Mikey Borup shares a great tip for anyone who has ever tried to get the After Effects Shape Layer’s Merge Path function to work with a Shape Layer Repeater. Typically adding a merge path to mask a repeated array will result in only the first element being affected – leaving the repeated elements unaffected.
As with most problems with After Effects shape layers, it all comes down to order of operations. As Mikey notes, this is not something that will happen that often, but when it does, here is how to fix it.