Opting Out - The Drop Trooper Project

Okay, so I meant defense debuffs, and said the wrong thing. Oops.

I played my first two characters without using WW's for a couple of months (mainly because the interface totally frustrated and intimidated me). I found recipes were too few and "common" salvage too rare to adequately slot the powers. I also found that only having slotted what dropped to result in a character so sub-par that they were almost unplayable (not that we knew any better, we just thought the game was REALLY challenging).

Sometime around 15th or 16th level I found the DO enhancement stores but was unable to buy much because of the expense. I skated around with barely slotted toons who were constantly broke well into the mid-20's until one day a Deific Weapon dropped and I finally, grudgingly, sold it at WW's and I haven't looked back.

I couldn't imagine trying to do that again... on purpose, but good luck!

I'm bumping this just to remind Smersh he hasn't played Drop Trooper in a while.

Where's Mah Screenies?!?!?

I too am curious to read how this experiment turned out (or is turning out).

In the market forum, we've discussed minimal builds in terms of costs and such,
and I'm reasonably convinced that relying solely on drops and the RNG to equip
a character is quite an uphill trudge.

By contrast, it costs ~18M over the course of a toon's career to use traditional
TO/DO/SOs and a bit less for Common IO's - a pretty easy financial goal comparitively.

Sets and Premium builds are, of course, quite a different matter, and probably
out of reach entirely without some minimal marketeering skills and effort.

I'm curious to see how OP's toon turns out, both from an effectiveness standpoint,
and from a "time needed" while levelling to achieve adequate performance during the run.


Regards,
4

You guys are nucking futs. This is like going into a gun fight as a quad-amputee who's blind and deaf.

This is how I play the majority of my characters, so it's not that big a deal to me. Even the ones who buy/craft things, I wait until they are 33 or 37 to do so, depending on how viable they are. Most of them I don't even bother doing that. Relying on drops and not buying anything is just par for the course for how I play.

My current hardcore character is Only Child, who is permanently level 2. He's a Willpower Scrapper and it's becoming more and more of a slog. I did manage to hook up with a charming and good-natured group of players last weekend to run many of the winter event missions. They reacted with good humor whenever I answered level-up ding "Grats!" with "Yay! 2 again!" Anything past about level 14 and your teammates have to carry you quite a bit. Someone mentioned that a Blaster would've been a better choice since they can still attack when stunned and I agree. I spend a great deal of time woozified because I chew through Mauves rapidly. I rely heavily on Vet powers and Temp powers, but since I can only hold a single recipe and 4 salvage at a time, it's rather difficult to craft anything. I focus on whatever temp power has dropped and sell everything not related to it. So far I've managed to make one temp power.

Another downside is that many of the unlockable goodies rely on your Security Level, not your Combat Level. Learned that the hard way when I wasn't able to get either the Raptor Pack or the Zero Gee Pack from the bank missions given out in Kings Row. *That* was a bummer. Same deal for making a Supergroup. I'll have to ask someone else to make it then invite me.

By popular demand, I'll pull the character back out this weekend.

I've just had other projects.

That's one crazy idea, I just might try it.

Well... Smersh may be getting Wife Aggro for not working diligently on the project... ... but here's my first update.

Exodus Hunter Mora (Super Group - Opted Out), is better slotted than most of my level 16 characters; as most of them have DOs at best at this level and would sell or transfer anything worth anything.