Giapper [734331] —
Original article
Find out how Giapper managed to acquire all five reviving merits in less than a month, and how you can too by following his guide!
I am a merit hunter. I have been merit hunting for a few years now, and I find it really gives the game a new purpose - there is simply so much to do! And before you ask, yes I have wasted my energy on acquiring a 100 hunting skill - it took over 160,000 energy.
I currently stand at 559 awards achieved, and the last time I checked (17th Nov), this meant I was joint 23th on the Torn Stats awards table - Andyman, please update your Player Diversity Ranks! Some of the merits I've acquired took years to achieve, while others were done in minutes. In this article, I'm going to explain how I managed to achieve all five of the reviving merits in less than a month.
Revive Honors
There are 5 revive honors available in total. As of November 17th 2021, the Crucifixion honor was most common out of all reviving honors, with this one awarded for defeating someone you've just revived. Second Chance was the least common honor, with only 1,904 players having revived 1,000 people or more. You can check the current totals here via Yata. Here is the full list of reviving honors in order.
Crucifixion - Defeat someone you've just revived
Resurrection - Revive someone you've just defeated
Miracle Worker - Revive 10 people in 10 minutes
Florence Nightingale - Revive 500 players
Second Chance - Revive 1,000 players
I had none of these honors when I began, having only performed 67 revives previously. These revives likely date back to 2017, long before the current system was introduced, when it was much easier to achieve the reviving honors since failed revives did not exist. Before the medical revamp, all revives were guaranteed to succeed, and they gave 25% health to the user.
We do not know for certain what future changes to the reviving system will look like. But since we can't do anything to predict that, or bring back the old system, let's focus on what we can do to make hunting for revive honors easier right now.
Where To Start
Resurrection and Crucifixion are the most common revive honors and are easily achieved in one single action by simply hitting a person, reviving them, and hitting them again. Not every player has their revives turned on and open to everyone, so you should find a target who does and who you can definitely defeat. If you want to be ultra-safe, research the player by checking things like their level, Xanax used, Stat Enhancer total, and other stats before attacking.
Unless you're a new player, this step may be unnecessary, since there are huge numbers of weak, inactive players out there for you to target. You'll likely have more trouble trying to revive someone than defeat them since your revive success rate is tied to your revive skill and the number of revives your target has recently received.
With the basic revive skill, your success rate for a revive is 90%, and it rises with every revive given. To avoid failure, check out your target's revives received graph to ensure they haven't been revived frequently over the past 24 hours. If they haven't, you're ready to attack them, revive them, and attack them again. Once you're done, you'll receive two merits for 125 energy, which is super cheap! And it's even cheaper if you have faction upgrades available.
Faction Upgrades
For the Miracle worker, Florence Nightingale, and Second Chance honors I highly recommend joining a revive faction or a faction with revive perks unlocked and in use. These honors either require you to make a lot of revives, or they ask you to revive a certain number of people successfully in a short term. In both cases, you'll want to make sure you are operating as efficiently as possible when it comes to your use of energy.
To achieve this, you'll need to join a faction with the Fortitude upgrade unlocked, and the Reviving secondary tree fully upgraded too. The latter reduces the cost of reviving to a minimum of 25 energy once it has been completely unlocked, and is essential for those who are about to embark on a long spree of reviving. If your current faction fulfills these requirements, great! If not, you'll need to do some negotiating.
Unless you have big plans coming up or a real jerk for a leader, most factions will allow you to depart temporarily in the hunt for honors - especially if you'll be returning with some sweet extra revive skill. I've been with The Unleashed Sykoz for a long time, and I have close ties with boo, so it was easy to ask for a period of leave as I knew I would always be welcomed back. It also helps that our faction, particularly the veterans, encourage us all in the pursuit of personal growth and goals.
I don't know if this is always the case with newer factions, but even if you suspect your request will be denied, you should always let your leadership know before leaving. Grudges take a long time to fade in Torn City, and even though my temporary absence was accepted, I made sure to leave at a time when I knew we had no huge chains or errands coming - I did not want my personal quests to pee on anyone's porridge.
I chose Emergency Room as my temporary home because of their respect and reputation. ER not only had the Fortitude upgrade, but they also had upgrades on the Toleration tree too, which only made them more attractive. I was offered positions in other revive factions too, but Emergency Room's communication skills were almost unmatched. The lead answered me right away and they respected what I wanted.
I think it helps to be straight up with your intentions from the off. I told ER I wanted to join to get my merits and then leave. They totally understood this and welcomed me with open arms. It is so important to respect the faction you're in, even if your stay there is only temporary. Emergency Room organized a 1,000 hit chain while I was there, and I made sure to participate despite the negative impact this would have on my merit hunt.
Reputations last a long time in Torn, so don't go faction hopping and expect your goals to be everyone else's priority. Do your bit, and make sure you leave having made a positive impression. It must be said that despite the presence of a few leechers during the aforementioned chain, Emergency Room was one of the friendliest factions I have been in during my 13 years of playing. Because of this, I will always be available to help them out if the need arises.
Miracle Worker
Now that you're in a faction with the necessary upgrades, your first target should be Miracle Worker. This honor asks you to revive 10 people in 10 minutes, so you'll need to have energy stacked and ready to go. A single Xanax will give you 250 energy, and with 150 energy in the tank already that gives you a total of 400. With a revive now costing 25 energy thanks to your faction upgrades, this means you have 150 energy left to play with for failures, giving you a wiggle room of six failed revives.
If you are wondering how can you get your energy above 100, that is done by having a donator status. You can either buy a donator pack or subscribe with real money, or you can buy one from the item market for around 23.5mil. I highly recommend using a donator status for everyone playing, not just for merit chasers. You can also stack additional energy beyond that provided by Xanax through the use of Energy Drinks and certain job specials.
There are certain times of the year when this honor is easier to achieve than others. The most obvious periods are during attacking events, all of which are marked on the Calendar. Elimination, Halloween and Slash Wednesday are perfect times for acquiring the Miracle Worker honor since there are so many people in the hospital because of warring and such.
The downside of reviving on these special occasions is that there are many other people focusing on reviving as well. It should be noted that if you are targeting a warring faction with your revives, there might be some faction related revive contracts active. Muscling in on other people's contract revives could lead to retaliations, so always check with the faction leaders before you mass revive any one faction - at the very least you should do some forum research!
When it comes to your targets, the player's level should not matter that much, especially if you don't want anything in return from them. Newer people are more likely to give you a thank you via chat or messages, and they might even send you cheap items like bottles of beer. Older players could give you some more valuable items or money - especially if they have overdosed on Xanax.
What you should absolutely NOT do is ask for something in return during your revive-spree. Not only will this take up your own valuable time, but it also invites retaliation and hostility your way. At best this could mess up your plans for the honor, since time is really of the essence. At worst, you could make a lifelong enemy of someone. See rewards for reviving as a bonus, not an expectation.
The Big Ones
The final two reviving merits are Florence Nightingale and Second Chance, and you will have to use a lot of energy to get these. To hit 1,000 revives will require 25,000 energy if you somehow manage to succeed with every revive attempt. This is highly unlikely, so you should prepare to spend a lot more in your effort to achieve these honors.
My plan was to spend around $3.6 million a day on three Xanaxes and a refill, giving me 900 energy total. This will allow you to make 36 revive attempts per day, but if you add on the daily natural energy gain you can raise this to around 1,500 energy, which can be used to make 60 revive attempts a day. This is an extreme plan which will require you to log in four times a day and play around 16 hours.
With this schedule, you could theoretically get the 500 and 1,000 revive merits in around 17 days if everything goes as planned. It won't, but it is nice to have a reference point, even if it is highly unrealistic. The same formula can be used on attacking as well if the faction has the revive upgrades capped, which I highly recommend if you are thinking about going for these honors.
With the right planning and some meticulous research, you can reduce the number of failed revives down considerably, especially if you follow my advice in the miracle worker section.
Diagnostics
My quest for the five merits took 23 days, but it could have been faster if the faction I was in wasn't chaining - this is why timing is crucial if you want to speedrun these merits. I made 145 hits in total during the chains, which is the equivalent of just over two days of doing full revives. Given that I had 67 revives made when I started, and I did only 4 revives on the last day, my calculations show that you can hit the 1,000 revive mark in just three weeks, plus the 3-day waiting time for the faction upgrades to kick in.
My revive skill rose from 12 to 73 during this period, which in turn caused my success rate to rise from 91.2% per revive to 97.3% per revive. This really made a noticeable difference. If you are going for 100 revive skill (which equals 100% success rate to revive a person that hasn't been revived before), you will need over a day's worth of energy because of the fails you will inevitably get.
Still, getting 100 revive skill can easily be done within a month if you stick to it. It is worth mentioning though that there is no extra merit for getting the skill to 100 (*COVID-cough, Ched, COVID-cough*).
Larger Link
Costs
I did not embark on this quest to make money, but some people might, and I still tried to reduce my costs where possible. I personally revived only people who were either online or idling to max out my potential financial gains, as they would be the most likely to send me payment afterward. I did not ask for a single payment during my revive spree, but you might want to do things a little differently.
Some people stalk through trade chat where people usually offer to pay for revives, and others have contracts or friends who will pay for heals too. I must say that I was a little surprised how few acknowledge the revive they are given, but then again, this service is entirely uninvited, so there is no obligation on the recipient to do anything.
My plan of crossing my fingers and hoping for payment did not work out that well financially, as you can see from the list of items I received during my merit hunt.
- 9 Xanaxes (7.5mil)
- 1 Bottle of Mistletoe Madness (425k)
- 1 Melatonin (300k)
- 3 Cannabis (18k)
- 100 Small First Aid Kits (420k)
- 1 Bottle of Beer (4k)
- 12 Bottles of Champagne (48k)
- 1 Bottle of Tequila (4k)
- 3 Lion Plushies (180k)
- 5 Single Red Roses (3k)
In total, those items are worth around $8.9 million. The money I was sent totaled around $10.5 million. For the 25,000 energy spent, I made a little under $20 million in total. That means that one revive was worth around $20,000 on average. Obviously, this is an extreme example, and contracted revivers make much more than this. But still, I think it's a misconception that reviving is an easy way to make money.
Freevives
Freevives were not a big thing back in the old system and there weren't a lot of active revive factions with contracts. In those days, you had to ask for a revive in chat, especially abroad. I don't recall a single time that I would have gotten a free revive back then.
Today, freevives are common, but frowned upon by some in the reviving community, as they are seen as having a negative impact on the price that paid revivers command. Despite this, I personally did not get any flak from the revive community for doing freevives. I don't think that revivers really stalk each other out on these, and it seems that the drama associated with freevives mostly lurks on the forums when people speak openly about it.
There might be some drama coming my way after writing this article, but I recognize that there are so many ways of playing this game - it's petty to think that other people's playstyles should be dictated by your own preferences. Of course, the bigger picture might change if even more people start giving out revives for free, but it's up to each individual to decide how they want to impact the game.
Prognosis
One of the biggest benefits of chasing all the different honors is that you get to see many different sides of Torn City, and it is this aspect of merit hunting that keeps me going again and again. Having experienced the revive playstyle, I understand why some people find their home in revive factions given the people they attract.
That being said, I wouldn't get your hopes up on the financial side of this industry improving anytime soon. Merit hunting aside, I don't personally see reviving as a legitimate long-term playstyle for me, since it's so unpredictable, and the War In The West is the first real war we've had for a long time. People get fatigued after few days of chaining and then demand months to themselves, which really narrows the contracts too.
In the good old days, one war could last for months, and you could make 50 million a day just from reviving. Today, prolonged battles cost huge amounts of money, and with the new medical system in place, the use of revives has become limited. That might hopefully change with the imminent arrival of the ranked war system, as we could see a huge increase in demand for revives during short-scale wars. If that happened, it would be to the benefit of everyone.
Not least those who are hunting revive merits!
I currently stand at 559 awards achieved, and the last time I checked (17th Nov), this meant I was joint 23th on the Torn Stats awards table - Andyman, please update your Player Diversity Ranks! Some of the merits I've acquired took years to achieve, while others were done in minutes. In this article, I'm going to explain how I managed to achieve all five of the reviving merits in less than a month.
Revive Honors
There are 5 revive honors available in total. As of November 17th 2021, the Crucifixion honor was most common out of all reviving honors, with this one awarded for defeating someone you've just revived. Second Chance was the least common honor, with only 1,904 players having revived 1,000 people or more. You can check the current totals here via Yata. Here is the full list of reviving honors in order.
Crucifixion - Defeat someone you've just revived
Resurrection - Revive someone you've just defeated
Miracle Worker - Revive 10 people in 10 minutes
Florence Nightingale - Revive 500 players
Second Chance - Revive 1,000 players
I had none of these honors when I began, having only performed 67 revives previously. These revives likely date back to 2017, long before the current system was introduced, when it was much easier to achieve the reviving honors since failed revives did not exist. Before the medical revamp, all revives were guaranteed to succeed, and they gave 25% health to the user.
We do not know for certain what future changes to the reviving system will look like. But since we can't do anything to predict that, or bring back the old system, let's focus on what we can do to make hunting for revive honors easier right now.
Where To Start
Resurrection and Crucifixion are the most common revive honors and are easily achieved in one single action by simply hitting a person, reviving them, and hitting them again. Not every player has their revives turned on and open to everyone, so you should find a target who does and who you can definitely defeat. If you want to be ultra-safe, research the player by checking things like their level, Xanax used, Stat Enhancer total, and other stats before attacking.
Unless you're a new player, this step may be unnecessary, since there are huge numbers of weak, inactive players out there for you to target. You'll likely have more trouble trying to revive someone than defeat them since your revive success rate is tied to your revive skill and the number of revives your target has recently received.
With the basic revive skill, your success rate for a revive is 90%, and it rises with every revive given. To avoid failure, check out your target's revives received graph to ensure they haven't been revived frequently over the past 24 hours. If they haven't, you're ready to attack them, revive them, and attack them again. Once you're done, you'll receive two merits for 125 energy, which is super cheap! And it's even cheaper if you have faction upgrades available.
Faction Upgrades
For the Miracle worker, Florence Nightingale, and Second Chance honors I highly recommend joining a revive faction or a faction with revive perks unlocked and in use. These honors either require you to make a lot of revives, or they ask you to revive a certain number of people successfully in a short term. In both cases, you'll want to make sure you are operating as efficiently as possible when it comes to your use of energy.
To achieve this, you'll need to join a faction with the Fortitude upgrade unlocked, and the Reviving secondary tree fully upgraded too. The latter reduces the cost of reviving to a minimum of 25 energy once it has been completely unlocked, and is essential for those who are about to embark on a long spree of reviving. If your current faction fulfills these requirements, great! If not, you'll need to do some negotiating.
Unless you have big plans coming up or a real jerk for a leader, most factions will allow you to depart temporarily in the hunt for honors - especially if you'll be returning with some sweet extra revive skill. I've been with The Unleashed Sykoz for a long time, and I have close ties with boo, so it was easy to ask for a period of leave as I knew I would always be welcomed back. It also helps that our faction, particularly the veterans, encourage us all in the pursuit of personal growth and goals.
I don't know if this is always the case with newer factions, but even if you suspect your request will be denied, you should always let your leadership know before leaving. Grudges take a long time to fade in Torn City, and even though my temporary absence was accepted, I made sure to leave at a time when I knew we had no huge chains or errands coming - I did not want my personal quests to pee on anyone's porridge.
I chose Emergency Room as my temporary home because of their respect and reputation. ER not only had the Fortitude upgrade, but they also had upgrades on the Toleration tree too, which only made them more attractive. I was offered positions in other revive factions too, but Emergency Room's communication skills were almost unmatched. The lead answered me right away and they respected what I wanted.
I think it helps to be straight up with your intentions from the off. I told ER I wanted to join to get my merits and then leave. They totally understood this and welcomed me with open arms. It is so important to respect the faction you're in, even if your stay there is only temporary. Emergency Room organized a 1,000 hit chain while I was there, and I made sure to participate despite the negative impact this would have on my merit hunt.
Reputations last a long time in Torn, so don't go faction hopping and expect your goals to be everyone else's priority. Do your bit, and make sure you leave having made a positive impression. It must be said that despite the presence of a few leechers during the aforementioned chain, Emergency Room was one of the friendliest factions I have been in during my 13 years of playing. Because of this, I will always be available to help them out if the need arises.
Miracle Worker
Now that you're in a faction with the necessary upgrades, your first target should be Miracle Worker. This honor asks you to revive 10 people in 10 minutes, so you'll need to have energy stacked and ready to go. A single Xanax will give you 250 energy, and with 150 energy in the tank already that gives you a total of 400. With a revive now costing 25 energy thanks to your faction upgrades, this means you have 150 energy left to play with for failures, giving you a wiggle room of six failed revives.
If you are wondering how can you get your energy above 100, that is done by having a donator status. You can either buy a donator pack or subscribe with real money, or you can buy one from the item market for around 23.5mil. I highly recommend using a donator status for everyone playing, not just for merit chasers. You can also stack additional energy beyond that provided by Xanax through the use of Energy Drinks and certain job specials.
There are certain times of the year when this honor is easier to achieve than others. The most obvious periods are during attacking events, all of which are marked on the Calendar. Elimination, Halloween and Slash Wednesday are perfect times for acquiring the Miracle Worker honor since there are so many people in the hospital because of warring and such.
The downside of reviving on these special occasions is that there are many other people focusing on reviving as well. It should be noted that if you are targeting a warring faction with your revives, there might be some faction related revive contracts active. Muscling in on other people's contract revives could lead to retaliations, so always check with the faction leaders before you mass revive any one faction - at the very least you should do some forum research!
When it comes to your targets, the player's level should not matter that much, especially if you don't want anything in return from them. Newer people are more likely to give you a thank you via chat or messages, and they might even send you cheap items like bottles of beer. Older players could give you some more valuable items or money - especially if they have overdosed on Xanax.
What you should absolutely NOT do is ask for something in return during your revive-spree. Not only will this take up your own valuable time, but it also invites retaliation and hostility your way. At best this could mess up your plans for the honor, since time is really of the essence. At worst, you could make a lifelong enemy of someone. See rewards for reviving as a bonus, not an expectation.
The Big Ones
The final two reviving merits are Florence Nightingale and Second Chance, and you will have to use a lot of energy to get these. To hit 1,000 revives will require 25,000 energy if you somehow manage to succeed with every revive attempt. This is highly unlikely, so you should prepare to spend a lot more in your effort to achieve these honors.
My plan was to spend around $3.6 million a day on three Xanaxes and a refill, giving me 900 energy total. This will allow you to make 36 revive attempts per day, but if you add on the daily natural energy gain you can raise this to around 1,500 energy, which can be used to make 60 revive attempts a day. This is an extreme plan which will require you to log in four times a day and play around 16 hours.
With this schedule, you could theoretically get the 500 and 1,000 revive merits in around 17 days if everything goes as planned. It won't, but it is nice to have a reference point, even if it is highly unrealistic. The same formula can be used on attacking as well if the faction has the revive upgrades capped, which I highly recommend if you are thinking about going for these honors.
With the right planning and some meticulous research, you can reduce the number of failed revives down considerably, especially if you follow my advice in the miracle worker section.
Diagnostics
My quest for the five merits took 23 days, but it could have been faster if the faction I was in wasn't chaining - this is why timing is crucial if you want to speedrun these merits. I made 145 hits in total during the chains, which is the equivalent of just over two days of doing full revives. Given that I had 67 revives made when I started, and I did only 4 revives on the last day, my calculations show that you can hit the 1,000 revive mark in just three weeks, plus the 3-day waiting time for the faction upgrades to kick in.
My revive skill rose from 12 to 73 during this period, which in turn caused my success rate to rise from 91.2% per revive to 97.3% per revive. This really made a noticeable difference. If you are going for 100 revive skill (which equals 100% success rate to revive a person that hasn't been revived before), you will need over a day's worth of energy because of the fails you will inevitably get.
Still, getting 100 revive skill can easily be done within a month if you stick to it. It is worth mentioning though that there is no extra merit for getting the skill to 100 (*COVID-cough, Ched, COVID-cough*).
Larger Link
Costs
I did not embark on this quest to make money, but some people might, and I still tried to reduce my costs where possible. I personally revived only people who were either online or idling to max out my potential financial gains, as they would be the most likely to send me payment afterward. I did not ask for a single payment during my revive spree, but you might want to do things a little differently.
Some people stalk through trade chat where people usually offer to pay for revives, and others have contracts or friends who will pay for heals too. I must say that I was a little surprised how few acknowledge the revive they are given, but then again, this service is entirely uninvited, so there is no obligation on the recipient to do anything.
My plan of crossing my fingers and hoping for payment did not work out that well financially, as you can see from the list of items I received during my merit hunt.
- 9 Xanaxes (7.5mil)
- 1 Bottle of Mistletoe Madness (425k)
- 1 Melatonin (300k)
- 3 Cannabis (18k)
- 100 Small First Aid Kits (420k)
- 1 Bottle of Beer (4k)
- 12 Bottles of Champagne (48k)
- 1 Bottle of Tequila (4k)
- 3 Lion Plushies (180k)
- 5 Single Red Roses (3k)
In total, those items are worth around $8.9 million. The money I was sent totaled around $10.5 million. For the 25,000 energy spent, I made a little under $20 million in total. That means that one revive was worth around $20,000 on average. Obviously, this is an extreme example, and contracted revivers make much more than this. But still, I think it's a misconception that reviving is an easy way to make money.
Freevives
Freevives were not a big thing back in the old system and there weren't a lot of active revive factions with contracts. In those days, you had to ask for a revive in chat, especially abroad. I don't recall a single time that I would have gotten a free revive back then.
Today, freevives are common, but frowned upon by some in the reviving community, as they are seen as having a negative impact on the price that paid revivers command. Despite this, I personally did not get any flak from the revive community for doing freevives. I don't think that revivers really stalk each other out on these, and it seems that the drama associated with freevives mostly lurks on the forums when people speak openly about it.
There might be some drama coming my way after writing this article, but I recognize that there are so many ways of playing this game - it's petty to think that other people's playstyles should be dictated by your own preferences. Of course, the bigger picture might change if even more people start giving out revives for free, but it's up to each individual to decide how they want to impact the game.
Prognosis
One of the biggest benefits of chasing all the different honors is that you get to see many different sides of Torn City, and it is this aspect of merit hunting that keeps me going again and again. Having experienced the revive playstyle, I understand why some people find their home in revive factions given the people they attract.
That being said, I wouldn't get your hopes up on the financial side of this industry improving anytime soon. Merit hunting aside, I don't personally see reviving as a legitimate long-term playstyle for me, since it's so unpredictable, and the War In The West is the first real war we've had for a long time. People get fatigued after few days of chaining and then demand months to themselves, which really narrows the contracts too.
In the good old days, one war could last for months, and you could make 50 million a day just from reviving. Today, prolonged battles cost huge amounts of money, and with the new medical system in place, the use of revives has become limited. That might hopefully change with the imminent arrival of the ranked war system, as we could see a huge increase in demand for revives during short-scale wars. If that happened, it would be to the benefit of everyone.
Not least those who are hunting revive merits!
Original article
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