A few Questions Regarding Mercenaries

XP: Put the mercs you want to level in a party with your highest level 3-merc team (preferably all level 30s). Then run through the highest level content you can comfortably farm using just the main 3-merc team.

Coins: Do whichever bounty drops coins for the merc. If you have the merc already, add them to your team while doing so. Tasks are generally faster, but can be random in appearance rates and there’s a limited amount (18 tasks, 985 coins from them, not counting the random coins).

Some abilities cleave (ie. hit mercs adjacent to the primary target). If the merc with Taunt is in the middle, both the other two mercs will also be hit. If the merc with Taunt is to the side, only one of the other two will be hit.

Cornelius Roame is a special case since his Taunt heals the mercs next to him.

The baseline F2P team Cariel, Xyrella, Samuro is also the most generally effective PvE team. While there are specific encounters that benefit from a different composition, those three can take on the entire PvE experience with a bit of thought put into ability use.

It basically comes down to speed 1 Taunt available on Turn 1 along with the high damage combo of Blinding Luminance + Double Strike.

If you want to find Mysterious Strangers, do bounties at or above the highest level merc in your team. If you want to actively farm them, reset the map (View Party->Retire) until you get a layout that doesn’t take more than 2 combat encounters to a Mystery Coin (Swirly symbol).

Level 1-30 can be fairly quick if you already have 3 mercs at level 30. If not, the fastest method is just doing the bounties in order until you do have 3+ mercs at level 30.

For skills, the biggest increment in efficiency is usually from rank 1 to rank 3 (out of 5) which costs 175 coins total for each skill. Getting skills to rank 5 certainly helps, but the 300 coins from rank 3 to rank 5 don’t give as much power per coin as the initial investment.

Given that you can only use one piece of equipment at a time, levelling more than one is only really worth it if you’re desperate to get the +1/+5 from maxing out everything on a merc. Equipment has 4 ranks and getting a single piece from rank 1 to 4 costs 425 coins (some equipment starts at Rank 2-4 depending on the effect).

This means to have an efficient PvE team costs 950 coins for each merc, to max out a merc takes 2700 coins if all their equipment starts at rank 1. The 18 tasks available to each merc grant 985 coins.

For PvP you still only “need” 1 piece of equipment maxed, but you’ll usually want all 3 skills maxed out. This is 900 coins more than PvE. You don’t require a fully maxed team for PvP until you’re so high in the rankings that everyone else is fielding such a team, at that point you’re likely going to have enough coins to max your team due to the rewards from PvP chests.

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