Wildly inconsistent merit rewards from storylines.

[Heraclea]

Did Provost Marchand on a stalker .  This was rather difficult, involving many unhelpful 'allies' aggroing random spawns and a battle with an elite  boss Silver Mantis.  The reward: 6 merits IIRC.

 

Ran the Lou Pasterelli arc  "Unity Plague" on the same stalker.  This was quite easy and quickly done.  Most of it is glowie hunts, boss room defeats, or named mob hunts with IIRC two relatvely easy defeat alls   The finale is a long tour of the Freedom Phalanx TF givers plus another destroy the glowie hunt.  No EBs.  43 merits.

 

Something here seems amiss.  Generally I think that any old line mission with multiple parts or timed missions lurking behind a first mission ought to give some merits. 

Edited March 24, 2020 by Heraclea

[Coyotedancer]

Merit rewards are based more on arc length, IIRC, than on arc difficulty... So a few missions with an AV/EB at the end might well end up giving less than one of those old-school, way-too-many-filler-mission slog-fests.

[RikOz]

I dunno, wasn't 6 merits supposed to be just the standard reward for beating an EB? The Protean arc that starts in Talos (with your mysterious double) is quite long and convoluted, and finishes up with a extremely-difficult-to-solo fight against Protean, all for a measly 6 merits. Meanwhile, Montague Castanella's arc, the last half of which is a series of non-combat, "go talk to this person" missions, awards 13 merits.

 

I've been skipping Protean, and certain other storylines, just because they're not worth the effort. I mean, they're worth doing once, just to see the story, and perhaps the 6 merits were worth it on live when merits were more scarce, but now, with merit rewards greatly boosted for most things, arcs like that one just aren't worth the time and effort.

[MunkiLord]

22 minutes ago, RikOz said:

I dunno, wasn't 6 merits supposed to be just the standard reward for beating an EB? The Protean arc that starts in Talos (with your mysterious double) is quite long and convoluted, and finishes up with a extremely-difficult-to-solo fight against Protean, all for a measly 6 merits. Meanwhile, Montague Castanella's arc, the last half of which is a series of non-combat, "go talk to this person" missions, awards 13 merits.

 

I've been skipping Protean, and certain other storylines, just because they're not worth the effort. I mean, they're worth doing once, just to see the story, and perhaps the 6 merits were worth it on live when merits were more scarce, but now, with merit rewards greatly boosted for most things, arcs like that one just aren't worth the time and effort.

I don't recall 6 merits ever being a standard for EBs, but I could be wrong here.

 

It's my understanding that the merit rewards for arcs are similar to TFs, average time to complete. Since arcs are frequently done in multiple play sessions, I'm not sure if it is literally time spent in the missions or something else like number of missions, or some sort of mix. 

 

And I'm not sure how often old arcs were adjusted after merits were added in the game, so there are likely some outliers there. And as the game got older newer TFs and arcs were generally shorter, so their merit rewards were significantly less even though some of the new stuff is more difficult.

[Heraclea]

I also did the arc with Protean on the stalker.  Decided to wait until I had several levels on him before attempting the Protean mission.   Roy Cooling is much more fun but offers similarly small rewards for the time it takes.  Anything that lets you beat up Captain Castillo is never a waste of time. 

[RikOz]

45 minutes ago, MunkiLord said:

I don't recall 6 merits ever being a standard for EBs, but I could be wrong here.

Maybe I'm thinking of Giant Monsters. I think I got 6 merits for participating in a Frost Lord (?) kill back in December.

[Coyotedancer]

1 hour ago, Heraclea said:

I also did the arc with Protean on the stalker.  Decided to wait until I had several levels on him before attempting the Protean mission.   Roy Cooling is much more fun but offers similarly small rewards for the time it takes.  Anything that lets you beat up Captain Castillo is never a waste of time. 

That's true. 

Good ol' "Captain Hotpants" deserves that. XD

[MunkiLord]

40 minutes ago, RikOz said:

Maybe I'm thinking of Giant Monsters. I think I got 6 merits for participating in a Frost Lord (?) kill back in December.

Yeah they give some sort of standard merit reward, six sounds right. 

[carroto]

I've noticed this as well.  It seems to afflict newer content.  I don't know when the arcs mentioned were added to the game, but maybe the devs back in the day didn't have enough accumulated data to set the merit rewards to their proper value.  That's what I thought when I ran that arc from Provost Marchand and got a lowly 6 merits.  It took me a while to do and there were a lot of challenging encounters.  Six seemed way too low.  I figured it had to be a placeholder value because the data didn't exist or hadn't been used to set it to a realistic value.

 

I do seem to remember that happening back in the day.  New content would commonly have very conservative rewards until the data-mining had been done.  Probably to guard against people finding a shortcut and exploiting it mercilessly until it could be patched.

 

However I have some concern about asking rewards to be looked at now.  As best I recall, rewards were set based on average completion time.  Back on live those were probably greatly affected by the large contingent of casual players running those arcs.  If we have fewer of those now, and proportionally more reward-focused power-gamers, average times will probably be lower and rewards with them.

[RikOz]

I've only done the Provost Marchand stuff once, on my fire/fire blaster, at around level 35. I recall completing it over the course of several days. It took a very long time to get all the way to the ending, solo.

[Vanden]

Merit rewards are based on median completion time. Lou Pasterelli's arc is very long for example, but if you Stalker to the objectives like OP did, you'll finish it much faster than the average. In addition, a lot of old arcs, like Lou Pasterelli's, had their typical completion time inflated by virtue of the fact that they'd been available since the launch of the game, when players were worse at the game and characters were weaker, and so took longer to complete them.