These Overclocks Are Worse Than Nothing

Juicy comments section for this one! I'll address some of the criticism I've seen in the comments - I published this video knowing full well the type of flak, players, and comments I'd attract, though I am slightly disappointed one of the top comments is as... vitrolic and dismissive as it is. I do super appreciate those of you taking your time to consider my opinions, how and why they might clash with yours, and leaving thoughtful and respectful comments on why you like these overclocks or why they're still fun despite perhaps being weaker than other options. That being said, I still stand by the relevancy of my content and especially its accuracy, and I'll address some common criticisms here. 1. Everything works on Hazard 5 Why does this matter in the slightest? I (and I presume many of you) could beat it with no overclocks (or mods, for that matter), and have. Assuming that everybody can and because of that build optimization shouldn't matter, however, is elitist and just, if not more, out of touch than whatever Lx2EX_b09 custom difficulty build recommendation is. My content is not aimed towards Haz 5 vets who spent 500 hours sleepwalking through the difficulty with meme loadouts, it's aimed towards people who are trying to play on difficulties they struggle on. If you can clear every enemy on the map with Overtuned Particle Accelerator on scout in Haz 5 then good for you! However, not everybody can do that on every difficulty (regardless of whether it's Haz 4 or Haz 6x2), and assuming I'm trying to give advice towards people who can wipe the map with objectively mediocre grunt clear on the class with the objectively worst grunt clear is completely misguided. For the player that's playing a difficulty they struggle on, ostensibly you would not be able to kill every threatening enemy like that, and if you can't kill all the enemies then you should be trying to kill the most threatening ones, which OPA does not accomplish (nor does Hipster). I try to make content that helps people win more, and pretending that all build options are equal and that none are bad does not do that. 2. Your opinion is invalid because you play 6x2 Okay, cool. I don't see how this is particularly relevant, since you should refute the points in the video and not my qualities as an individual, but we'll briefly talk about 6x2 balance in relation to vanilla hazards. Let me make it clear first, though - I was once a very good (I'd like to think) Hazard 5 player. I held most of these opinions then. I have talked to many very good Haz 5 players who share many of these opinions. Hazard 6x2 is not a difficulty where ammo economy doesn't matter at all. It's not a difficulty where AOE weapons dominate heavily. It's not easier, and if you think that you've never played a lick of 6x2 in your life. If this were true, as some of you claim, why would I rate Fat Boy so low? It has all the qualities - it's extremely ammo hungry in exchange for huge AOE dense clear. It's still not good. My reason for rating the cryo OCs badly is also because of bad ammo efficiency. If anything, 6x2 puts more of a burden on single target weapons - doubled single targets take approximately double the single target damage output to take care of, while AOE weapons are... AOE, and scale with enemy density. What 6x2 does make worse than vanilla is generalist weapons - typically, each class will hyperspecialize a lot more, since having a bunch of specialists is usually better than having a bunch of generalists, but even that's not really a strict rule of thumb. Ammo economy... is kind of more forgiving...ish? but only after you've gotten your footing? Nitra starves are very common in the beginning of nonlinear mission types, and double bugs, surprise surprise, consume more ammo. There's also more enemies than in vanilla, so if anything overclocks like Mini Shells get more use than they would otherwise - I've genuinely never run out of ammo with Mini Shells in vanilla, but I can't say the same for modded. We post 6x2 EDDs with 60 nitra, and you can often see that even in typical gamplay, at least in 6x2, we don't actually call many more resupps than typical Haz 5 games, as you tend to be significantly more ammo efficient when you only shoot the enemies relevant to you - just tonight, I played a 6x2 refinery with 2 greenbeards where we called in 4 resupplies and had 300 nitra left in the bank. Watch my scout solo speedrun for more info. All things considered there is exactly one overclock on this list which is negatively impacted by these: Hipster. OPA is not a generalist. It specializes into CQB grunt killing and is absolutely terrible at it. Hipster, as I said, might not belong on this list. But that takes us to our next point. 3. Background footage (and other videos) show X *Sure, but refute the actual content of the video, not its filler background*. I've heard a lot of talk about Hipster and its functions as a "generalist". Please tell me how it's productive to "generalize" into being realistically worse at killing grunts and HVTs in exchange for more LST DPS. Genuinely - I want real discourse instead of mud-slinging. Show me sandbox tests where you kill swarms faster and more ammo efficiently with OPA compared to base Drak (which is also bad, fight me) and then show me gameplay clips where OPA's extra DPS is worth the HUGE hit in accuracy. Also, the parts of the video that aren't those two overclocks exist! Explain to me how facemelter forcing you into flamethrower's worst playstyle for any sort of overclock benefit is beneficial. Explain to me how the stream is actually a huuuuge part of cryo and why that makes Tuned Cooler really good, actually. Explain to me why the burst freeze playstyle of FRE provides unique benefits, and so on. Don't call the video bad, my opinions irrelevant, completely fail to address the actual content of the video, and then move on.

I do not personally agree with a couple of the statements made in this Youtube video and am therefor now extremely angry. You will be hearing from my lawyers about this.

Forgot an obvious upside of Hipster: More ammo= more reload ping

Some of these OCs were definitely made as a "dumb fun over raw power" sort of option, and are likely popular for that reason. Given the ammo count, I pretty much figured that Fat Boy is probably terrible in comparison to other builds even before I started using it... but dear lord am I happy that the devs added a "fuck everything in that general location" gun for chill games. Same for Facemelter, playing a sort of trap-setting playstyle with Sticky Flames seems to be the best use for the CRISPR as a whole... but sometimes I just want to unga-bunga melt bug faces off for that T5b 50%-chance of a dopamine hit. It's not surprising that weaker yet flashier OCs are popular when pretty much any crazy thing can work on vanilla Hazards if you're good enough. Also... ngl, it's kind of nice to hear somebody not sing Hipster's praises for once. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE it on Elimination/Sabotage, I swap between it and SCC depending on my mood. But when people tell you to 3-tap grunts instead of using something like Active Stability System to buff your BUILT-IN grunt one-shot tool for a blowthrough build? It drives me up a goddamn wall, it's like people have never charged a focus shot in their life.

As a Driller main who really only uses Crispr, the Facemelter critique is fair, but I do think that it’s the most fun of all the Crispr OCs- something about just melting everything in front of you hits different

Hipster user here. I tried it after trying several other meta scout primaries (ASS, BoM, etc) and found that 22213 hipster's the one that works for me. It's more of a generalist weapon because to be honest, 90% of the things I shoot with scout are still grunts and trash, simply because those are the enemies that spawn and the enemies that feel safe to shoot. Killing praetorians I use grenades or point blank spam fire anyways. When I would use the M1000 normally, I felt like missing focus shots was too punishing and often put me in danger. Furthermore it felt bad to spam M1 at individual grunts or swarmers, the ammo economy of the M1000 simply doesn't support that playstyle unless you are precise with your shots, which I'm frankly not when I'm avoiding swarms. I think a better comparison is Hipster vs GK2, and Hipster is almost strictly better. It has better DPS, better total damage, better damage per clip, better penetration, etc. And the GK2 is a great gun that many people prefer over the M1000. Of course you could say the M1000 is just a better gun than the GK2 either way, but for me hipster captures most of the playstyle advantages the GK2 has while sacrificing very little (about 25% damage).

Honestly I just admire how some of these overclocks dont really care for the mindset of people who want to optimize everything or focus on meta or some stuff like that. Sometimes they wanna let you have some fun, experiment. Use your weapons in a way very different from how you used to. I have seen some crazy things with the fat boy. Like how it can just utterly destroy Omen or a Caretaker's healthbars. I will also admir having felt Schadenfreude from seeing a swarmer tunnels just absolutely dissolve when they spawn from a well-timed fat boy. Overall while you are pretty harsh on some of these overclocks and think they're worse than nothing. I do find myself wanting to try some of them out from time to time just to spice things up.

I love fat boy, and probably use it more than any other OC, but I’ve noticed that anything you kill with fat boy, probably could’ve been killed with 2 incendiary shots from a regular PGL. Regular PGL dosent have the really nice sound effect tho

Return to sender used to be really strong, but then the devs nerfed it to death.

The only thing I don't get is what IS Nothing At All? I never heard of that overclock.

The fact that there is no death animations or ore break is super distracting

I got micro fléchettes a bit ago and I was immediately like "yeah I'll stick to lead spray instead"

And as always: the overclock does not really matter as long you know what you are doing/having fun. Playing below haz 5 also helps

this man is so powerful he makes bugs literally blip from existence

i can taste the sheer hatred for OPA

As an engineer, I am quite proud how few of our OCs made it on the list. (I did notice Return to Sender didn't have its own chapter in the video, so I nearly missed it at first.) When it comes to Fat Boy, I really get why people love it, and why people don't. Those 3 shots are really limiting, and playing in groups make it hard to coordinate without hurting a teammate, especially if playing with randos with no mic. However, it is extremely cool regardless. Probably the flashiest overclock on the market. I have no doubt in my mind that when I get it, I will have a blast (pun intended) with it for a while.

I noticed you never talked about charged shot upgrade on Hipster as opposed to clip size. It may seem counter-intuitive but charged shot hipster is actually really good... It enables oneshotting grunts again, even with blowthrough. I have no idea if you tried it and just didnt mention it, but if you didnt, you definitely should.

I think face melter is supposed to be used on grunt bugs to explode them and damage big bugs in a horde

It's strange just how much better ice storm is than face melter. C'mon devs.

Surprised you didn't mention any of Stubby's OC's, but at that point it might be better to just put the entire gun on the list.