips, travel to the mish, complete the sometimes multi objectives, all in all it takes me about 45 mins to get 5 per night done. and on the second night, you must do the morality mish as well.

Getting tips seems to be hard for some peeps, ive heard of ppl going days without a drop.
I simply run to DA, toast mobs of BP til i get 3 or 4 tip mishs, then i start running. Ive gotten 2 tip mishs within 5 seconds of eachother sometimes.

I run at -1/x0 but that does spawn bosses still, i think ill change to -1/x2, then ill get 2-3 minions and 1 Lt instead. (i guess)

I plan on running these mishs alot because i want the ultra rare, ultra expensive IOs, and the thing i like most is i get to pick which on i want. Random drops are cool, but im finding i am getting 3-4-5 copies of the same IO recipe. I'll continue to run TFs/SFs on a nightly basis and buy LotG/Numi/Miracle with Regular Merits.

But thats just me, thats just how i run, i think this will work for me.
Good luck to yall in however yall handle ur bizness.

Guess I've been getting unlucky with my level 50 tip missions... they usually take me about 15-20 minutes. I suppose I have things set at non-optimal speeds (think I have GP at +1 or +2 and x3-4 mobs), but he's still looking for his damage and influence badges, so that's fine by me.

On small teams it's gone about the same length... most of mine just haven't been that short: lot of mobs and I've had to clear through most of them.

Anyway, I can see people getting bored of these... they're a little better than radio/paper missions, but they're not that involved. I'm sure it will still be easy to find teams for the merits or for sideswitching, but I dunno. Farmers be crazy, anyway. I start going nutty if I see too many of the same maps or foes, let alone not progress in a story of some sort.

I've been doing this mainly when my normal group is not around, and generally have different strategies based on how long I have.

If I am going for speed, I load up my favorite Ouro farm (Video Games Made Me Do It) at -1/x6 and run through that until I have 3 tips (most you can hold). I then drop to -1/x1 and then skip most of the mobs along the way. If by the end of the third mission I havent gotten a tip, I will either start cleaning up the map, or do the Ouro mission again until I get two more.

If I have more time, I generally go for killing all the mobs that I see (but not going out of my way to clear) for drops, so I will load up a newspaper mission and go until I have a tip, and set it to -1x4 (too many various mobs for me to want to go all out), and if at any point I run out of tips, I load up that same newspaper mission and go until I get another.


My tip drops have been rather good so far, I have gone entire tip missions without getting any, but 90% of the time I get one in a newspaper mission within the first 5 kills. I almost feel like the drop rate is different in newspapers/radios than other missions, because even in my Ouro farm at x6 I have gotten halfway through before getting a single drop, while on a two floor newspaper I had for a while where usually only 3 Malta would spawn on the first floor, I almost never had to go up to the second.



So 3D, you go to Dark Astoria and kill big mobs there for tip drops? Are you running a 50? I didn't know enemies that much lower than the player would drop tips...worth looking into. Half of my villain tips send me to Port Oakes anyway.

I was eyeballing a few recipes - Very Rare Recipes - at the trashcan in the Crucible, for which I would need 20 merits.

20 merits x $20,000,000 = $400,000,000

I instead bought both recipes off of the Black Market for $40mil, total, and the salvage cost an additional $30mil.

So, $70mil vs $400mil (and not including the costs of salvage & creation).

So, the Villain/Hero merits aren't worth it, really. Not for $20mil to make.

The trouble with A-merit farming is that occasionally you just get no tip drops.

I went 2 hours and a 4 figure body count before dropping the extra tip for my morality mission on Sunday.

I don't think buying purples with them is sensible, but if you can run them decently quickly, spending an hour or so to generate one A-merit and buying a 1 merit recipe that sells for 100M+ is very viable. Kinetic combat dam/end was the one I had in mind, but there may be others.

I recommend diversification in obtaining rewards for your retirement account and for this game. That keeps me from getting bored with any type of content and protects me from any wild swings in the market or changes in the game.

I have a couple of characters that run level 50 content x8 for purple and other drops and to give my second account some XP. My farmers are also my main marketers who buy needed items in bulk, save a few and sell the rest. I figure if I need/want a certain IO or set of IOs that other people will want them too.

I'll run TFs on any character with friends or the ocassional PUG for the merits, which I then trade on random rolls keeping what I need for any current or planned character then craft and sell the rest (or vendor if trash).

Right now I am running my new Praetorian elec/elec dominator through Striga arcs and tip missions. I plan to level him up to 50 using mostly tips. I'll cash in my Align-merits on random rolls as well.

I'll periodically run AE missions to break the monotony and use the tickets to get bronze level recipes and salvage.

If you mix it up, you'll never get bored.

I wonder if grays dropping Tips is working-as-intended, or if it is something that is going to be changed soon...

After running through a few more missions, it appears that it's only specific mobs not respecting "no bosses." All of my DE and Malta missions have bosses. Carnies and longbow are showing up as lt's. I forgot to check verify with arachnos.

After talking to various people, I am going to stick with my original statement that A-Merits are useful for getting PvP-Os and Purples that you just can't find on the market, or are currently overpriced (they will drop).

I think running a mission in 5-6 minutes is possible but, running 10,15,25,100 missions over the course of a few weeks and still averaging 5-6 minutes is not realistic. I think people might be looking at time from zoning into a mission to clicking exit and think "wow that was only 5ish minutes" but they aren't taking into account the travel time from the last door (yes its minor but it does add up over 5 mission) 30 minutes does not include the Morality mission which would 'in theory' bump the 2nd days worth of farming up to 36ish minutes.

Farming A-Merits (realistically):
Day 1: 5 Missions at an average of 7.5 minutes+travel time to door of 0.5 minutes = 40 minutes.
Day 2: 6 Missions at an average of 7.5 minutes +travel time= 48 minutes.

Total time for 1 A-Merit: 88 minutes.

Day 3: 40 minutes
Day 4: 48 minutes

Total time for 2 A-Merits: 176 minutes which = 1 LoTG 7.5%.


This is considering that the person is 'ghosting' missions as fast as possible defeating the minimal amount of mobs necessary.

If that same person were to speed TFs:

STF: 37 merits, ~30 minutes.
ITF: 26 merits, ~25 minutes.
LGTF: 37 merits, ~30 minutes.
Khan: 20 merits, ~30 minutes. (poor merit/min payout)
I can't speak to speeding shard TFs but I am sure people can run those pretty fast as well.

We can see that doing:
Day 1: STF/LGTF= 1 hour and 74 merits.
Day 2: STF= 1/2 hour and 37 merits.
Day 3: LGTF/STF= 1 hour and 74 merits.
Day 4: LGTF= 1/2 hour and 37 merits.

Total Time: 180 minutes (a tad more then 176 for A-merit farming) but you end up with 222 R-merits, so thats a LoTG 7.5 + 22 extra merits (one random roll). In addition, running those TFs will result in a lot more inf/recipes/salvage/vanguard merits then running Tip missions.

TL,DR?

A-Merits are nice, probably most useful for purples/pvp-Os
R-Merits are nice, still probably the most useful way to purchase specific recipes.


We will have a better idea of how fast people are gathering these merits in a month maybe 2. Honestly, until then is all speculation.

Of course all of this is just my opinion and is 100% wrong.

Panzer:

When I was trying to brainstorm times I considered the fastest tf times I know of which are:
~17 ITF
~19 STF
~22 LGTF
Those numbers are clearly not sustainable over numerous runs so I bumped them up to:
~20 ITF
~25 STF
~25 LGTF

But still didn' t think that was very realisitic longterm so I went with the:

25 ITF
30 STF
30 LGTF.

You mentioned you clock your times, I would be curious as to what you have found for 5 mission day and the 6 mission day.



Flea-

I 100% agree that set up times need to be considered and this greatly affects the outcome of the math.

If we were to tack on 10 minutes per day to get everyone on the team and in-zone we are looking as a 220 min investment for 222 merits compared to the 176 mins for 2 A-merits.

I went back and forth about trying to figure a good way to include set up times, because in all honestly, there is set up time for A-merits as well. Some people are heading to DA and burning through mobs till they get their tip missons then running them and only hitting DA again if they run out of tips. Some people say they never run out of tips. Others have said they have gone as long as 90 minutes without getting a tip to drop. So I don't know how to place a timeframe for A-Merit set up, which lead me to not include R-Merit set up.

Having said that... I would think, base tp->TP to DA -> kill mobs ->Ozone->PI would be fairly quick as a set up, maybe on the order of ~10 minutes and then hopefully the person would get any further tips during the 5 missions.

I just think we need to collect more data to see how viable these are.


BTW, This is what I do:
Bronze Roll Tickets < level 30.
Purchase LoTG with R-Merits/Random Roll in the 35-39 range.
for A-Merits, I have no idea yet, I will probably save them up and get Glad Arm +3% def or Pan Chance for heal/end. I have a few characters who could benefit from those little buggers.

OK, just got home and checked the fame point timers from my last run.

Time from completion of the first tip and fame point to completion of the last tip and 5th fame point was 34 minutes. And that includes running a morality mission in the middle of those, as I started with no fame points, but 7 points on my alignment bar Between tip mission 3 and 4, I had to run the morality mission, and then take time to zone to obtain more tips. Apparently, and somewhat annoyingly, if you have banked tips, and run a morality mission, you lose your existing tips and have to get new ones.

So, that's 5 total missions, plus zoning to my preferred tip gathering spot, in 34 minutes, for an average of 6.8 minutes per mission.

OK, forgive me for being a little slow here, but let me understand this…

Day 1: Do 5 tip missions.
Day 2: Do 5 more tip missions & 1 alignment mission.
Which then earns me 1 A-Merit, right?

Let’s say I do this repeatedly over several days and I earn several A-Merits.

Who do I talk to or where do I go to trade in these A-Merits for let’s say a LoTG +7.5?

Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this understanding.

Another time study:
Ran 11 hero tip missions yesterday, team size between 4 and 8 for each mission. No rushing and generally clearing the final room regardless of the objective; two hours.