Making a post to discuss the ins and outs of bounties for new(ish) players. I’ll try to not ramble too terribly much; we do bounties to increase faction reputation so we can buy faction gear, especially augments. In particular, we want ‘Revered’ status with Devil’s Crossing, Rovers, and Homestead while still playing vanilla/veteran so we can get the armor augments to cap resistances.
Are there particular bounties/sets of bounties that you look out for? For example, if I’m concentrating on DC rep, is it more worthwhile to take a Bounty like ‘Cronley’s Henchmen’ than Reanimators? The reason for the former is of course that every time I kill a Cronley hero/boss, I get rep for killing as well as for completing the bounty. Or is that suspicious logic, or maybe it’s not worth the time.
Obviously, it’s wonderful if you can stack up three bounties that take you to the same place - Steps of Torment, Blood Grove, etc…
The simple question is; once I have Mandates, what’s the fastest way to hit Revered with the those three factions?
For rep farming go for the ones that you could complete the fastest. Bosses with fixed spawn points are usually the best, provided the road isn’t too long.
(1) Bring me ‘X’ Bounties and Kill ‘Y’ Hero/Boss Bounties. The former can be done very quickly if you’re sitting on a bunch of resources (literally just a trip to nearest bank and back, sometimes with a brief detour to a blacksmith to craft a T1 relic). Killing Heroes/Bosses for bounties is preferrable for the bounty reward and the bonus reputation reward for killing said-hero/boss, and also guarantees a chance at good loot. Never ever “Kill Z enemies” of a certain type. You have no guarantee of being able to reliably find such enemies in a reasonable span of time and rarely, if ever, do the enemies in question even have an MI worth going for. In trying to kill those enemies, you might also wind up killing a boss that you’ll get on a subsequent bounty, which will require a session restart to complete.
(2) Bounties can expedite the process by a fair margin with or without Mandates, but if your faction has a solid boss run associated with it (e.g., Direni+Moneybags+Cronley for DC) it’s usually faster just to spam that run over and over. It’s nice if you get a bounty that’ll put you there, but there’s no guarantee of that.
Edit: For the three factions you mentioned…
Cronley Runs for DC
Arkovian Undercity runs for Rovers
Royal Hive (Dermapteran, not Bees, but Bee Hives are also pretty fast and good xp in general) runs for Homestead OR possibly Ancient Grove if you have AoM. I usually have Homestead maxed by the time I decide to do AG, but I could see AG being pretty quick rep if you can do it.
There are 2 efficient ways to do bounties. Option 1 is to know which bounties you’ll complete anyways and grab them. For example if you are heading through old arkovia for the first time a kill kilrian bounty is right in your path and easy rep. But i wouldn’t bother to restart the game looking for such quests…
The other way (which is even better…) is to get a bounty that gives an extra guarrented hero each run and never turn it in. For example ‘The Bruiser’ gives an extra Conley hero every run for +75 rep/run. I find it more efficient not to turn these in and just speed run the zone multiple times. Also slightly increases loot yield.
So the ‘boss run’ types are your favorites (mine too, for the previous reasons) - Cronley and Caspis leap to mind, Dermepterran hive runs, Spined Cove? Wasp queens?
Sometimes I’ll try to grab a few that I can knock out in Steps of Torment (Rovers and Death’s Vigil) if I wan to run it anyway. But for those of you playing along at home - some of the bounties for ‘find X hero’ in SoT are a colossal pain in the butt.
There are some bounties that align with farming, such as the Black Legion and Kilarian. I kinda cheesed it by just relogging until I got the quest for each farm run.
And I would do the Outcast bounty line fist after learning it, then get the BL reward for Log after to even it out. Why not?
This was before I bought AOM and BL rep was a bit harder. BL rep doesn’t need farming with AoM. Or any of them, really.
EDIT: iirc, some of the Cronley quests add a couple of heros(extra loot chances) to the run, so there’s that. As do some of the others. This is more of a useful thing at lower difficulties.
See, ya’ll keep saying that ‘no reason to farm rep in vanilla’. But I have a hell of a hard time getting my resistances even up to 60s sometimes without the armor augments, and I’m never at revered with DC/Rovers/Homestead just from running the campaign. What am I doing wrong? LOL.
Most of the “effortless” +rep comes from killing heros. So that just skyrockets in elite and ultimate, imho.
But…if you need stuff, then there’s nothing wrong with doing some quests. I’d say do ones that offer components just because (but not critical). I think many rewards can be randomly either cash or components except the give-a-heart-get-a-brain type and one-time quests.
Oh and the “give-a-heart-get-a-brain” type are pretty good for rep as you even out in the end and can eventually visit the smith to switch to your favorites.
EDIT: Rovers might be worth doing a few quests just to get to Honored status so you can do the RLegacy quest without too much backtracking. Rovers have a few really quick quests such as destroy forges, fedex Jelly, and stuff.
Just making sure I (and anyone lurking the thread) understand 100% -
Get the Romanov quest, keep it open and keep running it because killing Cronley and Romanov together is worth as much faction rep as completing the bounty. Am I understanding correctly?
It’s more for the extra loot than the rep. Once you’ve hit the cap on rep, having a guaranteed spawn on your favorite farming routes is a nice way to squeeze a little more utility from them.
Its also a good source of rep. With a fast killing build turning a quest in and finding a new suitable one can slow you down considerably but keeping the quest is 75 rep/run guarrenteed.