DRG 6x2ι EDD: "Broken Wilderness" (true solo scout)
Channel: ojb
Date: 2023-09-08

No deaths, no bosco. Featuring min clips m1k + double barrel boomstick + pheromone grenades in Salt Pits.

Been a whole month since my last iota dive and I was in the mood to spice it up a bit. Tough dive for scout (even with pheromones), and that stage 2 in particular is quite brutal. 

This was my third attempt with both prior runs dying in stage 2 (first blind playthrough I went too aggro in the clear phase and faceplanted with poor play, while the second attempt had an insanely difficult refuel that lost at ~80%). 

Stage 1 went far smoother than previous runs. I guess part of that is me knowing the layout and where all the leeches were, but I got much luckier with spawns than prior attempts. Both of the other runs lost my insurance plates before the final heartstone fight, but this one managed to hold on to one. Some very useful escort tech you'll see me utilize is letting the drill at the front of dottie kill bugs. It only works while the drill is spinning (i.e. while moving or while heartstoning), but it instakills bugs that path over it (even bulks). In solo especially, you can abuse your positioning to take advantage of this fact and repairing from the drill side of dottie can very easily let you be in a spot where bugs just consistently kill themselves on the drill in their attempts to path over. 

The leech red modifier is perhaps the easiest red in the game, and should NOT result in you changing up your playstyles whatsoever. The reason is that you should ALWAYS look up whenever entering a new room - and be mindful of escort breach timings so that you can never get caught off guard. A simple scout flare (or bosco's light ability) completely hard counters them. What I'm saying is, play every single map like it has the red leech modifier and you'll never need to equip heightened senses.

Stage 2 was the doozy this week: regen enemies doesn't tend to be an issue on any other map type besides salvage - and that's due to the existence of lots of stationary enemies you'll need to handle. Whales in particular are nightmare fuel already - giving them regen really forces you to focus fire more than usual. The one shining boon of this stage was the surprising lack of spitballers; usually 3-mule salvages are far worse with their firing squads, but this felt reasonably unguarded beyond the whales. 

My strategy going into this stage was to slow down and use the tight chokes to clear encounters before even thinking about breaching. Focusing regen whales before managing initial encounter bugs is surprisingly deadly. You still want to clear them ASAP, but if you attempt too early you're going to be bullied off without finishing them (and basically all that effort is wasted to regen). The safer strat is to try and draw aggro on initial encounters without hard committing into the room and to fight at the entrance for a bit. This involves taking pot shots at roaming mactera squads or groups of enemies - usually if you hit a single bug in the pack it'll draw all its friends over to your kill zone. Once the encounters are reasonably thinned out you have more time to hyperfocus whales without interruption. It's worth saying this strat is really only for regen enemies.

I've said in the past that I consider salt pits to be the easiest biome in the entire game, and I still stand by that statement. I would like to add a minor addendum to that however, in that salt pits salvages usually have quite atrocious uplink/refuel hold locations. Typically what ends up generating is something like this map: where you're basically in a pit that lends itself very nicely to getting pinballed by baby rollers while your actual bubble locations want some driller terrain modification to expand the tight positioning and limited visibility. I find salt pits to be among the hardest salvage maps additionally due to rollers interrupting mid bubble resups.

I've run out of description space, so I'll just briefly say stage 3 was a victory lap and pretty straightforward if you move at a brisk pace. One of the easiest stages in a good long while (especially compared to last week's stage 3). A vanilla squad of 4 should just plow.

---

Loadout:
23112 Minimal Clips
12233 Double Barrel
Pheromone Grenades

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


---

Highlights:

0:00 Build
0:57 Stage 1
21:43 Stage 2
50:40 Stage 3
1:04:16 Final stats page

---

P.S.
You may notice I have a quick restart mod that also lets you restart deep dive stages, but I've made the decision to only restart dives from the very beginning. Part of me likes the groundhog day aspect of learning a map more through repeated attempts, and part of me feels not completing dives in one shot is against the spirit of the challenge. I'll allow myself the flexibility to break that rule in the future if something feels like it really calls for it, but for now I plan to just use that mod for its other quality of life features.