Crafting is entirely unnecessary
Until the DLC. I couldn't buy new weapons for my DLC characters and I didn't get any in the few missions I did. It seemed like crafting was the only option to upgrade their weapons unless I'm missing something.
yeah Kylie / Ray / Misty weapons have to be crafted (Misty comes with decent weapon though for rogue) and Alisa only has 1 weapon drop (quite sure there is not more) which is very late game
That's interesting. Glad I found out now.
Few options around that for players who hate farming, grinding etc. I can think of.
1. Simply don't use those characters
2. Simply play the game with their starting equipment.
Second option makes me think whether you could do that for the whole game - just never change equipment from what your characters begin with at all. On cruel with challenge mode and high risk high reward on, this would probably make for a very tedious game, as at a certain point almost all enemies would be one shotting you and you'd be doing negligible damage to them, so even if you were able to single them out to make the game possible at all, you'd still be mindlessly bashing them for 3 or 4 character turns for each character to take them out of action.
You have to keep cruel mode on for the AI changes, I'd imagine (unless someone can attest to the hard mode AI actually being better - it could be, greedy AI strategies aren't always optimal after all), but you could safely do away with high risk high reward, which is basically a "So you hate farming? Well here's the option for you, but we gotta tweak the difficulty a bit to compensate" feature and is redundant with the self imposed challenge of never changing from starting equipment. Challenge mode is mostly redundant with limits to growth, certainly for story, but also for other missions if you play with the self imposed rule of clearing all (lower level) non-story missions in level order before advancing the story, so perhaps this is another thing you can tweak to remove what would become painful HP bloat.
Ofc. you'd keep all other modifiers on. Mind body unity is a must unless you want to break the game with Heixing and Fetters of the Past and Paranoid are amazing.
My biggest gripe after doing pretty much everything 100% (achievements + mastery sets and so on) is locking masteries behind pet taming + leveling em. It's very time consuming and boring (there is an option to unlock all masteries if u are doing offline playthrough).
Unlocking all masteries is probably a good option for players who like maximum build variation and do not enjoy grind and farming. Alternatively you can just accept a bit of random extra challenge or lack of challenge on runs through the game "well I didn't get Veteran during S9, that locks me out of the good Martial Artist sets till S43, guess I'll play around it". If you're keeping AT time counts for missions (as I do) it makes more sense to switch that option on.
All this reminds me why I generally hate sand box with kitchen sink thrown in in game design, as is the case with Troubleshooter. You can maybe, if you try hard enough, salvage a good game using all the options and tools given and writing a laundry list of rules the developers didn't, but you'll probably be the only person playing that way, and you might find out 50 plus hours into a run the game is still broken in some way anyway. Then the question arises, why don't I play a game where the game designers actually did their work, I mean beyond the market necessity of making a skinner box for retarded people?
Edit:
Jermu were you talking about the "A parallel world" option here? That's like a new game+ kind of thing, and you need to have a save file which already has the masteries unlocked, meaning you'd have to have done the grinding at least once. Or is there a different way? I was just about to start a new no new equipment or equipment upgrading run too to test out my theories.
