DRG EDD: "Exposed Outpost" (true solo scout)
Channel: ojb
Date: 2023-09-01

No bosco, one iron will revive, completely blind. Featuring min clips m1k + double barrel boomstick + IFGs in Azure Weald.

I was about to compliment this dive as one of the most fun ones in a very long time... and then I got to stage 3 LOL. Seriously, stage 1 and 2 were pretty excellent. I really loved stage 2 so coming out of that high put me in great spirits! Then I saw the stage 3 modifiers and layout and realized "oh, I'm going to be stuck here for a while".

Honestly, and I say this with your best interest in mind, just stop watching after stage 2. Pretend the dive was weirdly only 2 stages for a change, and enjoy your life elsewhere. I'm uploading the full thing for completion sake but this is not a scout friendly dive. And this is definitely not a bosco-less friendly dive either. Stage 3 was tedium and wholeheartedly uninteresting. This is coming from the world's leading supporter of janky refinery layouts with toxic pipeline puzzles. The unfortunate modifiers killed all the fun, and this was perhaps my least favorite deep dive stage of any dive uploaded to this channel. I can't imagine how awful it would have been had I gone in blind 6x2 lol.

I've come to terms with the fact that swarmaggedon is my least favorite modifier in the entire game. It used to be elite threat which I still find rather lame, but definitely after the engineer EDD recently followed by this now too, I'm really just over swarmers lol. I've long since graduated past the point of swarmers being dangerous unless I purposely play stupid, and have been well on my way towards disliking them as nothing more than constant busy work. Mactera plague is fun and challenging; swarmaggedon is pure tedium. Exploder infestation is at least kinda fun and less tedious because they blow themselves up with little effort, but swarmers don't really do anything but waste your time. And that bums me out a bit.

On top of that, volatile guts is a modifier I also don't enjoy. It's not quite a hidden red like low gravity is, but it does tend to take away some of the fun I have with the game. I enjoy shooting bugs in large numbers, and volatile guts basically lowers the bug count by 70%.

Enough whinging, me. Let's talk the dive before I run out of space:

Stage 1 my original plan was to walk the dread around a bit and explore the map with paused waves/swarms. In case you didn't know, having a dreadnaught alive prevents you from getting ambient waves or swarms - this can be used to cheese mining missions pretty heavily, and you'll see me pop dreads perhaps earlier than I'm ready for just to try and take advantage of that fact. It works great with every dread type but the twins, so once they came out I sorta abandoned that idea and just decided to kill them right away. I wanted to kill one of them with my resupply (that's why I put it in a pretty terrible spot) but I missed. I spent my iron will intentionally to dish out the last bit of damage onto the arbalest. There was a chance I didn't end up dying, but I knew it was slight and I was prepared to use iron will: HP and IW are resources to spend after all. Got arby shotgunned and regulars will know that's pretty much the only dread attack that kills me these days. An unlucky nemesis spawn delayed the finish a fair bit, but I didn't want to waste ammo or time killing it since they're ultimately pretty boring and far too tanky against this loadout.

Stage 2 was a blast. Great modifiers - interesting layout. Some of the ledges were a bit high for my grapple hook here and there, but overall definitely my favorite of the dive and I think I played pretty well. The nemesis encounter of stage 1 put me behind on nitra so I ended up feeling the need to linger and grab more on extract.

Stage 3... well. You know. Shit was ass. I popped dread yet again hoping for one of the easy ones to walk around with but of course it was the twins. I don't know how much better my pipes could have been without giving up on jankypipes and slow drilling directly to things. Constant slowdowns and tedium caused this singular stage to be longer than 2 of my previous EDDs combined! Not a fan, sorry. Skip over it: I won't blame you - in fact, I beg you.

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Loadout:
23112 Minimal Clips
12233 Double Barrel
IFG

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


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Highlights:

0:00 Build
0:51 Stage 1
10:48 Stage 2
25:02 Stage 3 (don't bother watching, stop pls)
1:12:01 Final stats page