Hello there, if you're reading this I can only assume that you're struggling to decide what exactly you want to invest your merits into. Well don't worry, this question gets asked a lot and hopefully, this guide will make it a little easier for you to understand and decide what is best for you. I hope this guide is of some use to you. Any feedback or comments are more than welcome and even encouraged.

1. Introduction

If you understand how merits work and so on I'd suggest skipping to section 4, the following sections will be aimed more towards new players and players who don't understand the system as well as an older player. With that out of the way let me first say that this guide will not tell you what exactly to spend your merits in. It's important to know that that's impossible to do due to what merits do. (they're used to change and improve your "game style" and everyone has their own "game style").

So what exactly are merits? Well, merits are a type of currency in torn. You're awarded them for completing challenges in either medals or honours (check section 2 for more information). They are used to upgrade different stats. The first upgrade will cost 1 merits, the second one will cost 2 with the final one costing 10 (10 being the maximum upgrade for all options and to fully upgrade costing exactly 55 merits).

2. How do you get merits?

So now that you understand what merits are the obvious thing would be how you should go about earning merits to spend. I would recommend anyone who is not familiar with how this works to go here: https://www.torn.com/wiki/Awards. The link covers every honour/medal that you can currently unlock along with what is needed to do to unlock. There are also more guides which go much more into detail about how to unlock awards and even what are the easy ones to go for when starting, you'll find those by looking around in the tutorial and guide section of the forums (the same one this thread is in).

Don't feel bad if you don't have a lot of merits unlocked, they're designed to be unlocked over time by just playing the game. You have awards which take a long long time such as being married to someone for 2,000 days but you also have one as simple as reaching level 10.

3. What can I spend my merits on/in?

To be able to view the page you're able to spend merits on you should go here: https://www.torn.com/awards.php#merits

Below is an example of how I've spent my merits:





*important to note is that how I've spent my merits is not the correct way for everyone, it's simply how I've spent my merits to compliment how I play the game.



4. How should I spend my merits?

So what should you spend your merits on? Well, it all comes down to how you play the game, however, some things are more important than others. If you're reading this I'm going to assume you're newer to the game and something you're going to need to do I kick start your education so this is one skill that I would highly recommend if you're doing education. Each merit will take 2% off the education time and as a new player, this will be one of the more important sections to invest into.

There are many different builds in regards to merit investments. The example in section 3 would be a good example of someone who is heavily pushing merits into "warring" or just attacking related sections. If your goal is to focus in this then the general thing to note is mastery is more important than hp/crit (which are equally important) and those two are more important than passives. The reason for this is mastery gives a +3% damage done and +3% accuracy bonus to the weapon style you invest in. IMPORTANT - make sure you invest into the correct weapon style, if you invest into clubbed and use an SMG it will be a complete waste, also important would be suggesting that you only invest into 1 attacking style and stick to it. For HP/Crit chance try to invest into these equally, 1 crit adds a flat 1% crit chance where as 1 HP adds a 5% HP increase. HP is generally considered the 5th stat in torn and is important however at the lower levels 5% of 100 if 105, 5 HP doesn't help a lot. As for passives, these give a flat 3% increase to your stat for example if you have 1000 str and have 1/10 in str you'll actually have an effective total of 1030. This follows the same rule as HP in that the lower your stats the less important this is.

Another play style is the "logs in rarely" style of game play where someone will invest a lot of merits into banking and make a lot of money passively through banking though if you plan on being active I'd suggest avoiding this.

Another play style is the "criminal" where increasing crime exp and nerve is useful. If your goal is to try and rush through our crime merits and trying to getting a high "CE" (crime experience) then this is how you should try to play. Avoid this if you're new, this is more important for players who are trying to join PA teams.

As for awareness, masterful looting, stealth and hosping. These are all skills which are generally rather useless - awareness used to be somewhat viable for the player who was super active and had completed education/didn't war however with cheds recent awareness nerf related to the aware book (read more on it elsewhere) awareness is much worse and ultimately not worth the merit investment. The other 3 are specialized and you'll know if they're important to you.

5. Important things to note

Don't worry if you've spent merits in something and regret it, simply go here: https://www.torn.com/points.php You'll find the option to reset merits for a number of points and suddenly you're able to respec!

For every two levels that you gain you'll be able to buy 1 merit via: https://www.torn.com/points.php for 250 points each, the most points you can buy is 50 when you hit level 100.

It is encouraged that you do not respec very often, each time you do the cost increases by 250 points but does cap at 5,000 points and will never cost more than 5,000.

edit: Update!

This is a reply to a user who talked about the idea of banking being a good investment for a new player with limited merits, feel free to read both sides and make your mind up :)



"In regard to the comment on banking being beneficial (and this is without going into the fact that banking would take up 55 merits.

so what do you get as a new player spending 55 merits in banking? well going by the best investment amount you're looking at 2 months, with 0 merits you'll get 4.24% interest but for 10/10 banking you should get 16.34% (going by https://www.torn.com/forums.php#!p=threads&f=61&t=15975353&b=0&a=0 - Wiki will need to be updated to contain more detailed information, will be done at some point during the wiki rebuild)

So while it's completely unreasonable lets make the assumption that this new player has 2 billion in cash. This is 326.8m a month or 1960.8m a year. As a non-active player or inactive player this is actually pretty good money, for an active player this isn't. Money invested in stocks will result in more money than Banking - looking at FHG as just a single example you're spending 750m and getting 14m items on average once a week and far more consistently. so over a year you're expecting 730m while having 1250m to invest elsewhere and unlike the banking system it isn't capped- over a year you'll return better amounts with the same % of return.

this part is more aimed towards Adrenalinas - this month I made two stock investments, TCP and WLT - the first investment gave 11% profit and the second 23% (at time of selling) - while being far riskier the money is better and for an active player it will pay off - with 2 billion this would have resulted in 2220m being reinvested for 2730.6m - a much larger return over 1 month vs 2 months while costing no merits."