Can someone explain Signnature Story Arcs (SSA)?

Day 1
Run 5 tips.

Day 2
Run 5 tips and Morality mission.
Run 1st arc for an Alignment Merit.
Run 2nd arc for an A-Merit.
Run 3rd arc for an A-Merit.
Run any one of the arcs AGAIN for an A-Merit.

Since you haven't run any yet, you can get FOUR A-Merits in 2 days on any character that you feel like doing this with (level 30+ for the 3rd arc). After this 4 Merit bonanza, THEN it's one per week.

That's what I'm doing. I also use it to track the timer.


No, you just have to have done it once ever to confirm your alignment as heroic or villain.


Lots of bosses for XP/drops.
Aside from the A-Merit, you can also pick Reward Merits, Incarnate Threads or Astral Merits.
New maps, like the Hollows engulfed in lava.

Well, not positive. It's either 10 for the 1st, 20 for the 2nd and 30 for the 3rd... OR it's 11, 21 and 31.
They exemp you to 20, 30 and 40 respectively.

Actually, you have to run it again to reinforce your Hero or Villian alignment if you haven't done the Morality mission since October 19th. That's the date of the patch notes I was directed to by support when I enquired about not being able to select Hero Merit as a reward.

No you don't - I have a couple of characters that I used to use to grind alignment merits, so I know that they had previously confirmed their alignment and I had them run SSA 2 immediately after this patch (without re-confirming) and both of them where given the option of getting the hero merit.

If you DO have to re-do this on a character that strikes me as a bug. That doesn't mean support is going to recognize it as such, they are notoriously bad about knowing exactly how the game works.

Which is odd. My main villain hasn't done a Morality Mission in quite some time (like spring), and still gets Villain Merits when she does these. Whereas my Heroic Dominator finished the Vigilante-Villain-Rogue-Hero trip in September, and had to reaffirm his Heroic status AGAIN.

That's the game going "A heroic dominator? Really? A heroic dominator? Are you sure??"

No, you just had to have run a morality mission EVER. Once you run a hero/villain morality mission, you have forever unlocked your ability to get alignment merits from all the SSAs (assuming you remain a hero/villain).

To the OP, it is very much worth buckling down and finishing your 11 missions (most of which are extremely quick) to unlock this functionality. ESPECIALLY if you've got a ton of alts. For every alt you unlock, you can get another weekly hero merit just by running the first SSA. The first SSA can be done extremely fast, especially if you have stealth powers, because none of the 3 missions are kill-alls. The first 2 missions each have exactly 1 mob that needs to be killed, and the third mission only has a few. I usually average about 9-10 minutes, which is very much worth the ~50 million influence that a hero merit is worth.

That's not broken. That is working as intended. It is an unintentional side effect of the devs sucking at basic planning and thinking ahead.

Appreciate the on point response.

Last question - can I pick up these missions from some nice central locale like FOrt Trident by chance?

Last comment (yeah right) - Is it me or is information on these things a little scattered and scarce? It just seems like some of these basic things would be clearly listed with its "news entry" or with its "paragon market" entry.

Wrong. If you had confirmed your Hero or Villain alignment in the past, it still counts. You did not have to confirm your alignment again after that patch. What the patch changed was that you could no longer earn A-Merits if you had NEVER confirmed your alignment. If you started as a Hero and never changed, you were able to get A-Merit from the Signature arcs *UNTIL* the patch. BUT, if you did confirm your alignment at some point in the past, you did not need to do it again after the patch.


um.. no? Not clear from your phrasing what you're saying here.
Running a single Morality mission is enough *ONLY* if it is the same alignment as your current alignment. So if you started as a hero and ran one Hero Morality mission, you're good to go. If you started a different alignment, you need one Morality to CHANGE to your final alignment, then ANOTHER to CONFIRM (or 're-affirm', 'reinforce', whatever) your alignment.

Nope. Each arc is accessible only by visiting the single contact for that arc.


<.<
>.>
It's just you.