DRG 6x2ι' EDD: "Warrior's Plateau" (solo scout)

Yes bosco, two deaths. Featuring aggressive venting drak + bodkin points crossbow + IFGs in Glacial Strata.

Very tricky dive for solo modded this week as stage 1 in particular took 3 attempts before I finally cracked it. I had to take a very strong loadout to push through yet still had to resort to some serious cheese to make it through the drillevator portion without pheromones.

My first attempt got cocky and stood on the drillevator right from the get go instead of lingering outside and above. This was a colossal mistake, because at about 17:09 you can see the absurd spam that would have descended on me with nowhere to run (and in my original run these spawns just absolutely mulched me). Second attempt I learned that the kiting-until-the-first-major-break-before-descending strat made things much more reasonable, and it was going fine until I got completely stuck and couldn't move by making the terrible mistake of "playing the game" by "grappling near the central pillar of the drillevator". So yeah, you can accidentally get glitched in it with no escape (dying didn't help). So that tilted me a fair bit because this is a long and boring map type to run back.

I took a brief pause to lazily plan a path through the crystals via freecam cheats (finding a decent resup drop point that would open a shortcut and a crystal) and then back into the grind I went with a much stronger loadout than I originally took.

In case you missed a tiny note of a recentish patch: they buffed the banshee module on the crossbow (so bolts now actually scare away enemies). In case it's not obvious from this footage... banshee is obscenely strong. Also you technically get infinite uses of it if you cared enough to pick the bolts back up in sequence. It's a seriously strong coilgun-lite, and it synergizes extremely well with aggressive venting's fear (especially into IFG), turning a very low effort loadout even more brain-turn-off'y.

Now, is it as strong of a loadout as just taking fire and phero bolts, no. Not even close. But that's more because that is extremely OP and this is just moderately OP. That being said, this is absolutely one of the stronger pheroless setups you can take into bubble holds like salvage/black boxes, and in comparison to other things I've taken in the past, this build holds ground like a damn gunner.

Just don't ask how I clear out stationaries or priority targets... (spoiler alert: the answer is I ping something and wait for the dipshit robot)

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Stage 1 is pretty toxic but made slightly less obnoxious by knowing where all the crystals are ahead of time. My first attempt where I actually did the original searching was like... 40 minutes or something ridiculous. 5 crystals is simply not enjoyable in solo, and I think this map type needs a serious second pass to make it more "fun". I don't think 5-crystals should end up in deep dives; it's far too long and here you're encouraged to use strats like popping the dread egg so you're literally fighting zero swarms the whole time too. Slap the shitty paint on top that is glacial strata's despicable terrain clutter and annoyances, and it's just a bad time overall. Far too much E holding and far too little engaging combat, ending in a section where you can pretty easily get screwed with no real counterplay unless you're on a strong counter like the loadout I took here.

Stage 2 was very fun until I remembered that ebonite outbreak is basically swarmaggedon 2. This map has some of the most enjoyable moments of the dive but also some of the most tedious, and it feels like at least 15 minutes of it I'm just bogged down trying to kill off the groups of ebonite enemies instead of being able to actually play the game and progress the mission. Some of that is just because this loadout SUCKS at stationary clear so I couldn't aggressively go in and force things to happen as much as I'd like, but most of it was cowardice against having to replay stage 1 should I mess up. I could have shaved off at least 15 minutes had I pushed more aggressively / ignored ebonites / skipped eggs during extract / fixed other pacing mistakes. But oh well. The double swarm hot drop and the buffed powerattack black box were quite engaging.

Stage 3 had a very interesting black box which got quite spicy once the duck and cover wave really hit near the end. I was expecting it to happen yet still got overwhelmed lol. Unfortunately the rest of the map is the extremely samey mining mission woes of riveting "wow, I'm standing in a tunnel" gameplay. This loadout makes it worse, because tight tunnels are where it shines. It's also in stage 3 where I remember "oh yeah I took chem explosion bolts", and finally started using them lmao.

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Loadout:
11321 Aggressive Venting
21123 Bodkin Points
IFG

Perks:
Dash / Iron Will
Resupplier / Deep Pockets / Born Ready

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Highlights:

0:00 Build
0:43 Stage 1
16:16 Drillevator
25:49 Stage 2
50:16 Black box
55:13 Stage 3
1:08:00 Black box
1:18:40 Final stats