DRG 6x2ι EDD: "Leaf Lover's Trench" (true solo engineer)
Channel: ojb
Date: 11/11/2023

No bosco, one iron will revive, one awful nightmare of a dive. Featuring magnetic pellet alignment warthog + inferno breach cutter + plasma bursters in Glacial Strata.

UPDATE: @slava7281 (the absolute beast) counted up the number of platforms I used in this dive. Check out the pinned comment for some neat statistics and to discover why I enrolled in a 4-week rehabilitation program at my local IHOP (a terrible location to hold Pancakaholics Anonymous meetings).

Welp, I stuck with it and finally beat it. Unironically this took like 30+ attempts. The combination of biome, enemy pool, and mineral placement really makes this one a doozy for boscoless non scout classes. This is definitely one of the harder dives I've ever completed, and I almost swapped over to scout (see: "giving up and wanting easy mode") about a dozen times but I persisted. This dive was seriously a tough one and has cemented my belief that glacial strata is the most difficult biome in the entire game.

Unfortunately the winning line isn't quite "fun" to watch. Maybe some of you will get a kick out of the long times of running around circles to grab 4 morkite at a time, but I suspect this will be one of my lesser viewed uploads. The real kicker is stage 2 is HORRENDOUS without bosco (or scout or driller). The time spent parkouring on platforms is ample time for hazard 6 speeded enemies to catch up, and because they do so much damage (and there's no red sugar anywhere convenient), you're very quickly bullied off of whatever task you wanted to accomplish. The enemy pool is exceptionally evil - stingtails, shockers, and mackies all require instant attention and can each very easily be a death sentence if you're caught either in rough terrain (snow drifts that slow you, which this map has plenty), or have a fun RNG experience by lucking into a glacial snowstorm (literally just unrecoverable death if at the improper time).

Stage 1 has some of the most toxic nitra. There's not a lick in spawn, and because the one side is open, you're forced into a hot drop on terrible ice where the "safe" side is surrounded by terrible ice vents. The dirt is a long one into more black ice, which means you can't just quickly retreat into a tunnel and seal it up and take on the enemies easier unless you get quite lucky. So you're forced to fight on the ice for a bit, and there's usually 3 grabbers to contend with out of the gate too. One of my attempts had 4 stingtails at the very beginning when I got out of the pod. Fun enemy (sarcasm). 

There are also bulk detonators in this spawn pool, which means the cheese strat of sealing up my ass for the black box failed about 20% of the time because the det spawn location is of course, in spawn (which digs open a wide tunnel and forces you to reset because engineer does no good single target damage outside executioner LOK-1). The nitra positions in the main cave are quite gross and a few of them are apparently RNG dependent and shift around a fair bit each time you reset. Some are fixed, like the silly one I speedrun strat hacked my way through a wall to find in this video, and this particular vein required something like 15 platforms to reach if attempted from below.

I find it quite difficult to skip eggs with this spawnpool in this biome. Shockers and stingtails both make it exceedingly dangerous to try and conserve nitra and just run to the drop pod after a cheeky skip, and glacial with all its toxicity means you're more than likely to just faceplant if you attempt to do so (been there, done that).

Stage 2 is the mother of all mothers. A grandmother of a map. Not like, the cookie delivering kind. But the "leading you out into the woods to eat you via a trail of breadcrumbs" kinda nightmare shit. The strat here is simply to run big loops. My hold position up on the hill outside the initial drop was the best place I could find as it has high ground to jump over enemies, and quick dash escape access to make serious space when needed. Other locations on this map pretty much all end in death because of unfortunate snow drift spawn locations and poor visibility. This was the best angle I could find, and you'll see me pop iron will so easily when I'm not in the coward spot on the hill. All my aquarq targets were well planned in advance due to reruns of the map, but I didn't quite get the morkite veins planned because I usually died before I could think about it. This was by far the deadliest stage, and is just real bad.

Stage 3 I went super slooooow not because stage 3 was difficult, but because it's remnant fears of having to do stage 2 again. I failed stage 3 once before (see previous upload) and didn't want a repeat of that, so I played like a coward. I did speedrun bury strats without the speed lol.

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Loadout:
22121 MPA
11122 Inferno
Plasma Burster

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

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Highlights:

0:00 Build
0:45 Stage 1
20:24 Stage 2
51:31 Stage 3
1:29:33 Final stats page