Where to spend your merits isn't as cut and dry as many other aspects of this game, but in general there are some universally useful areas, and typically people will follow one of a few paths. I am going to outline a few of these paths, as well as give an idea of how one might go about choosing which to follow.
It's worth noting that the more times you upgrade a specific bonus, the higher the cost of the next upgrade. Therefore, while the paths I outline here may be the suggested focus, there are some situations where it might be worth it to upgrade 2 different bonuses simultaneously simply to get the most out of your merits. I will try to make a note of these, but you should also use your own discretion. If you expect that it may be a while before you get another merit then it might be worth spending a few in lower-cost areas, rather than waiting around for the 10th one to be able to fully upgrade a bonus.
TLDR: The general upgrade path I would advise following if you're not certain what you want your game focus to be is the following:
Education Length -> Life Points -> Critical Hit Rate -> Weapon Mastery (Rifle) -> Passive Stats -> Bank Interest
However, this path will vary based on the individual so I would highly suggest looking below for more detailed information/advice.
Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, and I will either answer them myself or point you in the direction of someone more knowledgeable on the specific subject.
NOTE: I did not include Education Length in most of my paths because this will always be the suggested first upgrade to max.
Let's start with the upgrades that are always useful, for everyone. These are all worth getting at various points throughout your Torn career, and I will try to include my suggested timing within each specific path.
The main one is the Education Length upgrade, which (when maxed) reduces your education time by 20%. This should be the first merit maxed by every new player, and will be kept until you're (at least mostly) done with all the education courses. It is going to take a minimum of 6-7 years in real time, so unless you're an extremely old account that's been semi-active for years this should be the place you spend your first 55 merits.
Another universally useful upgrade is Life Points. While these are not always the best option to rush, they are useful for everyone whether your priority is warring, trading, etc, simply because it's the most reliable method to avoid losing fights.
The final "universal" merit upgrade is Bank Interest. This one is a bit more difficult, as it's only useful if you actually use the bank, and even then it's not the best method of passive income (there are multiple stock benefit blocks that provide more income/day than the bank interest does). Unless you've already got multiple other forms of passive income and an additional 2 billion to put into the bank these aren't worth rushing. If you do happen to have a significant amount of cash that you would like to invest then I would suggest upgrading these to max (or 9/10) immediately after Education Length.
War Focused
In terms of battle-focused merits there are numerous options, however there are a few that are worth prioritizing above others. The first two to prioritize should be Life Points and Critical Hit Rate. These are both general-purpose war upgrades that will help you with attacking and defending. Life Points are more reliable so I would suggesting focusing on them if you want to prioritize being able to win more fights, while Critical Hit Rate has less reliability but more potential benefit so I would suggesting focusing on these if you want prioritize being able to have a chance at winning harder fights.
Beyond those it becomes a bit less linear and depends on where you are in various other aspects of your game. Passive Stats can be extremely useful, but they aren't nearly as valuable early on when your battle stats are low. My personal suggestion is to use ~100m in a given stat as the cutoff point, below which you put at most 1-2 points in each. Weapon Mastery is also very good, but there are a number of merits associated with using different types of weapons, so if you're going for those merits it's not necessarily the best choice to prioritize this. In addition you have to take into account which specific weapons you use most often, as in the early game a Diamond Bladed Knife (DBK) is a good choice, but as you progress and obtain weapon modifiers the Armalite M-15A4 Rifle eventually surpasses. Therefore, my personal suggestion is to hold off on these until you've gotten a bit further into the game and have decided what your weapon of choice is going to be. Some people will prefer to stick with the DBK despite it's lower end-game power simply due to personal preference, in which case you'll want to max the Piercing Mastery rather than the Rifle Mastery.
There are also some upgrades which don't directly impact the outcome of your fight but instead impact its aftermath. These include the Masterful Looting, Hospitalizing, and Stealth upgrades. I will go into further detail on all 3 of these later as I feel like their main function relates more to making money than it does to engaging in war. However, there are some benefits to both the Stealth and Hospitalizing upgrades. The former increases your chances of stealthing any attack you make and therefore making it more difficult for the defender (or their faction) to retaliate if done while chaining, while the latter increases the amount of time the target is hospitalized for (assuming you select that option), thereby increasing the strain on their medical cooldown and making it more difficult for them to contribute to things like territory wars. None of these are particularly worth rushing points in (at least in my opinion), but they may be options you would like to consider later on. Note that if you choose to prioritize Stealth you're likely to want to use melee weapons as they have significantly higher stealth scores, and this might impact your decision of which Weapon Mastery you choose to go with.
Suggested Order: Life Points and Critical Hit Rate (max simultaneously) -> Weapon Mastery (Rifle or Piercing) -> Passive Stats -> Hospitalizing
Crime Focused
There are a few merits that are focused on assisting players with committing crimes. While these may help slightly with Crime Experience (CE) gains, they are not really worth putting points into unless that is your sole focus in the game, since the benefit is extremely minimal compared to other merit upgrades. There are a number of common misconceptions surrounding these as well, which I will try to address.
Let's start with the Nerve Bar upgrade, which gives 1 extra point in your nerve bar for each level. Of the crime upgrades this is the one that's most "useful" simply because it allows you to take more time away from Torn (either by traveling or not being afk) without losing out on nerve gain, and it also gives you extra benefit from using Nerve Refills which cost 25 Points. However, even taking these benefits into account this upgrade is fairly low on the usefulness list, especially in a warring faction, since it doesn't actually provide any direct benefit to your CE. One common misconception is that your Nerve Bar (NB) is the same thing as your Natural Nerve Bar (NNB), which is used a gauge for a player's CE. This is not the case, and it can often lead to situations where a player may believe they have higher CE than they actually do and attempt to do more difficult crimes than they're able to. It can also be confusing when communicating with your faction's Organized Crime (OC) manager, as they need to know your NNB, not your effective NB.
The other merit upgrade for crimes is the Crime Experience upgrade. Note that this is not the same as the CE mentioned before, these upgrades increase your likelihood of succeeding at a crime but they don't actually increase the rate at which you earn CE. In addition, each crime has a maximum success rate, so once you reach that point naturally there's no benefit to having these, and there are other ways to boost your success rate such as Crime Enhancers which are specific to each crime. Finally, these merits are not believed to benefit your success rate in OC's. Because of all this, these upgrades are typically not worth putting points in since it's likely that you'll want to remove them fairly quickly, once you reach the success rate cap for the crimes you're doing (around 35 NNB for Arson-Warehouse, the most people CE-increasing crime).
Suggested Order: Nerve Bar -> Crime Experience -> Life Points
Money Focused
This is a hybrid path that has multiple different ways to play, so instead of a Suggested Order I'm simply going to include all the various moneymaking upgrades here and outline some of the strategies one might take using them. This would be something you would likely combine with the War path if you were more interested in fighting for financial gain rather than faction growth.
Mugging to generate income means you may want to consider the Masterful Looting upgrades, which increase the percentage of your targets on-hand cash taken when you mug them. This would be most useful if you're the type that likes buy-mugging or things of that sort, as these are essentially useless unless you mug on a regular basis and for large sums of money. It's important to note that buy-mugging is frowned upon by many players and requires reasonably high stats in order to be able to beat your targets. While these upgrades are certainly fine to get later on, after you've completed all the main merits for the War path, I would personally suggest against getting these before then. Note that this pairs well with the Stealth upgrade due to the decrease in likelihood of being discovered and therefore blacklisted when buy-mugging.
If you really enjoy warring, to the point where you would rather hop from faction to faction and guest in territory wars, you might want to consider getting the Hospitalizing upgrades which increase the amount of time your target is hospitalized for (note: these only take effect if you choose to Hospitalize your target rather than Leaving them). Some factions will be inclined to hire and pay you to guest during contested territory wars, since your target will be required to use more medical items to get out of the hospital. That being said, in most cases you'll need decently high battle stats to be of value in this manner, so they're probably not worth rushing either way. As with the mugging upgrades, I would suggest focusing on these after completing the War path, as by that point it's likely that you'll have high enough battle stats to be of use and factions will be willing to pay you significant quantities of cash.
The Bank Interest upgrades which I mentioned before would also belong in this section. They are a significantly more reliable method of income than the mugging or hospitalization ones, and as I said before if you're at the point where you're considering investing 2 billion into the City Bank I would suggest maxing these upgrades.
The other type of upgrade that technically fits in this category is Awareness upgrades. However, while these do in theory increase your income, awareness as a whole has been nerfed so significantly that I would highly advise against investing at all in these. Unless this gets changed some time in the future it's not worth your merits.
This is my first guide posted on the public forums, so please feel free to respond with any and all feedback. I have done a trial run of this guide within my faction, but I'm always looking to improve, so if there's anything you would suggest changing please let me know.
Credits: information for this has been collected from numerous resources, but in particular Alexstrasza [1825532], RGiskard [1953860], MolonLabe [2072034], and JinHoshi [2075624] all helped by providing significant amounts of advice over the past months. I would also like to thank my faction (and Red-Rabbit [2203961] in particular) for helping me with typos.
All else aside, your statement regarding Capel having a 1* SS is completely useless... that company is 19 days old, which means that if he's in the process of finding a solid employee base (something that's very hard to do at low stars) him having gained 1 star in a 2 week period is actually pretty good. If it were a 500 day old company then your statement might be founded, but as it is the fact his company is 1* means next to nothing about his business plan's chance of success, if it were much higher then it would literally require hacking the game.
It's important to do your research before making judgements.
If nothing else you'll have the downside of not gaining any working stats and having access to no specials. While those might be worth it if you're particularly concerned with protecting your cash and nothing else, there are other safe ways to store cash (such as a faction vault).
In addition, unless you have the SYS benefit block you'll be at risk of getting hacked (plus you just advertised that you're planning on storing large sums of money there).
Piggy backing off of this idea (or maybe just fleshing out the idea a little more), what if there actually was a decay to current points at the same rate as to required points?
It should be a very simple implementation (just applying the same scaling code), and I don't think it would cause issues for what is the existing goal behind having the required points fall off (which I'm guessing is to ensure that a close fought war doesn't go on forever). Obviously it's not a complete or even all that significant fix, I'm sure lots of factions could still find ways to take advantage of it (such as spreading out hits for their faction members rather than doing them all at once) but it would be at least a slight discouragement to just sitting and doing nothing for 90% of the war. I suspect that short of a complete overhaul of the system, which lots of people seem to be calling for but no one has proposed a fully fleshed out system for, the best we could reasonably hope to get is small improvements based on changes like this.
Another one that I think would have a larger impact, but also likely be more intensive to code, would be a participation scaling factor based on the lowest activity % in the war. We have tracks of player activity, how about adding something like # of hits made per hour during the war, where if it falls below a certain number you get fall off of rewards? You'd probably need to tweak the value/timeframe to make sure people didn't abuse it the other way, to force a loss of rewards for their opponents (maybe if you're fighting a 30-man faction you only have to make 1 hit every 3 hours, vs 1 hit per hour against a 90-man one), but with a little experimentation and a better knowledge of active tactics than I have atm (as someone who hasn't been following this all that closely of late) it should be entirely doable. Or if you wanted to actually make Ranked Warring hard, you could implement a chain sort of system, where you must maintain your chain throughout the war. A combination of hits made against the opposing faction alongside a chain value requirement would force factions to be extremely active during their wars, as well as leading to a significantly more cut-throat nature to most wars (imagine that your goal becomes to break the opposing faction's chain). Perhaps it's max chain size (scaled by faction size) during the war instead of maintaining it, so that if your chain breaks you lose out on some reward value but are still compensated. I could write out a whole slew of ideas for how exactly to implement this, some that would probably be great and others that wouldn't be worth even considering, but even just the idea of a chain-based reward seems worth considering.
I'm sure the reason these things aren't implemented is difficulty to code/design, and that's fair enough. But if people wanted specific ideas for how it might be changed that could be worth considering I hope I've provided a few decent ones.
It seems like a lot of the complaints are missing the actual idea behind the item: this isn't something that would take effect during the fight.
For example, if you initiate an attack on someone and they Smoke you, you'd still be dealing with a Speed penalty for the rest of that fight. And by making it something that can only be used when not being attacked it would still allow people to stack temps against a high-stat target that they wanted to take down. As long as the attack doesn't completely end (i.e. no one in it at all) the temps would continue to apply as normal with no way to remove them aside from time.
The primary function for this would simply be to remove the wait time players experience when attacking random targets who happen to have their temps on. At the moment if you happen to hit a target that never bothered updating their temp settings after the last war, then the result is that you'll have to sit there after the fight has already ended and wait out the duration of their Smoke or Tear gas. That provides no benefit whatsoever to the person you attacked, since it's not like you're going to be attacking them again. The primary effect of the current temp system with regards to defensive temp usage is random hits leading to players having to wait long periods between on completely random targets, which (I don't believe) was the intent behind the system. The goal (as far as I'm aware) was to provide a tactical advantage within a fight or series of fights, something which would still be entirely possible since only allowing usage outside of combat covers the scenario where someone tries to remove the temps they've been hit already during the war.
As Jin mentioned, having it require the usage of some amount of medical or booster cooldown removes the benefit to use in most real warring situations, leaving on those situations where a player is chaining or making uncoordinated hits.
And for all the arguments of "this doesn't make any sense, how could a medical item remove a side effect" being hospitalized fully removes all temporary effects (aside from drug addiction/radiation poisoning, which this obviously wouldn't impact either), so you can currently utilize a wrong type blood bag to self-hosp, then a correct type one to come out and be suddenly free of temporary effects. This would be no different, except that it would skip the piece where your HP has to be randomly dropped to 1 and brought back up again for no reason.
One Easter, a father was teaching his son to drive when out of nowhere a rabbit jumped on the road. Slamming on the breaks, the son said, "I nearly ruined Easter! I almost ran over the Easter Bunny." His father replied, "It's okay son—you missed it by a hare."
I will admit part of me was hoping this would be another "fake SA vs real SA" situation, but sadly after looking at the faction my hopes aren't too high...
It really depends on your goals and how close you are to completing them. I would personally suggest going for 10/10 in Education simply because this is the one field which heavily impacts your long-term growth, and even a small boost in efficiency of it can lead to a large change in completion time later on.
That being said, for most upgrades if your goal is to optimize your strength in the current time then yes, going for 9/10 or even lower isn't a bad choice. I personally upgraded my merits in a fairly linear fashion, however I am currently doing all of the passive stats simultaneously, meaning that all of mine are around 5/10 right now. In general it will depend on your personal preference, but doing this certainly isn't a bad option.
This guide was written during the old mugging system, meaning that while the basic ideas still hold (merits in Mugging are overall unhelpful for those prioritizing crimes or battle stats, but might be useful for those who want to jointly increase strength and finances), the balance between paths has changed and therefore when someone might wish to pursue bonus income from mugging may be different. I do now know the balance for these values, my suggestion would be to take a look at Proxima's guide to mugging, although I wouldn't be surprised if the data in this post is based on that.
Overall I think the suggestion is great, however you would probably have to remove (or add an option to opt into) the battle stats rank, as unlike the game-wide rank for this which provides very little information outside of the top few hundred spots (all of whom are spied regularly anyways), it would become fairly easy to deduce the battle stats of those around you simply due to the small pool of possibilities.
One potential idea would be to add an option similar to that for faction applications (as the information would be shared with a similar group of people), so that those who would rather remain entirely anonymous can do so. Obviously the list would still be effectively anonymous the same way that the game-wide version is, but this option would keep their rank out of the list entirely.
I'm glad I could help! That sounds like a good plan :D
We'll probably get a free merit reset in a few months, at which point your NNB is likely to be high enough that the CE merits won't be worthwhile anymore, so that should be good timing.
It sounds like you're following the Crime path, so I'm going to provide feedback based on that assumption. If that isn't the case then the short answer is that you're better off investing your merits into Life/Crit/Passive Stats if your goal is winning fights.
CE is generally not useful unless you're on the verge of leveling up your NNB and want to be able to start running higher crimes earlier. Otherwise, all it actually does is provide a passive boost to CE rather than increasing the rate of gain, and for most crimes their success chance is capped at a certain value above which there's not benefit to having flat CE boosters (such as merits, enhancers, etc). Given your age I would imagine your NNB is reasonably low, probably not above 35 at most, so you could consider keeping a few merits in CE to help you with succeeding at harder crimes a touch earlier in your NNB progression, but you'll want to reset and remove them before too long either way (I would personally advise to do so once you reach 40 NNB, as you should be at cap for successes on Arson Warehouse).
Nerve Bar merits are a bit more useful at all stages, as early on you can use them to help you have to log on less and make longer flights without wasting nerve, whereas later on you'll be able to gain more from nerve refills. If you were regularly finding that you'd be at max nerve bar when you return to the game, or when you're coming back from abroad, then it's not a terrible idea to have some points invested. But I would suggest trying to gauge the number based on how long you tend to unable to use your nerve for, and would typically advise ignoring overnight as that's hard to maximize regarding no matter what and is only a single refill.
As for Life Points being useful, as I mentioned above it depends on your goal. You're absolutely correct that a) Life matters more as you get to higher levels simply because it will provide a larger increase, and b) higher level and stronger players will always have an advantage and will likely go right through any extra Life you get from the merits. Honestly this is true of every upgrade you can make to your character aside from battle stats, as in reality you won't really stand a chance against someone significantly stronger than you no matter how much you invest into other areas. The main benefit of Life Points is in close fights where the person you're fighting is within a reasonable range, something that is much more common as you get stronger and your stats increase. I've found they can make difference in the range of about 1.5x your stats. At your stage you're probably better off investing your merits into something like CE or Nerve and trying to focus on increasing your long-term stats, and then resetting your merits when you're a bit further along. As useful as the extra Life is, it doesn't become any more or less useful if you upgrade it a year in, so it's not really a rush if you're not in that many close fights at the moment.
I hope this was helpful. Let me know if you have any follow up questions.