DRG 6x2ι EDD: "Hunter's Tongue" (true solo scout)
Channel: ojb
Date: 2023-10-06

No bosco, one iron will incident (can you guess?), completely blind. Featuring min clips m1k + double barrel boomstick + pheromone grenades in Salt Pits.

Not my best dive, but certainly not my worst dive either. I think I played alright, but there was a lot of questionable decision making throughout. I did a few warmups on haz M beforehand (lmao) to try and offset the new patch mouse stutters, and I think that worked actually, because my stutters were quite few and far between.

Stage 1 was a bit long (as expected for sabo), but iota feels perfectly reasonable actually. I really liked how many waves I got, and since this is my first time playing this map type under iota in a dive, I was happy to see it hold up. The terrain layout wasn't the best (lots of tight corridors and forced robot turret fights), and I had a fair bit of difficulty on the first hack. That hack in particular had very difficult spawns to start phero piles off of, as my ground bugs were basically just swarmer spam and nothing substantial to keep everything going. I went with the age old singleplayer strat: just let hack-c die repeatedly instead of trying to play in the awful position and risk everything keeping it alive for no reason. 

Nitra from this stage alone was extremely plentiful - sabotage will do that for you, and throw in free mule nitra on top and there's just so much free real estate. I think I mined a bit of nitra in stage 2 as well, but I think I was pretty set coming out of stage 1 with like, 4 resups in pocket that it trivialized that portion of dive difficulty. I did try and farm some lootbugs at the caretaker arena (leave nitra on floor for them to eat; I know I'll be back to kill them at the final boss, so why not fatten up the little piggy wiggies - in case you are unaware, lootbugs amplify the amount of minerals they eat, ala an infinite money glitch, but I mean, it's just funny to do and not valuable at all. I maybe got like, 5 extra nitra from this idle farm rofl. The scale factor is 1.5x I believe, but they eat so slow it doesn't tend to matter).

The caretaker fight itself had real nice terrain. Lots of great high ground and shelves made it extremely free. I tried to avoid having to shoot snipers because I'm lazy and don't want to aim, so I basically denied myself being able to easily stand in half the map and made it hard to shoot some eye phases, but hey it worked lol.

Stage 2 was simultaneously the easiest phase while also being the sloppiest. Hiveguard starter cocoon makes things so conveniently free to walk around and clear stationaries with while completing the secondary objective. I didn't even need to be super thorough with my map clears because I needed very little nitra at this point due to the excess from stage 1. You'll see me kinda wander around aimlessly for a bit because my brain stopped working after the caretaker fight, and my ability to mine minerals off of high walls was literally non existent. I find it quite funny how much variance there is in my ability to play this game; like, most days I'm fine and do things good, and then there's days like today where I can't grapple for the life of me.

Because of brain farts I barely remembered "oh yeah I can use a resup to 2-cycle the hiveguard" but monkey brain made that realization too late to actually use lmao. At the point I remembered that's a thing I can do, it was too late to drop a resup. Unfortunately, my brain didn't process that second detail and just sent it anyway like a buffoon. You can maybe see the cogs turning in my head as I realize what I did right away, and I felt so dumb lol. The actual strat, for those curious, is to drop the resup at the very start of it going into rockphase when it begins staying still, and then limiting your damage to around the right of the G in "Hiveguard" on the boss health bar. @benicopter has better explanations of this trick in his overexplained speed run, and I highly recommend you check that out because beni's great and that video is excellent. But I'm stupid and couldn't use brain cells gooder.

My death was... yeah you know. Do I even have to at this point lmao. I'm bad, and arby is too skilled at the mind games.

Stage 3 was a simple mining mission with a very tough black box. Got through it first try, but it could have gone worse. The difficulty of course being volatile guts (it's a red modifier, don't believe the lies) mixed with tight quarters; VG means you can't easily build up phero piles because the pile wipes itself so quickly. Bad visibility too. I just got lucky to hit it first try lol.

After finishing the dive, I realized my phero nades weren't really all that useful at any point, so this is a good pheroless candidate IMO.

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Loadout:
23112 Minimal Clips
12233 Double Barrel
Pheromone Grenades

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


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Highlights:

0:00 Build
0:42 Stage 1
30:30 Stage 2
50:18 Stage 3
1:04:26 Final stats page

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