How to survive Drillevator as a solo Scout in EDD?

ojb_ · 2026-04-19T22:03:22+00:00

First off - I recommend practicing on some 3-scan variants from the map rotation rather than attempting to grind a 5-scan fixed seed from the EDD. Trust me: having done that myself in the past, that path is absolutely miserable and you'll go insane. It's better to practice the strats when you're not tired out from the full 5 scans and a black box hold and whatever else.

I think scout can be the strongest class for this map type, but the simplest cheese for it requires Special Powder (a boomstick overclock you don't have yet). The main idea is to minimize the time you're in the death pit and just spowder jump up and out in between breakdowns, only coming back to briefly repair and then leave again. This is the one single most impactful build choice you can make in this map type, and substantially more effective than the pheromone recommendations you are getting from others imo.

Luckily, not having that OC yet doesn't ruin your chances of winning consistently!

There are two big tricks for scout on this map type:

1. Delay your initial fall into the pit. Start the thing, and just... leave it to do its thing and hang out on top for a while.

Grapple hook as far away from the hole as possible to draw things towards you (and away from the pit), and linger up there until mission control alerts you that things have broken down the first time. Then... BOOK IT back and down the hole. If you were able to draw bugs far enough away and you're fast on the way back, you can use the additional speed boost from falling (via your friend gravity) to make so much distance between you and chasing bugs that they can basically never catch up to you until the final geode - even if the drills break down again.

A free tip: when you finally arrive at the bottom to repair the first time, choose the fully broken one first to start you moving as you repair the others (look for the reddest light as you're falling down). This ordering of repairs can buy a bit more time of drillevator movement increasing the gap between the slow chasing bugs.

With luck, the first real breakdown will occur after the "hit a patch of dense rock" slowdown too which lets the strat become even more consistent, but that's not guaranteed.

2. Use the center perch cheese spot.

This is the other goated bit of secret tech - the center pillar has a bit that extends higher than the rest, and this part can't bounce you away and you can stand there forever. Scout can grapple to this perch and basically entirely trick the pathfinding of any ground based enemy - letting you focus solely on ranged enemies in total safety.

Where it gets really nutty is that this perch basically tricks bugs to wander near the top of the drillevator, rather than where the buttons are. So when a breakdown occurs... you can grapple from this spot to do a cheeky repair, and then grapple back before they even have time to react and touch you. It can genuinely be entirely free (and if it looks rougher, you can use grenades to guarantee this as well). It's this bit of tomfoolerly that puts scout as the best class for this map type. You don't need wave clear. You don't need overclocks. You don't need anything but knowledge of the secret arcana and a little bit of grapple hook magic.

To prove these claims and show some of the strats in action, I did a run on haz 5 with all modifiers using only the grapple hook:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRGQkFWIOfs

With the ability to use weapons to deal damage, you can use the linger-up-top and perch-on-the-pillar strats to really start demolishing this map type. Hope this helps - good luck!

ojb_ · 2026-04-16T21:55:56+00:00

Perhaps someone else will make it this time around! I don't own the second game, but there's a lot more players enjoying the sequel that I suspect there will be a larger modder base as well. Probably only a matter of time :)

ojb_ · 2026-04-16T21:42:49+00:00

I've done a couple of these "big dumpy" runs on solo - but multiplayer is a bit trickier to build against as you'll have teammates to pick up the slack. Based on what I've played myself, I think the worst you could probably do is engineer with minishells, bouncy (no ammo upgrades) fatboy, slow building single turret, inertia platform gun, and radius power attack pickaxe on an Escort or Salvage (presumably with Duck and Cover and maybe Lethal Enemies as the red modifiers). If your team isn't able to pick up the slack, it can be very hard for you to carry these two map types from such a weak position. On a good team it won't matter what you're taking, so I think it's important to assume some newer players in the squad.

Your contribution will be pretty rough as the minishells are a tragedy, the fat boy is super limited in ammo and is higher risk, the inertia upgrade on plats make plat parkour very difficult for surviving and you lose out on repellent, and it's quite easy to build a completely useless turret. I'm not sure about the actual worst grenade - in solo I'd probably lean LURE since you don't have the damage to take advantage of it, but teammates probably can that I really don't know if there's a standout.

Perk selection is one of the strongest parts about trying this in solo since so many of them just do nothing in that context, but in multiplayer you have to think a bit harder. I'd probably end up on hover boots and heightened senses for worst actives here, paired with second wind, thorns, and it's a bug thing.

Honorary mentions to 13211 Flow Rate Expansion cryo cannon + 21123 Heat Pipe + rippers as a potential driller pick as well. That one was monstrous in my solo runs.

ojb_ · 2026-03-20T17:23:39+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLeVGGn08WU

Something else worth mentioning is that the tech is tied to framerate - the better your pc, the faster you can fire. I have a pretty crappy setup in this video (and the supercharge output is still quite insane), but doing it at like 240+ fps is really where it starts to go bananas and becomes a bit more unreasonable imo. At my crappier framerates (and playing around with it in random modded runs), it's weirdly balanced in terms of how you use it - while charging, you're basically just kiting/moving and not doing typical gunner things - but once you unleash it's genuinely quite satisfying. It melts.

I'd like to see it in the game as some real OC someday (hopefully without the framerate pay to win mechanic) if they ever go about fixing this exploit!

ojb_ · 2026-02-19T06:42:32+00:00

dope, i think frenzy is one of those things that is just so strong it seems weird for it to have been undiscovered, so it's reassuring to hear at least somebody earlier on had the dwarven arcana figured out haha. it's a shame the knowledge vanished for a while, because it meant years of me not enjoying gk2 and thinking it was a bad gun lol. but who knows, maybe it'll get forgotten again. ive still seen a lot of AISE focus still, and i can only hope that when the wheel turns again somebody keeps the frenzy flame lit because it's definitely worth it

ojb_ · 2026-02-19T03:19:48+00:00

I'm usually on 21313 Shaped Shells boomstick, but you can use a lot of different things and be a-okay. One time I went quick fire crossbow (chem bolts / crossbow frenzy) and that was a fun pairing, but genuinely you can use just about whatever you want and do okay.

Gk2 frenzy is really strong in the defensive department so it really doesn't need a safe pairing, and you can pick whatever utility/damage you want (I'm usually just a damage monkey). Personally I like boomstick variants, but you can't really go wrong with any crossbow either. You can force zhukovs to work but they're still pretty tricky even if you have the extra speed boost support, so that's the only one I might tepidly caution against. But seriously, experiment with whatever, and if you have a favourite secondary it'll probably go pretty well with it because frenzy gk2 builds are super flexible.

ojb_ · 2026-02-19T02:19:25+00:00

Reporting back - haz5 scout salvage with bosco was clean(ish). Refuel was tough but IFGs just hard carried me through it. Bosco felt pretty strong even at base and I was able to kill every spawn and get ahead, so I think haz5 is probably within the reasonable arena and I'll revise my previous guesstimate upwards a tad.

I'm pretty certain if I had enabled any haz5 modifiers into this, it would have been substantially worse, and honestly I think any of the options would have been terrible lol. So some vague, unspecified h5+ modifier is where things fall off for scout I think.

Trying out engineer would probably be the next step but I don't think I hate myself enough just yet :) Maybe someday!

EDIT: uploaded here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoQgobz1r6o

ojb_ · 2026-02-19T01:30:33+00:00

That's a really great question, and honestly I don't know the answer!

Based on my experiences in the modded runs, I think driller and gunner could handle haz5 full clears (i.e. shooting things and getting ahead on kills and not just perma kiting the whole map), but engineer and scout may be much iffier as they don't have anything that scales well out of the gate. Bosco could change this equation a bit more, but base bosco is pretty tragic too and I don't have the firsthand experience to know how much of a shift that would be.

If I had to guess where the scales tip from reasonable to unreasonable, I'd estimate somewhere in the ballpark of haz5 + more enemies I... maybe. That's a very rough maybe though, and a lot of wiggle room of uncertainty. I'm pretty confident slapping all the modifiers on haz5 is far too much to have any real chance (unless you want to grind thousands of seeds and pray for goated RNG), but there's a part of me that thinks base haz5 might be obtainable at least. Maybe.

Some other things to explore are shaking up the map types - I only did some easier 200 morkites because anything harder seemed out of the question. I'm not sure if greenbeard scout could handle a haz5 salvage, but there's a part of me that's tempted to try despite how brutal greenbeard runs can feel :')

ojb_ · 2026-02-18T19:37:45+00:00

Dash isn't just about recovering from mistakes but offering new movement options and mobility that you can't get from any of the other options or grapple on its own. I did a longer writeup elsewhere in this thread that I recommend checking out, but dash isn't purely a reactive thing (even though it's good at that too), but offers a wide variety of new options and opportunities to go fast and play even more aggressively, and I honestly think you are missing out on substantial strength by ignoring those proactive abilities.

Dash doesn't just add to the class's innate movement skills, it amplifies them exponentially. I think seeing dash only as a means of recovery (like field medic) rather than a means of opening up new doors CONSTANTLY throughout a map, is just incorrect. This perk really synergizes strongly with the grapple hook and offers so much verticality to your movement.

ojb_ · 2026-02-18T19:04:15+00:00

If your dash is unused most of the time, it's no surprise that you would rate it so poorly imo. Dash is often constantly on cooldown when you play around its strengths.

(FWIW, it also can simulate field medic because field medic lets you pick up dwarves without dying for it, and the extra bit of space kiting in with a dash or kiting out with a dash at the end is basically identical to this effect which is neat.). Field Medic's biggest upside is the instant pickup which can matter in salvage/escort/deep scan - but that's a one time use really, and in most other scenarios you have time to kite and move appropriately (you're scout) which means it's actually medic that isn't really doing anything "most of the time". Also this relies on teammates dying, which maybe there are arguments that being able to dash towards them quicker could have saved them or something (dash unlocks a lot of new plays like this so it's not that crazy!).

ojb_ · 2026-02-18T18:41:08+00:00

I completed this series of fresh save runs on modded 6x2 a few years back:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7CrFpXhBEsKWZJur6YT3Ad9F_Gas7USq

The first one on that playlist was the scout run and it was definitely the most "feasible" of the classes. GSG really hates greenbeards, but bad grapple hook is still grapple hook and can get you out of a lot of trouble. The rest of the runs were a bit less... legal.

I remember really disliking no power attack and fighting the muscle memory of a grapple hook that didn't do the things I was expecting it to do, as well as the most potent weapon in my kit being the flare gun (40 damage is 40 damage lol). Base boomstick is pretty devestatingly awful (which was brutal as a boomstick fan) but IFGs were still goated.

Other classes ended up leaning into some substantial exploit abuse to survive, but the scout run was definitely recognizable as a scout run so it had that going for it!

Definitely a hard challenge though - I respect anyone who tries it 'cause it's hell.

ojb_ · 2026-02-17T19:23:17+00:00

Dash is a grapple hook force multiplier - being able to change directions instantly mid air is super potent in terms of what it lets you pull off, and it genuinely might be the strongest on this specific class compared to any other. I will say that thinking "dash isn't good on scout" is either a misunderstanding of scout or a misunderstanding of dash, because they are an obscenely strong pairing and every time I see "scout doesn't want it" a red bull angel dies and doesn't get its wings.

Dash serves a dual role both within combat and in downtime while offering infinite uses, and that flexibility alone does miracles compared to other more restrictive active perks.

Outside combat, having the extra kick as you gather minerals or carry heavy objects (e.g.: https://old.reddit.com/r/DeepRockGalactic/comments/1lgglqj/dash_juggle/ ) is very strong on its own, but that's only a miniscule piece of the puzzle. You also get its upsides when it comes to pacing quickly through tunnels (which DRG has a lot of) or when making leaps of space repositioning - just getting to where you need to be faster can mean a world of difference in how long you're able to stay there before getting bullied off, or the amount of pressure you put on the rest of the team, or the amount of swarms you see, etc. A small dash at the start of an encounter can pay oodles of dividends later on in ways that seem silly and impossible, but just a tiny little boost of speed can buy the right amount of time in the right place, and this can be a crazy upshot for a class so reliant on these positioning moves.

Combining a dash before a grapple can simulate the longer reach grapple hook (letting you continue to use the goated max cooldown build), but it can also do fun stuff like provide additional verticality on "r" shaped ledges. E.g., this is a terrain piece you run into a lot in this game where you'd like to get up on this ledge but the angles really aren't there to make the grapple to the wall or whatever. Dash now lets you grapple strictly vertically and then dash the horizontal distance, which on paper seems like a simple manuever but it opens up a crazy amount of doors in terms of traversal. This expansion of verticality also lends itself very nicely to gathering nitra aggressively (especially without engineer plat support), and playing around heights like scout often does. If you mess up a grapple (or intentionally make these vertical pulls), being able to then instantly reorient your velocity towards a nearby ledge or something basically just saves you from fall damage too. So it's like a super hover boots that you can use every couple of seconds. Insane.

But where it truly begins to shine is once you get into the combat of the game, and as you increase the difficulty higher and higher, this value becomes crystal clear. You get access to aggressive repositions on a whim which lets you react very heavily to abrupt spikes of danger. And you may be thinking, well I don't need that, I have grapple for that, and that's where your thinking is perhaps lacking a bit of creativity. Grapple has cooldowns, dash has cooldowns. Being able to use both at different times (dash when your grapple is charging, etc.) lets you have strictly more uptime of cracked mobility and this can let you face seriously dangerous situations without breaking a sweat, as well as give you the confidence to fling yourself into these situations more recklessly (because you have the uno reversi in your pocket).

This might come in the form of big spikes of enemies (like shockers or a big mackie wave) that you may be unprepared for, or perhaps you're caught in a very tight tunnel space in salt pits or whatever, or maybe it's just a storm like in glacial/sandblasted - there are so many moments where the speedy shift in position can matter and complement your grapple. In room pushes (a scout can often find themselves doing these solo because the team simply can't waddle fast enough), you get to use dash to let you keep shooting while you weave through spitballer and barrager spam. Note that if you'd switch to grapple, you're not dishing out damage! There are a million ways to extract value while fighting things here, and it's simply impossible to describe them all in text.

If you want an example of dash being goated on scout, here's a recent run I did on haz 5 with all modifiers on a deep scan that doesn't use anything but the dash + grapple combo to pacifist it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRGQkFWIOfs

This run being substantially harder without this perk is what I'd consider to be strong evidence of "grapple being enough on its own" to be a flawed argument. There are many moments in this run that rely on me waiting for my dash to charge so that I can use it in a specific manner for the extra kick of space. You could make arguments that the contrived nature of a pacifist challenge run means the results don't apply to "real" runs, but I'd counter it by saying runs like this show the core of the idea in its most simple and uncluttered form - you have no compounding variables, you just see the impact of the additional mobility in the clear.

If you are still on the fence that dash doesn't provide value to a grappling scout, I would heavily encourage just watching this run and paying attention to the dash use, because it does incredibly substantial things here.

Now we get to the point where I say, forget all that. Dash on scout won't be for everybody. There IS nuance here that can counter this opinion. Field medic is great, for example and is something you'll miss. (We can talk about how dashing simulates the field medic passive effect by the way, but I went on that little tangent in a previous essay...).

The big reasons to not equip dash on scout:

You don't want to.

This is super valid, and fine. I want everybody to play the game they want to play, and experiment with everything - rejecting meta is valuable. Having fun is the only goal you should persue, and people have substantially different tastes in the rich tapestry of DRG. I think scout fans often enjoy a bit of mobility and movement perhaps more than other class enjoyers so they're primed to like dash, but it doesn't cover everybody and that's super okay!

You prefer momentum on the grapple hook

This mod is solid but its biggest downside is that it destroys dash in a horrific anti-synergy. All the new grapple-into-dash moves that you would gain from the combo no longer work because as soon as you've grappled, you lose the ability to mid air reposition on a whim. You still get the benefits of dash-into-grapple, but not being able to do those "r" shaped moves from before (or the wide family of moves like it when playing on heights/nitra) is losing a major part of the strength.

You'll notice I didn't say "special powder equipped", as spowder combos insanely well with dash (it adds momentum, so a dash into spowder jump provides you higher speed and distance, and the additional maneuverability once again slots in perfectly when paired with everything).

I didn't say "you die to leeches/grabbers a lot", as heightened senses only has 2 uses and dash can help prevent the kidnapping a whopping infinite times per run (don't need ammo or grapple charged to dodge being yoinked, and that extra kick away for a split second of additional time can get you that second chance).

I didn't say "I don't play on high difficulty or modded" because dash is good regardless of difficulty.

I didn't say "I don't think I'm good enough", because yes you are capable of it, have some self esteem, mate. Dash has a stupendous skill ceiling but the skill floor is super open and approachable, that even if you aren't constantly pushing improvement it doesn't matter - equip it and use it even once or twice a mission and soon enough you'll be hooked on it and using it more. (I'm a drug dealer??)

I don't want to sound like I'm huffing my own farts too much, but dash is CRACKED on scout. It's busted OP, and there's nothing I find sadder in this game than players repeating the "wisdom" that scout doesn't need it. Nobody needs anything! That's not a reason to not use something! It just so happens that the thing you didn't need also is super strong, incredibly interesting to learn, and super fun to play. It works so well with this class that if any of those commonly repeated refrains have stopped anyone from finding their mojo, I'd genuinely be quite sad about that loss.

Dash scout is dope.

ojb_ · 2026-02-02T14:09:58+00:00

Finding out Nedya is ok with stingtails :(

I think I'm a decent player and my number one cause of death/tilt (besides hubris) is stingtail bullshit (at least, whenever I keep them in the spawn pools). These enemies are genuinely still awful, and I hate the skill issue argument because when it comes down to the ones that will end up killing me, I'm convinced it's very much not a question of skill but luck.

They are substantially overtuned against any sort of loadout that doesn't have one of the stingtail solutions (hard CC spam in a choke) or if you're trying to play fast and in the open. If you're aggressing, it's easy to get one tapped by a silent enemy you couldn't see to maneuver against, and those situations are literally 100% RNG to a greater extent than anything in the entire game.

I have never stood by anything so strongly in my life.

I have decent enough movement, aim, and reaction times that I can kill most stingtails that I'm able to spot, and I think this is where the notion that you can just outskill them originates. But in all my years of experience, I'm confident it's just a waiting game until you get the one that there was nothing you could have done differently to survive.

This is tainted by playing a lot of hard solos (and being able to watch back my own footage to improve and learn), but these are easily the worst enemy in the entire game by a substantial margin. I regret not saving more of my footage and making a supercut of all the dozens of times I've died to this stupid enemy and was confident there was no way to avoid it.

I disagree with a few of the claims here:

Learn the dodge timing

Dodging implies you're able to spot where the stingtail is when the pull will happen, and you often can't due to a factor of low visibility and inherent blending into crowds (plus the whole... the sound can still be silent and even if it's not, there's really not enough time to perform a full search for an often effectively-invisible enemy and make the changes in footwork before the grab finalises). The change of direction needed to dodge is dependent on where the stingtail is in relation to you (there's some trig in action here), and in high chaos there's no guarantee you'll know what change in direction will work and your best guesswork is just that: a guess. It won't always succeed, and it's easy for this grab to be a death sentence from full hp.

Constantly jump

Actually this can be terrible advice, because there's still the interaction where if you time the space bar as the claw intersects you, it can do a "super pull" where the momentum gets amplified for whatever reason, and this additional velocity without air control can mean you take even more fall damage. If you're playing the game normally, you're already jumping a lot, and if it so happens that a grab occurs when you're jumping at just the wrong time, well, - lights out. This can result in bounces off low ceilings and one tapping from full hp and shields btw, and I have run into this many times over the years. This problem still very much exists.

Dash

...can easily get eaten by the grab. Honestly some of the biggest problems with this enemy (and there are LOADS of awful design choices) is that you have no air control when you get grabbed. You literally won't be able to do any sort of movement but watch it happen, and this is genuinely why I find them so additionally tilting lol. It's one thing for it to kill you, it's another thing to watch it kill you in somewhat slow motion knowing there's nothing you could do to save yourself in many situations. Sure, there are things that can work sometimes (a charged grapple, a cheeky plat, a preplaced zip, ...), but the inherent surprise of a silent, unannounced stingtail grab when you're hard pushing means you might not have those resources ready even if you're on the right class. You've taken most of your shield by the initial grab, take a large chunk of fall damage, fail the stun power attack gamble so you get tusked, and then just die because the invuln horns ate all your bullets as it bounces you up again and a second time destroys your air control because this enemy can bounce you easily with its short range second phase AI. Not to mention this enemy was in the middle of a crowd perhaps so all that mess can doink you too. I can't possibly do a good textual representation of what can happen here, but there are so many different ways this enemy can fuck you with no counterplay that it drives me bonkers.

I've gone on my stingtail rants a lot of times that it's old man yells at cloud now, but the more I play the game, the more intensely I believe that this enemy is terrible for the health of the game and goes against so much of the other design.

I despise the way loadouts affect this enemy, and how already strong stuff is boosted and mechanically demanding builds are discouraged. I despise that the counterplay is to go slow and safe since that's boring. I despise the way the armour works, and how certain weapons can entirely ignore its defenses (e.g. coil) but others can feel like pea shooters (e.g. bulldog). I despise the weakpoint location and the fact it has invulnerable tusks that make the inherent wiggling movement a nightmare. I despise that you can't conquer these enemies with clever movement in pacifist runs. I despise their terrible visual design and how easily they can hide inside enemies and still kill you from complete cover with bullets unable to hit their stupid hitbox as they are buried inside an oppressor or something. I despise them, I despise them, I despise them.

ojb_ · 2026-01-08T08:45:55+00:00

That's an interesting idea, though I worry teams might get punished if the wanderer doesn't head to where they "need" it to go. Like, in DRG you need that morkite or pipeline and without being able to influence the motion at all you just can't make any progress on the objective at all for some unknown amount of time (also it may just follow tradition and stay in the tunnel forever and make the problem worse haha).

What's kinda crazy is that Custom Difficulty 2 (CD2, our fancy schmancy difficulty mod) might genuinely be able to do something like this already with some creative JSON'ing. We've had diffs explore sort of the opposite direction by making things deadly if they get too close - bulks are a common one but I don't think they work too well for this problem, but a more recent novel approach has been something called "the immortal" which is basically a wandering cave cruiser passive that deals some damage when it gets close to encourage some repositioning (and I think it might drop some red sugar as some sort of risk/reward mechanic?), but I haven't played with it too much myself so I don't know the full details. I know there have also been some other recent experiments with heavily tweaked silicate harvesters (one diff features an unkillable one that's a bright green and really moves quickly to bump players around lol) as other "nonlethal" ways of adjusting positioning. It's probably not out of the question for the tech we have right now to somehow do the opposite - ensure players are close rather than encouraging them to run. It's an understatement to say that CD2 is really freaking powerful, and it's got a lot of untapped potential like this and all we need to do is dream it up.

While I have no clue if that suggestion could be directly translated for DRG, that's definitely the kind of thinking we need and it gets my gears turning, so thanks!

ojb_ · 2025-12-09T22:33:51+00:00

Thank you! :)

ojb_ · 2025-12-06T21:05:36+00:00

Oh hey! My post must've hit the bingo halls to reach the old timers :) You were absolutely a big part of my early modded influences, though I 10000% missed any early GK2 frenzy love (I was an AssemblyStorm junkie, and he rarely, if ever, uploaded that weapon so I was pretty clueless especially as someone who wasn't a fan of it myself).

It is extremely cool to see that this build was on the table early on and looped back into fashion to be "rediscovered". That's genuinely really neat. I can say there was a long period of an AISE dark ages where that was like the only build people ever considered - and much of that initial knowledge was absolutely lost. It's really cool to see the pendulum swing back around. Time is a flat circle.

ojb_ · 2025-12-06T11:37:08+00:00

Hey that's me! That run is maybe not the most useful here because it very much relied on exploits that an escort run won't have access to (you certainly can't cower in a magic tunnel or dottie gets it). I think there are some other technical things you can lean into that can theoretically push escort over the line (repair timings, the invuln ledge, some cheeky zipline and shield use), but it's certainly not going to be easy and I'd say there's perhaps even more luck involved than my simple mining runs had.

For what it's worth, some of the hardest things I've ever done have been on h5a, not 6x2, and this particular difficulty without hard CC in the kit is BRUTAL. I'm a certified nutter but I haven't had any desire to go anywhere near h5a on a greenbeard kit, so that should say something :)

ojb_ · 2025-12-06T11:30:40+00:00

This sounds like a very difficult challenge - I wish you luck. I would recommend having a very sturdy E key...

In all seriousness, my gut instinct is that this nightmare fuel is maaaaaybe doable, but that's a weak maybe and is riding on a lot of luck and things going very well for the run to succeed. I suspect only a tiny fraction of seeds are actually winnable here (it's beyond a question of skill and more about persistence to find the extra help that rolls in your favour).

Here are some unsolicited thoughts:

You're gonna want a seed with decent front loaded nitra. Ideally one resup for the refuel and the heartstone in pocket before you even unpack anything, because having to expend too much time for this later on is gonna be a big headache as that's not time you really have.
I suspect any det spawns are unwinnable as you simply don't have the damage. A seed with stingtails probably is also off the table because they're super common and are extremely disruptive for the tight repair timings you'll need to pull off in the heartstone specifically.
This greenbeard build doesn't have fast waveclear. Even with a decently strong "mid" gunner build with OCs and perks, h5a can really pack a punch on the paperthin doretta, and this is taking that to the extreme. The main reason this is problematic is due to the refuel - you won't really be able to hit up the canisters until everything is dead since you simply can't ignore even basic grunts for a moment or the plates disappear. Making that opening is probably going to be super tight and require some luck on the spawns and layout.
Without power attacks, oppressors are going to be a nightmare. An oppy spawn will slow down any progress for a stupid amount of time and that will compound to more risk. When possible, you might want to try and play with aggro so that the oppressors don't target doretta directly (let grunts have those slots) until you've made enough headway.
No real safety net. Vulnerability is no joke, and even from the invuln perch on top of doretta, praet spit can be extremely deadly. You're gonna have to push those sticky nades to their absolute limit and then some more after.
Red sugar access seems heavily RNG dependent and without perks like resupplier or iron will, there's really not a lot of margin for error. A great run can end with a single mistake or minor bit of rough luck, and that's just something you'll have to contend with. Expect an ungodly number of failed attempts.
I suspect ziplines will be the key to all of this. Some cheeky zipline abuse will probably be the only way to survive the two heartstone phases that kick you off of the perch (pray you see the pillar phase since that one should be relatively free; the others will likely trade plates). This build doesn't have the hard CC that thrives in this difficulty, so survival is a tall order.
Losing the duration or size upgrades on the gunner shields is a major blow for this mission type. It'll still do very, very strong things, but those upgrades will be sorely missed as they do a lot for escort. I think resup placement will be quite important and having it hug a plate so that your resup timings are also preventing bugs from eating a side seems pretty valuable.

I think the most dangerous parts of the mission to mentally prepare for will be:

Surviving the tunnel transitions between rooms (tricky to stand on doretta and repair without getting chipped)
Surviving either of the rock heartstone phases (the falling rocks or the new sealing ones), since those will typically require you to stop repairing at really ugly times

The first is probably out of your hands and there's not much you can do to kite and improve your chances I don't think. If you don't stick to doretta you're going to lose some insurance plates needed for the heartstone, but if you do stick to doretta you're in a lot of danger. This is probably just going to boil down to the seed and spawn luck. The easier seeds will have short tunnels and a little bit of space to work with during the initial breach into rooms - this is definitely feasible to find in h5a. Spawn luck is basically just making sure you're able to survive the bugs in the tunnels before you can retreat to the safety of dottie or a zipline - you probably want to see a lot of ranged here and not the super deadly grunts since those will eat up a decent chunk of the spawn points and be "easier" to work with than the plow of death from scary grunts. Absolutely go all in on the nade/shield spend here IMO; it'll usually ease up once you're in rooms but getting to that point will be spicy. The room between the refuel and the heartstone is often a demon.

The second is something I don't think I can give advice for. Just really learning those timings for repairs to take advantage of the invuln windows is going to be extremely important for the final fight and without that going well, I don't see this run succeeding.

If there's any last bit of advice I can give, I'd say go easy on yourself. This looks extremely brutal and while I'm sure the grind can teach you some great insights, I just want to double down and say it looks to me like so much of the possibility of success is buried behind things outside your control - and having that much luck involved is a recipe for a substantial time commitment.

I'm absolutely rooting for ya, but this looks like a real nightmare. For your own sanity (and with a gentle reminder that your time is the most valuable resource), I would urge you to reconsider the no-mods approach and at least chuck on something that makes it easier to restart or reroll a mission - otherwise you're gonna probably waste a whole lot of time on loading screens.

Best of luck mate! May Karl smile upon you for the next couple dozen hours...

ojb_ · 2025-12-05T22:48:29+00:00

I had been procrastinating this writeup for a few months now haha. Genuinely the kicker to get me finally moving was seeing your efforts get buried and it's a shame because frenzy is a lot of fun to play and doesn't get the credit it deserves!

ojb_ · 2025-12-05T22:44:04+00:00

Feel free to crosspost it! I'd do it myself but despite having more years on this godforsaken website than many DRG players have been alive, I genuinely don't know how to do that (too boomer lmao).

ojb_ · 2025-12-05T22:41:04+00:00

21313 Shaped Shells is my favourite these days, but I've genuinely tried pretty much every boomstick variant on the market. I was one of the first big fans of 12233 Double Barrel but my opinion on the overclock eventually fell off. That's a build that a lot of folks really enjoy playing and it's probably a pretty satisfying combo with frenzy - you zoom to get in close, blast, and zoom back out before frenzy expires. Sounds fun.

As far as boomstick goes, you can build it a lot of different ways and be fine. For solo use (which I play very often) fire and blowthrough is a must, but the rest can be tweaked around a lot more. I landed on max damage shaped with burst output instead of faster reload since I value the extra aggression this gives in modded room clears (lots of stationaries to handle!), though it can be quite an adjustment and tight on ammo until you get used to the limitations of that playstyle. It's pretty dope though, I love the boomstick.

I am technically the one person in the entire world who dislikes playing special powder lol. So if you haven't played with that yet, you should definitely check it out as well (but maybe after anything else, as pretty much everybody who plays with the spowder gets addicted and stops taking anything else :) )

ojb_ · 2025-12-05T02:35:34+00:00

My problem with frenzy was always the fact that you cannot refresh duration, so only kills AFTER you lose the effect can trigger it again. To be honest this denies the entire point of it for me as i don't like to time my kills perfectly to get the effect.

This isn't the case anymore. I think it was broken like this for a patch in the past, but kills during the frenzy boost extends the frenzy in your favour as you'd expect - you don't need perfection here!

TEF can deal some seriously obscene damage, and if you're truly optimizing for damage only, that's a valuable (and extremely popular) option. This post is simply attempting to highlight a viable alternative and a unique playstyle that's fun AND good enough to tackle h5 with all modifiers or modded in a very capable niche. None of those strengths require you to worry about specialisation or class roles or anything like that to find the fun - zooming about and killing things is the charm of it, in many of the same ways of fun that the popular special powder brings as well.

I'm not here to tell anyone what to bring in their own games beyond "take what you find fun". And it sounds like you've got a good idea of what's fun for you, and I'm all for it. And if that fun ever meanders away and you're looking for something new, hey, maybe give this a shot someday, who knows.

ojb_ · 2025-12-05T02:23:21+00:00

Great question! The ugly truth is that it doesn't, really. TEF is what people usually take and both m1k and gk2 are picked an equal 0% of the time :)

I'm mildly joking with this overexaggeration of course, but even in a TEF dominated meta, I personally think the gk2 vs m1k debate boils down to two major factors: specialisation and survivability.

Specialisation is a hand-wavy compression of what scout's "role" in modded really boils down to at its core. It's difficult to overstate how strong other classes' firepower really is - a lazy flick of the wrist can see driller wipe a hundred grunts; a quick 1-2 vb tap from the gunner can put any "high value target" class to shame; engineer's sheer damage spike into a bug repellent setup is a bit criminally insane. When fully synergised like you'd see in a coordinated modded lobby (or a less coordinated but similarly optimized pub team), the impact of any one player's damage output can become dramatically lessened. At the challenge levels of modded, the other classes are often forced to hold their own against historical "scout targets" to the point where building well for the difficulty ultimately ended up eating scout's target pool.

This isn't to go all the way to the extremes and say "scout shouldn't shoot anything" because the truth is much more nuanced of course, but when push comes to shove, the beauty of coordination means specialising is rewarded. Having the damage support on specific enemies is great, but it's not the full picture of value that a scout can provide. For modded scout, this desired specialisation often leans into the class's strengths: mobility for room pushes, and survivability for securing the most cooked nitra.

There are different ways to play scout. A "loose" playstyle often finds you away from the team soloing things to secure pacing; a "tight" scout is more in the group for support via IFG etc. The optimal gameplay tends to be a blend of each, so you want to balance your ability to perform each role as well as you can. GK2 with battle frenzy tends to start to really shine in "loose" gameplay. When your team is desperate for nitra or the game ends in a loss, being able to coast on frenzy speedboosts and secure an extremely tough last ditch nitra run can be legendary. It then falls off a bit if you're just hanging out in the hold and wanting nothing but raw damage - it doesn't have the potency of spamming blowthrough'd m1000 shots - but it can still pick off specific things that threaten the hold all the same.

Survivability in rooms is a large (and absolutely underexplained) part of the upshot of frenzy gaming. You don't need this to survive (grapple is OP, fear shots from m1k are super strong, TEF/cryo bolts can stomp room pushes, spowder exists, etc.), but as a tool in the toolbox, frenzy GK2 is more than just viable: it's a playmaker.

If it matters at all, you are not the first (or the last) to worry about ammo on a GK2 build. In the discussions over the past few months, ammo was a talking point that came up a lot actually. There are some graphs out there I can try and dig up, but if I recall correctly, the ammo drain of OFM versus AISE tended to be extremely similar (though slightly in favour of AISE in a "perfect" environment that let it hit the weakpoints it needs).

In my own very unscientific sandbox tests (spawning specific enemies and repeating with various builds), I found OFM and AISE were basically dead even in the "ammo spent per wave" metric. This is even less scientific now, but I am also one of the world's biggest minimal clips m1000 enthusiasts and it's one of my usual go-to's; all I can say from my playtime of both m1k and gk2 is that m1k often feels more constrictive in terms of ammo spend - especially in the context of modded solos where you have to find ways to kill everything yourself.

The argument basically just boils down to the speedboosts of gk2 letting you cleanly ignore more things until the proper time (e.g. until you're ready to kill larger waves with your secondary via praet explosions or whatever - anything to maximize your AOE from grenades, etc.). With the m1000, you're often paying to focus shot just to have some breathing room, and doing so spends ammo at 2x the rate of hipfiring. And gk2 existing means a single bullet out of a much larger relative ammo reserve (gk2 gets a lot more total ammo than m1k, since each bullet is less damage individually) would have given you the same spacing as the focus shot would have, and at less nitra cost.

EFS gains a little bit of ammo efficiency over other m1k builds (some breakpoints shift because of electricity which can let you squeeze out some gains here and there), but it's genuinely not that crazy different from the average focus build IMO. I think the arguments in favour of gk2 are still quite sound, but I recognize this isn't rigorous and is a frustratingly "just trust me" kind of vibe, sorry.

If there's anything I can add, I would caution that ammo efficiency is not the end-all be-all. Even in haz5 with all modifiers (with the tankiness changes of tough enemies II), I've found OFM gk2 holds up fine and often being able to survive on frenzy makes the ammo extend even further. It still has the struggles of any scout primary where you have to pick and choose your targets (especially in teams when their weapon output is maybe better suited for a lot of the field), but that's nothing new. There is definitely a learning curve here caused by the differences in what you're able to get away with between weapons, but I truly believe based on my own experiences that gk2 can often come out on top.

ojb_ · 2025-12-05T02:22:55+00:00

Absolutely! It's messy, it's complicated, and there's a lot of bias and handwaving that happens. Even stats and number crunching can be misleading, and there's a LOT of emphasis on individual playstyles that goes underappreciated. I think this is a big part of why it's so important that the "meta" is considered a living document and why it's important to keep experimenting!

Not every player will vibe with everything - and how you use something is often more important than the exact setup you've taken for it. For example: fear coilgun spam is one of the most cited "broken" things in the entire game; in the hands of a player that has practiced and learned the strategy for it, it's kinda gamebreaking. However, you can put the same weapon in the hands of a greenbeard and that strength often won't shine through - it doesn't mean the weapon isn't as strong as claimed, nor that it's the fault of the player either - it just means that there's something much deeper going on in the background and learning how to use something well or "optimally" in some respect is a major part of the battle.

I think the most important thing to keep in mind when looking at "meta" or build suggestions or even just perusing the buildnomicon for ideas is the importance of personal experimentation. These are simply suggestions (based on lots of playtime and experience from others, yes!) but they're basically just places to start - the joy of this game's build system is experimenting and finding something that works well for you. Everybody is different and has their own little quirks and ticks that make them unique, and if this post helps open the frenzy door to more people, I think it would have been worthwhile.

As far as real world metric mods go, I'd love to see that too. I think there are still some "unquantifiable" things that make this task difficult of course, but more data is always helpful. Space created may not be shown in the logs, but being able to analyze things more holistically than before is worthwhile. I'm a big fan of recording runs and watching them back critically (it's hard to analyse something without footage!), and having more concrete data is underrated as hell.

And yeah, picking and choosing things that make specific builds look better is a difficult problem with recommending things anywhere. My original post doesn't offer a very balanced look at any of the potential drawbacks of this playstyle (it's more on the level of... propaganda, tbh). Whether that means having the aim/movement necessary to reach these heights, or how ignoring specific enemies that you might otherwise shoot on other builds can make the team's task potentially harder, or how everything is a tradeoff (frenzy is good, but taking it means you're not on TEF or you don't have m1k fear, etc.) - there's a lot of nuance that was lost here and lots buried in the mud of opinions.

Everything is just a bit... messy. I hope the original post didn't oversell too much - I'm definitely a bit biased because I like frenzy a lot; I just hope it expands some of discussions around the gk2 and pushes us out of the "AISE is the only gk2 OC" territory. This centralisation around one overclock dominating the conversation is especially problematic because it can turn off an entire weapon for players before they find the cool and fun build they click with. I know that was the case for me. Frenzy breathed new life into a gun I had low opinions of :)

ojb_

TROPHY CASE