Just FYI, as I'm not sure if you're aware, but Thargoid Scouts were nerfed some time ago in terms of how much xp points killing one adds to Combat rank. I have no idea if it's still considered the best way to rank up, but most likely not as good as it used to be.
Increase Combat Rank
- Thread starter Javert
- Start date
I'm still not Elite (am Dangerous) on my PC account. I was triple-Elite, on my Xbox. Back around 2018/ 2019, I found Comp Nav beacons the best, as there were a lot of Eagle, Viper and Cobra class Elite NPCs...and even when they weren't elite, they were especially quicker to destroy, to where it maybe even took pulse lasers less than 10 seconds of sustained fire to down lol. Even when Scouts were the (then) meta for the Elite rank grind, and you could just use regular human multis and beam lasers, it took me longer because I had to take time to find the signal sources and hope it were scouts.
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Take the highest threat missions you can. A threat 0, 1 or 2 mission will not help your combat rank as you level up your ranks. So I suggest trying the highest level missions you can.
Same goes for Nav Beacons/Resource Extraction Sites/Compromised Nav Beacons. If you are dangerous level in combat, you want to be killing ships that are your own level or higher for pirate massacre missions.
I mostly focused on pirate massacre missions, using assassination missions as something different to do. And the scouts, which are not elite anymore, were very different, and moved my combat rank the fastest.
What level missions have you been taking?
Bounties confer Mercenary Rank not Combat Rank.
Out of curiosity. What is the point of grinding combat rank ? It's not like you'll increase your skill when taking a loophole. On the other hand, you'll end up getting a bunch of Elite Condas & FDLs gunning for you with every mission and random interception. They might be more than you can handle.
Combat bonds on foot confer mercenary rank, bounties confer Combat rank. You can go test it. Go to the Naren system and do 1 safeguard mission. All of the NPCs that drop will have bounties. Turn in the mission, relog, and notice your Combat rank will have gone up, not your Merc rank.
This is confirmed both in my experience, youtube videos, posts online, and a discussion with someone who used safeguards to get most of their Elite V in Combat rank completed.
NPCs are goobers so are easily handled, but the better ships can have better materials and higher bounties attached to them. Along with this, Triple Elite is cool.
Also depending on the systems picked to take pirate massacre missions, the mission giver might be affiliated with the feds, so it could help your fed rank grind as well. So money, mats from the destroyed ships, fed rank grind for unlocks, and combat rank are all possible.
Beside the being cool while actually only taking a cool shortcut, the rest doesn't really compute. A harmless ship will drop the same mats as the same elite ship. Also credits are utterly meaningless after you're advanced enough to engineer everything and get a FC.
I have since console transfer. Both bonds and bounties confer Merc rank. The NPCs also have a combat rating which is what Combat Rank derives from.
On the contrary, on foot CZs can increase your combat rank quite wildly. I found myself at Elite after a week of grinding ground CZs for a CG, giving me a bit of a steep learning curve when it came to ship combat, which I'd largely avoided, and suddenly I was getting interdicted by elite pirates all the time in the T9 when I went back to trucking. So careful with that!
I get the feeling it was intended that on foot kills would affect Mercenary rank, and CZs would additionally count for combat rank, but they got it ass backwards in the implementation, because on foot CZ combat bonds seem to be the only way to increase Mercenary rank (and anything but high CZs is painfully slow)
...except bounties maybe? I hadn't noticed it make a difference, perhaps I should start scanning for bounties again. I kinda gave up when I realised the real money was in farming power regulators & suit schematics on behalf of the ED community tbh (o7) but you can net over a million clearing out a high threat criminal military installation.
You say shortcut, I say smart and efficient gameplay to accomplish one's goals. You might disagree with the goals, but then why even be in this thread at all? If you're worried about NPCs then by all means, keep your combat rank low to stay safer. However, when one is a higher combat rank, they typically do see tougher ships, and Anaconda pirates usually drop better materials than Asp Scout pirates in my experience.
Doesn't seem to track with my recent experience, so I wonder if you were doing other activities on the side as well, or if there was a bug at the time, because I've done quite a bit of Merc grinding on high CZs and my Combat rank doesn't budge afaik.
I think many people in this thread need to go do some more measured testing.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/14v74p8/onfoot_method_for_leveling_combat_rank_810_elite/
I totally missed that. Unfortunately, the quick search is also wrong. It currently only returns the system Bach. That system isn't in Outbreak, only the controlling faction is.
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Weird, coulda been a bug. Seemed like all my on foot kills were counting towards my Combat rank and Mercenary rank didn't budge outside of CZs, but others clearly have very different experiences!
Bounties on scavs accounted for all my early Merc rank. However as the bounties are tiddlywinks compared to combat bonds rank doesn't rise as fast.
Javert
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Lori Jameson access
- I am actually only trying to get from Master to Dangerous so I can access the engineer for G4 Life support.(Seems like you have to fly to Colonia to get G5 Life Support - er... no thanks).