DRG h5a: new marked for death m1k OC vs haz 5 all modifiers (solo scout)

No deaths, yes bosco. Featuring marked for death m1000 + embedded detonators zhukovs + boomerangs in Hollow Bough.

bLaSt It, tHe HaCkInG dRoNe HaS sToPpEd! ClEaR tHoSe CrItTeRs OfF iT nOw!

---

Hipster 2: electric boogaloo

Marked for death is literally hipster, making hipster a true hipster because it was hipster before it was cool. MFD has all the same problems and playstyle woes as the O.G., and inherits basically the exact same strengths and weaknesses. I'll be honest about my anti-hipster bias up front: I don't think it's unusably bad or anything, but I really find the best thing the m1k brings to the table are those tier 5 focus shot synergies - especially when paired with blowthrough focus shots. Both hipster and MFD lose out on that offensive/defensive powerhouse in favor of... being able to kill a praetorian marginally quicker with the primary? (Is that what people like about these OC's? lol)

You get relegated to spamming hipfire shots to handle everything else (aka literally the overwhelming majority of enemies in a mission), and once again I have to admit my bias - I just can't really stand playing like that for an extended amount of time. It's exhausting lining up all those headshots constantly, especially knowing that if I was on something like my baby minclips I could just line up a few at once and do a simple lazy focus shot anywhere to the body and kill 4 in one swoop / fear the rest. The hipster lifestyle is a lot more clicking and a wannabe repetitive stress injury - it's just not for me.

I don't have much else to say about MFD besides that very obvious observation. It's pretty stinko into solo and removes a primary for no real upside (maybe it's fine into elim, but elim is boring so I'd never know). I can see arguments made for coordinated modded teamplay where the lightboi bosco cosplayer at the kid's table is instructed to mark the big scawy tanks or he doesn't get ice cream that evening. That's maybe a thing. But outside that, it's another whiff in the scout department for season 5 IMO. Surely they can't all be stinkers... right guys? Surely GSG wouldn't make all three new scout OC's frustratingly below the curve and unusable for solo haha. That would be so swiwwy.

---

Other things:

* I took rangs to see how they felt into h5a. They still suck (a big shock to all, I'm sure). I built Bet-C just to stop the beeping (she tried to kill me twice: first at the start, and then later when she was "on my team").

* Robot event was kinda tricky on h5a. My struggles to keep hack-c going are probably more so to do with the loadout than anything, but it still felt like my best bet was just to let it stop over and over and widdle down the bar a bit at a time.

* Bosco sorta trivializes a lot of refinery missions, but I found this loadout would have been super slow and made even a shorter map like this one take 40 minutes in true solo otherwise. I'm still torn whether or not I should look for a mod that makes the pipelines not have a "hold e to build them" phase so I can leave the stupid toast machine where he belongs, or if I should just limit myself to not use him during the final pipes-are-breaking-repair-them phase since you don't have to do anything at that point but run around & ping them. idk. I love refinery missions, but I hate holding E. The eternal dilemma.

* Armor break is extremely important for MFD breakpoints in h5a. I noticed this because I was originally playing around with the faster focus speed to see if I could justify marks more often, but it turns out losing armor break really, really sucks (which, I mean - it's m1000 so that's not really that surprising). There were definitely loads of enemies where the armor break was necessary. While on the subject - I think I also prefer "lightning fast reload on kill" more than stun for solo. In a perfect world I'd take fear, but that's before you consider this overclock can't kill with focus shots lol. With hipfire spam, the faster reload is noticeable even with reload animation canceling, and there are plenty of other sources of stun.

* Marked for death has some really annoying bosco interactions. Any focus shot forcibly pings an enemy, and that interrupts anything he was already working on. So if you've set him to build up a pipe, you're incentivized NOT to mark anything in the meantime or he'll stop working. Also, it appears that in cases of blowthrough, the very last enemy hit in the ray is the one that bosco goes after (probably). You can see this happening when I blowthrough and accidentally hit a lootbug behind the thing I was intending to mark, and then bosco heroically throws himself at the offensive attack of a lifetime.

---

Loadout:
23213 Marked for Death
13212 Embedded Detonators
'rangs

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

---

Highlights:

0:00 Build
11:11 Robits
16:49 Starting refinery
21:49 Final stats page