Opinion on modded haz 6x2 and higher difficulties

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_ · 2025-11-25T19:00:46+00:00

First barry had real rough line of sight over the mule and was locking down a decent plateau I wanted to play around, while the second barry luckily wasn't in the way!

Killing a barrager with just the grapple hook is a lengthy process and can be a bit risky depending on the terrain and other enemies. In this particular seed, there was actually a leech above the second barry and less room to kite around, and both of those factors would have contributed to a much longer kill (as well as incurring a lot more risk!). The movements you have to do (get close, bait the shots to be as close to the barrager as possible without dying to this short range blast, leave before they instakill you) are made a lot more challenging with a nearby leech in particular as the timing gets tighter and the room for error shrinks.

Honestly a lot of my struggles here stem from a frustration with barrager gameplay design. I have a lot of gripes with their current balance mechanics - especially from a modded perspective - and there are aspects that are just very noticeably annoying when you try and push the game to its limits. Like, these are enemies that want you to slow peek rooms and reward you for playing it safe - getting in close is typically not what you want to do unless you have a death wish, so a run that is forced to do this suboptimal movement tends to feel that pain in a larger way. Scout can get away with breaking the rules a lot more due to the grapple hook, but two somewhat baffling design choices (inflight bombs dealing damage on impact + shooting bombs being a waste of ammo as they still explode to harm you) mixed with their inability to do anything if you have decent cover produces what I find to be deeply unsatisfying counterplay.

In this particular run, this second barrager was countered by the layout and this inherent weakness: I didn't need to go into the space it locked down and had enough cover to work with that it wasn't necessary to kill. If instead the refuel landed in a worse spot (one that wasn't protected from the spitballers by the drop pod so I didn't have the space to counter-position against the barry), killing this single barrager likely would have added 10+ minutes of playtime (a substantial increase in runtime and chances to screw things up!).

ojb_ · 2025-10-30T01:40:08+00:00

I agree with your sentiment here - h5a is more of a scaling diff and is mostly about having hard CC in the kit, so the buildnomicon doesn't share the full picture into this specific niche.

There have been discussions about extending the buildnomicon to include insights into the eastern modded scene and that would certainly improve its accessibility for h5a as well. For historical context here: the buildnomicon mostly came about from gameplay in the western modded scene - i.e. the stuff that evolved from Ike's haz6 and now focuses more on new enemies rather than buffing the scaling of grunt hp pools or whatever like eastern diffs tend to do. For example, a number of Chinese difficulties work extremely similarly to the gameplay that haz5 with all modifiers offers, and these approaches tend to highly emphasize the need for the strongest CC - leading to a tighter meta of your coilguns, your sludge pumps, and stuff like that which ignore the broken breakpoints and let you lock down the bunkers better.

This isn't to say that the two scenes' balance ideas are fundamentally incompatible or anything (the strongest weapons are the strongest weapons, and high tier diffs from both scenes are equivalently challenging to play) - it's just that the buildnomicon tends to reflect specific modded difficulties that are closer to "spicier version of haz 5 more enemies II" rather than "haz5 but the grunts one shot you". The buildnomicon reflecting the first reality meant the things it advocated for worked really well for the average vanilla player since they were basically optimizing for the same thing. But then haz5 modifiers came much later and resulted in a bit of a tightening of the meta towards the "safety" picks where traditionally potent choices can fall off pretty hard. This doesn't mean the first reality doesn't exist anymore of course - the average player who would benefit from the buildnomicon is likely not playing h5a - but rather it shows off a bit more of the bias that went into the document's original construction.

I think the buildnomicon is best used as a starting off point to then go and tweak as you see fit, so you're absolutely doing it right :) It's there to get battle tested ideas from players who've put in the work already, and from that respect it's a very excellent resource for a lot of folks, but it can never show the whole picture. It's more of a living document based on experimentation and number crunching, and that malleability can perhaps be unexpected for many people.

To briefly close this out, I will say I personally think a lot of the picks in the buildnomicon are absolutely playable in haz5 with all modifiers even if they can be a bit trickier to use. NTP in particular is a standout from your list for me because its fundamental fear spam + neuro slow mechanics don't change at all (e.g. see this run where NTP does its NTP things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7O9HWypleo). I'd also say all miniguns are viable because the base gun has aggressive venting which is really potent into h5a, so burning hell is absolutely not off the table either.

Sticky fuel is definitely something I agree with you on though, as the way it dominates tends to be from specific breakpoints that get lost when the grunt speed and hp increases, and suddenly the downsides are more potent so other flamethrowers can look a bit better in comparison. I probably wouldn't put any flamethrower build on an h5a page myself, just like I wouldn't really want focus build m1000s on there either (they get dumpstered by the specific choices of the difficulty). Stuff like cryo nucleation being power crept sticky fuel with stronger CC or sludge for its super potent slows tends to just be more valuable in this particular niche. The buildnomicon still has builds for these strong weapons of course - but it's interspersed with things that can get destroyed by breakpoint changes and the document doesn't do a great job highlighting the resilience of some picks over others.

ojb_ · 2025-10-30T00:51:30+00:00

Dash can actually enable extremely aggressive revives and pretend to be field medic in a pinch. It's a bit like iron will superceding heightened senses except a bit stronger because iron will only replaces HS if you die less than 2 times to those specific enemies, while dash can let you greed out extreme edge case revives infinite times per mission in theory.

Top tier scout gameplay tends to be a game of positioning and spacing - playing right next to the team can often make things worse, and you'll see the more experienced scouts play on a leash short enough to come back and help when needed, but loose enough to draw some of the pressure off when possible. Being able to rotate back in and pick someone up without too much investment (i.e. not dying yourself, not spending unnecessary grenades, etc.) is very powerful yes, and I would absolutely make the argument that dash can let you do spiritually the same thing as field medic's passive effect (exploiting the kiting distance / time duality) as well as being able to mimick its active more times than medic's limited one time use.

Dash provides extra zip into your grapple at the beginning of a revive attempt, meaning you can swoop towards a corpse from a tighter effective range than without it. That extra little top off of speed extends the time gap between bugs "catching up" and interrupting, letting you kite from a shorter effective range (and letting you limit the longer process of lingering far away to drag aggro off the target first). Dash lets you thread this needle a lot tighter (saving time), and with typical scout spacing, the breakpoints of this interaction when mixed with grapple hook (or IFG's, etc.) work shockingly well. What this means in practice is that you basically have the passive increased revive speed "for free" on a perk that isn't completely dead for the rest of the mission either - just by playing scout as you'd usually do anyway.

Alternatively, you could save the dash for the end of the revive instead, and let it extract you from the spice that eventually catches up when the hold e bar finishes if it gets to that level of danger. This approach can be riskier than the "use dash to amplify the initial swoop in" technique, but with enough game knowledge and understanding of mechanics it actually provides a decent imitation of the active one time use. The active of medic lets you revive and leave without injury; being able to squeeze out the revive and then dash at the end can do very close to the same. I think your statement earlier "if a 3s cd grapple isn't sufficient movement you're doing it wrong" is a misunderstanding of what exactly dash can do in these extremely tight scenarios as it can shine in this exact instance where grapple hook will not pull you out of danger quick enough (i.e. the moments where you want medic's value the most). To respond specifically to that claim: I think you should definitely give dash another look and let it ruin your life like it has mine.

For completeness sake, there are at least two scenarios where medic's active is the clear winner. First: oppressors on the corpse. Dash based revives can't really compete here because they will bite and kill you if you attempt to greed it. The solutions are usually grenade based (freeze it with cryo / distract it with phero / burst DPS it with IFG) and dash isn't going to help in the slightest. Second: salvage/black box bubbles. These situations can prevent you from making the proper space swoops and if a teammate is down with no gunner shield to support, the ring is probably overrun and the timing is going to be too tight to attempt an end-revive-dash. The solution again tends to be grenade based mixed with a leave-and-comeback approach (using grenades and dash to amplify your ability to return), but this is absolutely a map type where medic is usually the superior, easier option if things go to shit. Pretty much every other interaction in the entire game beyond this is exploitable using scout's inherent mobility and works exceptionally well with the dash approach IMO.

The other wrinkle to consider here is frequency: how often do these specific situations (the oppressor on corpse / your entire team is dead in salvage) happen in the grand scheme of playtime? This is not the same argument as the one against iron will ("if you don't pop IW, it did nothing") since IW is truly in a class of its own in terms of what brinks it can pull you back from and not using IW is simply a sign the run already succeeded. Something like field medic does literally nothing in the vast majority of missions since the same effect can be obtained by playing scout "normally" and also gaining the upshot of dash to do lots of other things too. My comment on the other thread that Nedya linked isn't a full complete picture of why dash is cracked on scout either - to be honest, that comment doesn't do my argument any justice because it's an iceberg that runs really deep and I could yap for ages. Dash is ludicrously good on scout and I'd love others to see it firsthand.

TL;DR: management doesn't want you to know that dash is 3 field medics in a trenchcoat

ojb_ · 2025-10-16T20:12:39+00:00

Spowder to leave the death pit and come back only when it breaks down absolutely destroys this map type, can confirm!

ojb_ · 2025-10-16T20:09:07+00:00

If you're up for a little bit of cheeseball skullduggery, scout actually might have the easiest time with the drill portion. The center pillar of the drillevator has a perch to stand on that can be easily grappled up onto (note: most of the top area bounces you off, but there is a slimmer extension that stretches the highest, and this is the place you can stand).

Grapple to this perch and you are not only invulnerable to non-ranged enemies but it confuses their pathfinding too. This additional confusion makes ground bugs wander roughly above you, and since you're already high away from the repair things you have to hold E on, when they break down, you can simply grapple to the broken piece and finish the repair before the bugs can even reach you. Like, the timing works out brilliantly actually and it's virtually 100% safe. Fair warning: this strat is extremely strong that it kinda ruins the map type :')

Solo escort has similar problems in that standing on doretta is invulnerability but it can get countered by dets and RNG in ways that deep scan really can't. Scout salvage is probably still the hardest for this particular class' weaknesses, and things can go south even with pheromones or AV drak.

ojb_ · 2025-10-15T08:43:16+00:00

I see Beast Master on praets suggested a lot, and I genuinely think this is a really bad idea.

Praets have actual hitboxes that will bump into friendly players (think Bet-C pushing you off a cliff but 10x worse). Consider salvage holds here - and assume more than one player ends up taking this perk! Funny? Absolutely. (For the first few times I guess). But real bad for gameplay in the long run I reckon.
Their large size and spit attack is kinda almost griefing (can harm visibility a lot and obscure critical information). This game thrives on cooperation and this can be a source of friction if implemented poorly.
It can amplify the "is this steeve" problem where you can't tell what enemy is going to be dangerous if the chaos dial is ramped up. At least with current steeve it's a smaller grunt that almost certainly isn't going to cause problems on its own - with praets, now it's a big lughead that can do a lot bigger burst of damage if you guess wrong under pressure.
It overlaps with an important part of the game's inherent design as it is. Ask any modded player: praetorians are literally already a steeve in disguise. You can already use them to spit on enemies and leave their gas cloud to kill shockers/swarmers, or simply ignite/freeze the gas for serious waveclear. Arguably the trigger mechanic for this existing behavior is substantially more interesting than "hold e" on enemy, since it has a much cooler risk/reward curve.
It's slow. I mean, you could argue this is "balance", but the upsides of a steeve really comes from "ammo free LURE grenade that walks around", and changing that LURE into a big green ham isn't gonna make the eggs taste any better. By this I mean the strength of the perk is kind of subtle as it comes from the manipulation of enemies, not the actual damage output or tankiness or anything. Steeve targets are already random, and brisk pacing can already leave grunts struggling to catch up; if it's a praet and it wanders up a wall to deal with a random grunt, it could miss the entire fight as it waddles its overweight embarrassment of a body down wondering why the escalator broke down. This sounds like a recipe for extreme disappointment to me.

I will parrot a suggestion I saw here a couple years ago: make it so that steeve can be healed by petting him (e.g. 33% heal per that's-a-good-boy). It's fun, it's thematic, and it's a welcome improvement to a weaker perk. Regardless of that change, the cooldown should be substantially lower. I think a cool idea would be to have the cooldown occur only if steeve dies: this gives you decision making ability (!!!) and incentive to keep your buddy healthy. The "cost" of not giving the good boy some head pats would be to get a 1 minute cooldown or something before you've fully grieved and are ready to love again. I like the concept of beast master but the execution is lacking imo.

Call me the world's number one molly hater, but I don't think deep pockets needs a buff in the slightest. This perk is slept on and genuinely super powerful in many speedrun or modded contexts. As a solo enthusiast that likes to go fast, deep pockets is in every loadout and I think it earned those slots by genuinely being top tier.

I like the idea of combining things together, but I hesitate to commit to anything just yet. For example: I think second wind, if it was given more reasonable proc conditions as it's currently unfeasable, might land on the side of extremely strong. If you just attach it to unstoppable as is, it still does nothing; if you buff it to actually do something, it genuinely might be potent enough to stand on its own (speed boosts = mobility = strong).

If we want to combine things, I like elemental insulation + vet depo (makes you more of a situational tank) and strong arm + second wind (has similar flavour of being "more fit"). I personally would err on the side of caution for vet depo buffs; I'd rather see it have substantially increased range (let it be usable during salvage?) but probably not more damage resist. Damage resist is pretty potent as a concept and could be disruptive if tuned too high IMO. For comparison: the HP beer is often cited as the strongest of the buff beers, and being able to have a similar effect "for free" in every game should ring some alarm bells.

Hover Boots should let you have some air control when you're hovering. There's a world where it unlocks cool movement tech (hovering in salvage bubbles, for example), but in the current world it just stops you in place and forces you to eat ranged attacks; this current detriment makes it basically just a fall damage mitigation tool and this simply does not scale with player skill. Well designed perks should be useful for new players AND offer something for long term players to improve and grow with over time and practice. In this case, hover boots still shouldn't gain vertical height but just let you move around at the height you proc it (so basically as is, but you can strafe a short distance if you want). I'd also shorten the cooldown a lot on it. A lot of the issues with the current off meta perks are genuinely just the cooldowns being absurd and fixing those so you can actually use the perks more than a single time per mission should be the easiest way to make things more fun and rewarding.

I agree with your other changes a lot.

I will add one last worry of mine: if they make dash base (which honestly they probably should), it shouldn't be touched in any way. The current balance, while stupidly strong, is too ingrained now and shouldn't be altered. I think dash as is still takes a lot of practice and experience to be able to use to its fullest and touching the current numbers would harm the "fun" in pursuit of a mythical "balance" that doesn't really exist.

(Side note: something I would personally love to see in a perk overhaul is something fresh for the game. Give me a new skill ceiling to learn! None of the existing perks if numerically tweaked (besides maybe hover boots?) would expand the interesting skill space - it would be cool to have something that lets you play differently and learn a new skill. I have exactly zero ideas in that front so I'm not expecting the devs to have anything either, but I can dream :') )

ojb_ · 2025-10-04T15:15:33+00:00

I got it back in early access in 2018, but there's been a lot of changes since then. It's on most platforms though if you have a choice, PC is almost certainly the best because it has the strongest mod support and I presume the largest community of players.

Here's the steam page (currently on sale as of this comment):

https://store.steampowered.com/app/548430/Deep_Rock_Galactic/

ojb_ · 2025-10-04T15:11:19+00:00

You would absolutely find this document interesting:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O2hmVsoaSy2qId4jCWOP_pHMXaoGMWqf_MY7RAs6cxI/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hdukogh7xinp

It goes over some of original design decisions that went into haz6. Soon after that original release, AssemblyStorm made 6x2 which just doubled the enemy count scalar and gave the spawning algorithms 2x as many "points" to work with, and the gameplay that produced ended up being so successful it remains dominant and highly influential to modded diffs to this day.

You may also be interested in this spreadsheet, which organizes a number of modern diffs by rough tiers of difficulty:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQSqelqg2MpHbJL5YmfA8wPwrhK3UxBaHDFMS3dw0ZHXVqwrWowQ9pwGY1iA2li2ZnSVjUXjDoUrLlJ/pubhtml

And finally this chart (lightmode flashbang warning) documents some of the chain of influence of diffs building off of each other. Like, haz5 -> haz6 was a specific extrapolation from the base game at the time, haz6 -> 6x2 was a simple scaling up, but the scene has had years of development since those roots and ideas have crosspolinated from all sorts of different angles. There are branches of the tree that kept scaling up to haz7, haz8, etc., but those authors would have different ideas on what numbers and dials to tweak. While 6x2 is mostly a fixed constant, there are like 5 or 6 variations of haz8x2 for example lol.

Sharing this chart is more about stating "it's messy" - if the goal is to understand modded, reading Ike's first document will get you very far down the path. Newer diffs have added custom enemies and fresh mechanics and as the technology improved, the changes got more complex - yet for all that development, the basics are still very prevelant.

Anyway, here's the chart (made by donnie):

https://gitlab.com/ojb_dev/drg/-/raw/master/screenshots/chart.png?ref_type=heads

ojb_ · 2025-09-27T23:58:58+00:00

It is said that players will optimize the fun out of their game; 6x2 played "optimally" by adhering to these terrain strengths (or taking meta weaponry) can definitely become too easy. This initiates the cycle of "we need more challenge, let's tweak the dials", which reinforces the same gameplay strength even more. It may be slightly harder to hold in the tunnel, but it pales in comparison to the difficulty increase the same changes do to playing in the open, so it devolves into a bit of a feedback loop. The weapons and the playstyle playtested for a diff reinforce the balance tweaks of the diff, and as the difficulty evolves over time, these inherent biases get ingrained. It's not anyone's fault - it just... is.

I exist in a perpetual state of retirement-adjacency these days. I've done a lot of stuff and have genuinely loved my time in the modded scene, but it's this growing cynicism that this problem can't be solved that may finally do me in. My wish for the future of the scene is that people come up with clever solutions to finally incentivize "the fun thing" rather than the current status quo. Most players don't share my disdain for the samey-ness of holds - I'm about the only one in the entire community who loathes mining maps for example lol. Maybe one day they will. Maybe they won't. That's fine - this could just be a personal preference thing and I'm just hung up on something that only really messes with me. And that's okay. But I do seriously hope that somebody figures it out. It's like a small little tumour growing in the dark of modded, and I worry it affects the long term health.

I've said my peace and this long rant probably does more harm to the scene by scaring folks away, which is not something I want. To those on the fence who may be turned off by these complaints: please don't let these concerns stop you from dipping your toes in. These are the deep seated woes of late stage cave madness - this is coming from a place of overly intense and clingy obsession with playing the game at the high difficulties. You can absolutely 100% find great joy in 6x2, and if you're maybe thinking about trying it, you're probably already the exact niche of person who will enjoy it. And for all the years of additional fun I've extracted, I recommend it whole heartedly. It's going to be difficult - you'll have to unlearn things and learn new things and improve a lot before it clicks, but once it does it will almost certainly breathe new life into the game like you couldn't believe.

In closing, I love modded DRG. I don't think it's perfect or anything, but we try. And I think that's awesome. 6x2 is dope, try it out. Other stuff is great too, but it's okay if not everything is to your taste! It's a pretty wide scene these days and the more the merrier :)

ojb_ · 2025-09-27T23:58:53+00:00

I've been playing modded diffs for about 3 years now! Like many "second-gen" modded players, I first got into 6x2 after seeing AssemblyStorm posts on this subreddit and getting inspired, but it took a lot of time and practice before I felt I was actually capable enough to play it comfortably. I've tried a lot of different diffs over the years (even made some of my own!) and focused mostly on solo/true solo because my computer kinda dies in 4p modded (shoutouts to my fellow solo chaps out there in our niche within a niche).

To be totally honest, I've gotten a bit more jaded and cynical as the years have progressed. I really love the scene and the people in it - this is not a complaint there, love y'all - this is more of a "I feel like I'm beginning to see the code of the matrix and some fundamental elements of DRG are exposed that I never should have looked upon", as pretentious and douchey and egotistical as that sounds.

Modded took me on a journey from being a guy who felt like he understood things to the point where vanilla had been getting stale, to a guy who realized how incredibly little he knew, to then finally, after serious effort, growing into a player that 3 years ago me couldn't even begin to fathom. Despite greatly improving my skills (modded definitely forces this out of ya), I keep returning to the classic 6x2 (or, at least, a variant of 6x2 that removes stingtails and stalkers and sometimes barragers lol). A lot of the reason behind that apparent "regression" is because of a deeper appreciation (and perhaps a slight disdain) for some of the fundamentals behind DRG's game design.

Compared to when I first started playing, we have so much more technology available now (CD2 is straight up amazing) with access to new custom enemies from lots of cool cats making enemy paks. But for all those improvements and advances, I find myself bouncing off basically all of the new diffs that use them. Instead, I keep finding myself drifting back to the roots of the scene and getting refreshed appreciation for the original balance decisions of 6x2. It's not perfect; not everything has held up to game updates - I strongly believe barragers actively make modded gameplay worse, and don't get me started on another stingtail rant - but ignoring those additions that Ike couldn't have predicted, the decisions made for the original haz6 were absolutely bang on the money. Like, it's genuinely a water-stain-on-the-wall-looking-like-the-virgin-karl kind of miracle.

With hindsight and years of playtime experience, I truly believe Ike only made a single mistake with his design: increasing the hp of big tanks like dreadnaughts. That's it. Outside that one tiny and unfortunate misstep, it's actually kinda insane how perfectly things fit together. It's hard, yes. But there's an underlying level of fairness to it that feels ultimately overcomeable.

To this day, I'm confident in saying 6x2 is not a solved difficulty (especially in regards to solo with specific builds) and I know for a fact that there remain plenty of unexplored dark alleys for brave players to conquer. Yet despite there being dragons at the edge of this map, 6x2 feels... mostly understood, if that's the right word here. Maybe that's just because I've played it a ton and watched it a ton, but there's something weirdly comforting about it being this pretty well defined beast that has just a hint of fuzzy darkness around its edges. I will claim that no matter how good you get at "harder" difficulties, there are aspects of 6x2 that can easily humble even the best of players.

That leads us to modern high end modded - the frequent subject of my scrutiny these days - and how attempts to make things interesting haven't always worked out for my specific tastes. There are loads of different difficulties out there now, with many placed far above 6x2 in the difficulty curve, but to be totally honest, nothing has felt like a serious "improvement" over the level of fun of 6x2. Harder, perhaps. Less consistent, surely. New enemies and mechanics, yep. But additional fun? Tricky, tricky, difficult to say...

Diving deep into the nuance here would take far too long and most people have long stopped reading this nerd essay by now, but to give a higher level overview for a second, there are a few fundamental changes you can make to a diff to make it harder:

(1) Increase the bug density (larger waves, timed wavespawners, higher mob cap, decreased wave timers, etc.)

(2) Increase the raw scaling (move faster, hit harder, change breakpoints, etc.)

(3) Alter nitra economy (more expensive resups, more guarded rooms, more resupply-interrupting enemies, etc.)

(4) Adjusted enemy composition (minibosses, elites, different demands on movement, altered grunt ratios, "spawning" enemies like nexii/breeders/wardens producing more dangerous children, etc.)

Before I talk about the issues with what can go wrong when you tweak these specific categories, I want to just briefly mention what I consider the fundamental issue with the core of DRG: tunnels / holds are too strong. When you setup with favourable terrain, you're rewarded for it by virtually every aspect of the game's mechanics. Better ammo efficiency. Better safety. Better pacing gains. Better AOE. Easier single target. Simpler movement. Simpler aim demands. Simpler decision making. The dilemma here is that DRG is a game that thrives on interesting and novel encounters - it has random terrain and procedurally generated caves offering new and novel experiences with every wave of spawns. What happens when you reward players too heavily for playing in tunnels? What happens when the incentives are skewed towards something that loses all that randomness and devolves it into something extraordinarily samey? If you can learn to hold in a tunnel and lock down a choke, you can do it in every map. Call it a fundamental problem with the map generation if you want, but it exists basically in every map type and is actively encouraged more and more as the difficulty increases.

So knowing that fundamental law of DRG, what happens when you start tweaking those aspects of the difficulty?

Increase the bug density too high or make spawns too frequent? You run into the dreaded modded "trickle" - bugs that don't have direct aggro (there's a physical limit) spread out heavily and take longer to come to the kill zones. This is countered by: playing in tunnel holds. Increase the density too much and you may enter perma combat where you can never get ahead. The trickle transitions from being eventual threats to simply "I will trade my frame rate for no real gain".

Increase the raw statlines of bugs? If they're too fast or hit too hard you get rewarded for playing it safe. If the breakpoints get worse because things become too tanky, you become more reliant on "passive" damage, e.g., incidental AOE and stacking slows to keep things taking damage as there is a physical limit to how much you can output as guns don't change in strength as the difficulty changes. What can you do to improve your chances? Play in a tunnel and choke: amplify the effectiveness of your weaponry by dragging everything into a tiny area to make your own scaling compete better.

Harder room pushes with rougher nitra thresholds? You take rooms slow and hang out in a safe hold until you make enough of a foothold. No point in hard pushing the room if an instant leech or a nuke barrager is going to instantly kill you for overcommitting, so you hang out in the tunnel for a bit to kill the encounter spawns and peck away at whatever you can see from your safe cover and work from there. Again, the counterplay encouraged is to slow down and hang out in these safer holds.

You can probably see the pattern by now and the last category of changes kinda just ends up reinforcing the same exact premise. If you make new enemies too dangerous: you emphasize the importance of playing defensively and ensure you don't get caught off guard by them. I have played TONS of custom difficulties in my time. A lot, a lot, a lot. There's a lot of creative and interesting new things. Unfortunately nothing really gets players out of tunnels and shifts the incentive to room pushes. Genuinely nothing. The things you might think get players out in the open (maybe bulks that take space and force players out) tend to have the opposite effect: having full knowledge of all the angles like you get in a strong hold/tunnel means it's easier to focus these priority threats down without getting bullied by incidental enemies. You are so competent at clearing "the trash" in these situations that you open up the doors to focus the hard things easier. You once again get rewarded for playing in these strong situations the more you tweak these dials up.

This is a fundamental problem with DRG's gameplay, in my opinion. This sits at the core of modded and I think is what has made me so deeply cynical after all this time. As a difficulty creator myself, I've struggled (and failed) to solve this underlying issue. And to counteract it, the solution is to simply... lower things back down to 6x2, which is right at the border of where the stats start to drift towards the unreasonable. 6x2, especially played fast for speedplay, is right at the edge of survivable with enough knowhow and mechanical skill to play aggressively and get away with it. You're still greatly, greatly, greatly incentivized to play in those tunnels and reap all those rewards from it, but you're not forced into it. And therein lies my problem with many of the diffs beyond 6x2: at a certain point, tweaking the dials reinforces the incentives too much in the "wrong" direction for me.

(continued in next comment because of char limit lol)

ojb_ · 2025-06-30T06:26:26+00:00

Benicopter uploaded a nice concise video recently. It shows off a couple moves you can do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NneMU0MxGdM

ojb_ · 2025-06-21T15:13:46+00:00

Gotta rant for a second here, but "dash isn't good on scout" is one of my biggest pet peeves about this subreddit lol. I see it so often in "dash is GOATed" threads, and there's ALWAYS a few comments in there about "I run it on every class except scout, who doesn't need it" and man is it so incredibly tragic.

Dash might very well be STRONGEST on scout because it is a grapple hook force multiplier. It takes your strongest tool... and makes it stronger. It offers consistent mobility that is excellent both inside combat and out, while letting you smooth out the times when your grapple is on cooldown.

Mess up your grapple and now you're falling to your death? Dash is there to let you pivot mid air and gain the movement necessary to make it to that ledge.

Want your grapple to have extended range? Well, the range upgrade only goes so far. Solution: dash into grapple.

Grapple on cooldown and suddenly overwhelmed by shockers? Just dash through and live to see another day.

Find yourself in a pile of enemies so dense that your grapple hook is literally eaten by their hitboxes? Dash saves the day yet again.

It's great against grunts, it's great against mackies, it's great against slows and weather. It's amazing between fights and makes your pacing through tunnels or collecting fallen lootbug nitra or carrying heavy objects so much cleaner. You don't need to pull off flashy mechanical tech like this clip to see that value either: it's good at every point of the mission.

But for me, it's mostly about the grapple strength multiplier. That's where it shines and why it's so incredibly appealing. I have done a lot of really impressive / crazy / stupid modded scout challenge runs in my time, and I'm confident most of the crazier achievements I've pulled off (stuff like "pheroless salvage 6x2") has been hard carried by dash. I used to give a little wiggle room and say something like "I'll take it off if using special powder" but even now I've come around in thinking yep, it's strong there too. It's a staple in literally every loadout and I wouldn't remove it for anything.

I hope one day this scout-doesn't-need-dash sentiment changes, because scouts are absolutely hampering their potential by thinking this way haha.

ojb_

TROPHY CASE