DRG EDD: "Gunner's Foot" (true solo scout)
Channel: ojb
Date: 2023-06-15

No deaths, no bosco, completely blind. Featuring min clips M1k + jumbo shells boomstick + pheromone grenades in Crystalline Caverns.

First dive of the Season 4 patch, and my first time encountering the new enemies. I actually really like the design of both the plucky poo peddler and the gregarious ground grabby; the first one is super satisfying to squish and the second has some neat gameplay implications when you get forced out of position. The sound design on both is really top notch too - some of the best in the game, and that's quite impressive because the game's enemy sound design is really excellent overall. The grabbing tail whosamacallit maybe needs weakpoint tweaks perhaps (it's possible that I just repeatedly missed entirely lol), as even with armor break m1k they do tend to take a lot more shots than I'd expect. Didn't get to experience these enemies too much though, as it's solo vanilla so the caves seem pretty empty :(

Pretty sure I won't be running this week's dive at 6x2 due to the particular map set - it seems like a very long and slow nightmare with a messy egg into salvage into escort, with none of the layouts particularly forgiving for solo modded. I would also like to explore the new patch further in more regular maps to get comfortable with the changes, as I haven't played any of the experimental branch at all yet and a full dive might be too much at once.

As for this particular map, it was alright. Not my favorite map types for solo, but I do like a decent egg mission so at least there's that (though the egg terrain was very much chokepoint heavy which I don't find all that engaging personally). I think I played at a decent pace overall, but I think I could definitely have shaved off like 5 minutes or so if I had played just a little less sloppy/lazily. With a decent 4 stack in multiplayer, I think this is a decent contender for a quick 30-35 minute dive.

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Random things:
- I disabled the low poly enemies mod for this run as a stress test of the new patch. Seems like my framerate was fine in vanilla at least; I was worried because every season has typically degraded the performance on my aging PC by a noticeable amount. I don't like using the low poly enemies mod (I find it kinda ugly) and I find it more difficult to aim with less visual information on the bugs. So having the full models back was really nice, and hopefully modded goes well framerate wise that I can leave it off permanently. I am worried about lithophage missions though as they tend to chug my frames in a way that not even the sludge pump can pump out.
- New enemies on stage 1 psyched me out a bit and I didn't complete the full omelette :( I also forgot about the path being laden with lightning and I slowed down too much to get the last two eggs during the initial pull sesh.
- Stage 2 I lost time not just triggering the mules during the eggs. I stood at the entrance of the cave (6x2 PTSD) and cleared the egg waves instead of just running around and drawing ALL the aggro at one big bit instead to be more time and ammo efficient. So I ended up fighting mule waves one by one and definitely lost several minutes to it.
- I misplayed doretta's health bars a fair bit and lost time because of it. I spent a lot of stage 3 indecisive over whether or not to return and defend or just let the sides blow up and wipe out the weaker trash with it. Definitely could have leaned into it a bit further and spent more pheromones to buy time where I could ignore her and rush mules or whatever, as I was flush with nitra and didn't need to be greedy at all.
- I spent some time rewatching youtube footage of me failing to perform molly skips (i.e. glitching into the pod before molly returns) and noticed that I was pretty safe due to the 99% resist gained from being in the glitch spot. So this dive I decided to just hang out there and let the damage resist give me confidence to spend the time trying to wiggle in. I'm still worried that a point blank exploder could do harm, but if the praet spit can't do anything, surely I've been far too paranoid. I've been tempted to spend some time just testing this theory over and over to see how consistent I can make it, because they didn't patch it out and it definitely still is something worth trying for in solo. Either way I was able to (technically) skip all 3 of the extracts this dive, which is a nice change of pace for all my failed skips recently.

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Loadout:
23112 Minimal Clips
21213 Jumbo Shells
Pheromone Grenades

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

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Highlights:

0:00 Build
0:44 Stage 1
4:45 Cave cleared: twins fight
9:17 Popping 4 eggs
12:58 Popping last 2 eggs
15:51 Stage 2
16:43 Both eggs
24:57 Uplink
27:44 Refuel
32:08 Stage 3
34:49 Dottie refuel
41:49 Reached heartstone, repairing mules
43:40 Starting heartstone
50:00 Final stats page