Opting Out - The Drop Trooper Project

So, I was thinking. It is a dangerous thing, because I occasionally come up with crazy ideas that I can find no compelling reason to avoid.

The idea I had was to create a new character who would opt out of the economy entirely, but still use the invention system.

The thought has coalesced and bubbled through my brain, and hence I have created Drop Trooper: A Plant/Trick Arrow controller who will only use what drops for him. No enhancements will be purchased from vendors, Wentworths will not be used. The only thing he is allowed to purchase will be inspirations from contacts.

I have not yet started this project in earnest, but I will be soon, and I will post about my experiences here.

The rules I have set for this project are as follows:

1) No purchase of any enhancements from stores.
2) No use of Wentworths in any way.
3) Any merits or tickets received will be randomly rolled at the first opportunity.
4) This character will be making his own solo supergroup, primarily for storage of enhancements and salvage. No one else can be admitted to the supergroup, to prevent getting things mixed up.
5) I will not give any help from my own characters - no emailing influence or salvage to myself.
6) No asking others for salvage.
7) Set IOs will be slotted over standard crafted IOs, which will be slotted over standard enhancements.
8) Any recipes, salvage or enhancements that are not used will either be vendored or emailed to my global. (I'm crazy, but if for some reason the character ends up with a redundant Miracle +recovery, I'm not vendoring it!)

I just want to see how well an independent can be slotted without any trade. I have chosen Plant/Trick Arrow/Soul as the way to go; the power pools will include Presence, Flight and Teleportation. (No fitness - I'll wait for Issue 19.) These power choices will allow, eventually, for the character to slot IOs from every category save two - Accurate Healing and Sniper Attacks.

Yes, a Trick Arrow/Dark Blast/*patron defender could slot every set save for Confuses, but I really don't want to play that character. (I will, however, send one million influence to anyone who can point me to a build that can slot inventions from every single set!)

So, a character slotted entirely by luck of the draw. It should be interesting. Watch this space for further developments.

Having gone this route a few times myself I shall give you the following advice:

1) Supergroup started at level 10 with 20,000 sign-on prestige. Don't plan on being able to build a small workshop until you reach around 15th to 17th level. Forget the Enhancement Racks. At 95,000 a pop they aren't worth it. Besides, you won't be keeping any enhancements you aren't able to slot immediately anyway if you're lucky. On the other hand you WILL want as many salvage racks as you can cram.

2) I don't know your play-style but you MAY want to consider going almost exclusively solo. The salvage drops are more frequent that way. Also, if you team too much you will tend to out-level your recipes before you have an opportunity to build them and use them well. Take it slow, max out your salvage rewards.

3) The one bad side-effect of the no-Wentworth's rule is going to be cash flow. Selling choice recipes and rare salvage items is a GREAT way of getting income. You will feel actual physical pain the first time you get a Deific Weapon or Soulbound Armor and realize you can only sell it at a store for 5,000 inf. You will feel a pinch in the pocket book, I guarantee it. You don't realize how much of a money-maker WW is until you don't have it.

I wish you all the luck in the world! As a person who is into the whole "make-up-self-imposed-rules-just-for-the-heck-of-it" I respect your endeavor!

Smersh and Steelclaw, you guys have some interesting ideas. At just over a year of play, I've started to come up with various little rule sets and challenges for a couple of my characters. I'll incorporate this idea into the first character they seem a good fit for. The influence hit would not even bother me. Compelling challenges and discovered strategies are extremely rewarding.

Steelclaw -

I admit I haven't really started this project yet, but I'm not seeing how the lack of income will really affect me. I'm not buying any recipes, not even from the University crafting tables, and no salvage. My only expense should be crafting costs, which can be brought even further under control with day job bonuses.

Income and influence shouldn't be the problem, just the luck of the random number generator.

Wow. I think you guys must have a screw loose somewhere. A good screw that is since I almost feel like doing this myself.

How about stopping XP or exemplaring just to increase inf flow. Allowed?

I think I'll stick to my soloing a defender to 50 as my 'craziest' plan. Good luck though. I'll be following this thread with great interest.

//Jack

Cheers to you, I would be in agony if I attempted this.

Great project... I hope you're gonna post screenies of your Enhancement management screen so we can point & laugh/ congratulate as appropriate

Best of luck with it.

For what it's worth, the one piece of advice I can really offer is that I usually don't slot TOs unless they fall randomly... unless I'm on a tough team or a big mission or the like and not having powers slotted at around lvl 12 doesn't really make much difference to slotting. It's not something I'd be missing put it that way.

Once you get into DO/SO territory things change of course but hopefully you'll have had a few good SO drops especially if you run a TF or 2 from lvl 10

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Are you allowing yourself to use WW to store salvage? Or base salvage racks only?

One suggestion from me - do NOT choose Mutant as your origin. It seems to me at least that there are fewer mobs that drop Mutant origin SOs than any other type. I would suggest Science or Technology.

Mousedroid - I picked Tech as my origin. It was a toss-up between that and Magic, but that was a practical decision regarding lighting up Oil Slick Arrow. It was a rough choice, though - I prefer Freakshow to CoT, but CoT to Nemesis.

Silver Gale - I won't store any salvage in Wentworths, no. The only use I will have for Wentworths is working on the Entrepreneur accolade, which will reduce my crafting costs.

Jack Power - I'm choosing not to artificially slow my levelling for this project. If I find myself needing salvage from a lower band, well, that's what exemplaring or Ouro are for. That's my choice; if you chose to run with a similar project, but chose to turn off XP at certain levels, I think it would provide an interesting comparison. I say go for it!

As to the rest:

Day one of the project.

I took the character out into Atlas Park last night, having opted out of the tutorial. My wife, having heard my enthusiasm for the project, decided that she wanted to give it a shot as well. She rolled up a Plant/Storm to play along. We chose not to level-pact.

We ran around, smiting Hellions to get up to level 2. Right about that time, we saw a broadcast for a sewer team. I do like running pick-up sewer teams on new characters, as it's a quick way to get up to level six or seven in fairly short order.

This was the best sewer team I had ever been on, and it may cause problems in the next few levels as a result!

There were eight of us, and we had a guardian angel - one Ketan, a level 50 mind/kin controller who shepherded us along. We were speed-boosted, healed, fulcrum shifted, and the mobs were put to sleep. She kept us all alive - there was not one single death on the sewer run. We rolled all the way through to the Steel Canyon exit of the sewers, which is a first for me, and I exited the sewers with a full salvage inventory and three bubs left until I hit level 11.

Drop Trooper has trained up, created his own personal supergroup - Opting Out - and logged off in Wentworths for day job credit.

It was a successful first run. I've missed the opportunity to run the Atlas Park safeguard, but I do have the City Traveler vet reward, so I picked up Teleport to get around town.

My slots look rather empty and barren at the moment, but that is standard for my characters, as I generally do not worry about slotting anything other than a few training enhancements that drop until level 12.

I'm planning, for the next adventure, to do the invention tutorial and either the Midnighter arc or a few radio missions/the King's Row safeguard. Probably the safeguard mission; better chance of origin appropriate DOs.

I suppose, that if I really want to do this properly, I should set up a Photobucket account - It's on my list of things to do, so that I can show off my enhancement screens and the like. Once I begin to get some enhancements slotted, I will also be using Mids to track and show off how effective (or ineffective) my slotting becomes.

Where's the person who's supposed to pipe up and say "THIS IS NOT MIN/MAXY ENOUGH YOU FAIL PURPS IS WHERE ITS AT"?

Or does he only show up when you show oddball character builds like my totally awesome petless Mastermind?

Ah well. Enjoy playing the game the Issue 0 way!

Are you able to earn inf in Costume Contests and other player event challenges? Just another idea of how casual players earn inf.

Ah! So this is that famous lunatic thread I heard about.

Seriously, good luck guys. This is going to be quite the challenge for.

I think I went sane reading this.

I'm curious to see how this experiment goes.

Is padding your SG with your own alts to get the prestige bonus allowed, or is it against the "self-sufficiency" concept?

I'm curious how you'd deal with unexpected IOs or recipes dropped onto you. I get that kind of thing occasionally, usually someone on a team who thinks I can use an SO (usually very wrong, as I almost always slot at least generic IOS), wants to get rid of unwanted recipes, or someone in Wents who is dumping something they don't want (although if you don't stand around in Wents, that solves one possible source of random gifts).

I would do this myself except... well no. I wouldn't do this. Well I might have tried it a year or two ago, when I played solo a lot more.

Eva Destruction - I don't have the spare spaces on Virtue to pad the supergroup with, so it's a non-issue. I won't be. If I'd gone with Victory or another server on which I have no presence, I might have.

Organica - If a recipe or enhancement gets dropped on me by a PUG teammate, that's fine. My wife or global friends, I'll politely hand it back. The focus of the experiment is dropping out of the economy, not total self-sufficiency. If someone is feeling generous and I happen to be in the right place at the right time, that's in keeping with the spirit of the experiment.

I'll be curious to see how the project goes.

I'm tempted to investigate a "natural gadgeteer's" path... still have to determine the best archetype to do this with. I'd send the new character a few million to buy & craft all the temp powers from Wentworths. Once I get a full tray of every craftable power in the game, I remove all primaries and secondaries ( I'm considering allowing pool powers) and use just those powers, replacing them from WW as they wear out.

The goal... well the goal was to see how far I could go without going mad... but I think I need another metric, as just mentioning this idea proves I've met that metric