A Couple of Questions on Alignment Merits

I just recently started accumulating some Alignment Merits (I know, I'm behind the curve). I have some questions about them:

It appears that not every recipe is available? I get the impression that the yellow/uncommon sets aren't available? Is there some rationale for that? What if I wanted to buy a specific level of uncommon set IO and it wasn't avaialble on the market for weeks at a time, wouldn't it be reasonable to let me drop an alignment merit or two on it, even though that would be a "waste" of their value?

Also, it appears there's a limit not only on how fast you can acquire them, but how fast you can spend them? A 20 hour limit on purchases? Has anyone given a rationale for that? If a given character banks 12 Alignment Merits, is there something unbalancing about letting the player spend them all in one sitting to buy a full set?

Most likely the reason that yellow recipes are not available with alignment merits is because they're available with Regular merits/AE tickets. I've not encountered a limit on buying stuff with Alignment merits the only limit I'm aware of is the 20 hour restriction from trading in 50 Reward Merits and 20 million inf.

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Originally Posted by Sailboat I just recently started accumulating some Alignment Merits (I know, I'm behind the curve). I have some questions about them: It appears that not every recipe is available? I get the impression that the yellow/uncommon sets aren't available? Is there some rationale for that? What if I wanted to buy a specific level of uncommon set IO and it wasn't avaialble on the market for weeks at a time, wouldn't it be reasonable to let me drop an alignment merit or two on it, even though that would be a "waste" of their value? Also, it appears there's a limit not only on how fast you can acquire them, but how fast you can spend them? A 20 hour limit on purchases? Has anyone given a rationale for that? If a given character banks 12 Alignment Merits, is there something unbalancing about letting the player spend them all in one sitting to buy a full set?

The 20 hour limit on purchases is easily testable if anyone doubts it.

It is indeed there

Thanks for confirming. But why is it there?

Someone suggested to me in-game that it's to limit profiteering. But it seems to me that a typical user who is buying IOs for himself, not for resale, would want to buy a whole bunch at once after a respec, for example, and not carefully extract one every 20 hours and hoard them in a tray until the respec...whereas a user intending to market the IOs could indeed dole out a large supply of alignment merits as one regular purchase a day as part of a long-term strategy. And the ability to earn them in the first place is already limited to a steady rate by the fame point system.

I'm not really worked up over this, but it just seems like such a strange rule to have devised.

It is a strange rule, but profiteering is probably the reason. Sometimes prices really spike at certain times. If all of a sudden a certain recipe went from about 100 million to 1000 million, someone could get a bunch and make a quick fortune.

I don't much care for it either, since I had been saving them and now I have to spend a few weeks to clear my inventory, and it makes tracking what I need that much harder. It just means I have to take a longer view to slotting up characters that are already 50 (particularly for those 3rd builds).

However, I think if I were a low level character and used tips during my life to 50, it would probably feel quite reasonable.

Which uncommon sets can you not find? I've found all of them. Be sure to adjust your level slider if looking for a srt that caps under the level you are currently at.

As far as I know, every recipe is available for purchase.

However, when you're buying a recipe directly the list is filtered by the level slider at the top. So if you're wanting to buy, say a Kinetic Combat recipe (which only goes to level 35) and your slider is set to level 50, then the Kinetic Combat recipes won't show up on the buy list.

The slider also controls what level the recipe will be when you buy it, so don't just set it to level 10 unless you really want level 10s.

As far as the purchase limits go: you can convert reward merits to alignment merits once per 20 hours and you can make one purchase (either a direct recipe or the 5 random rolls) once per 20 hours.

Why? I don't know. That's just the way the dev's coded it. I understand the conversion limit, even if I don't fully agree with it. I don't really understand the purchase limit, but I accept it for what it is.