u/Gadget-Gabe

Could have probably reached 18k with the rng I've been given but I was playing incredibly sloppily at the end.

Trinkets are Tunnelling Codex, Iron Lung and Evasion Powder (these three are essential), and Brisk Brew, Blinking Glass and Pneumatic Armlet (small optimizations/might as well use them). Leaving a dagger from dagger throw on the ground also increases your movespeed, which I'm pretty sure affects burrowing speed and air speed. The wisp glide and airdash trinkets just get in the way when you have tunnelling codex because their inputs overlap with your held input to reburrow.

Edit: as a commenter pointed out, the vial salvo is actually a lot better to use in this combo than the valor medal, whenever I mention the medal pretend I'm using the salvo instead

You can purposefully play really carelessly and deal ludicrous damage due to having constant upkeep from Reckless Beastium (Reckless-ium gives you double damage for your next 3 hits after vial use, with the downside of doubling damage received if you get hit before dealing 3 hits). I always pair it with Plasma Jug so you can have the plasma ready for IV Vial to use up, and Steady Soles for recovering faster from knockback so you can deal damage during your i-frames.

The 5th and 6th trinket slots are flexible-ish but I find that Uranium Ring + Valor Medal are the most consistent parings. The decreased defence from the ring puts you in IV Vial range more often, and losing less plasma from getting hit with the medal lets you think less about having sufficient plasma for IV Vial. With the medal, getting the damage penalty from reckless-ium is also no big deal since it almost always gets immediately restored by IV Vial.

Because Reckless-ium can also boost the plasma generated from Mist Jar, you can use Willow the Wisp instead of the Medal for even more damage (since you tank damage anyways to activate Reckless-ium) if you pay more mind to topping up your plasma when needed.

Evra deals so much damage that with the Uranium Ring, you're actually put in one shot range when you have reckless-ium active, so it's better to not use it. Because Geoffrey is so giant and slow, it's the only fight that I found evasion powder to be really worth it with this combo, since you can just stand inside his collision and get 2 swings and easily get reckless-ium refreshed from contact damage. Very cheesey. Because the skeleton summons can eat up your double damage hits, it's possible that dropping reckless-ium for Willow is better, but the difference is probably marginal.

EDIT: I also tried out a similar idea on the daggers with the Lightning Grip instead of the Reckless-ium and the Evasion Powder instead of the medal and that also works really well.

The training room is mostly fine and takes a lot of considerations regarding what you can test there, but a few things I find annoying about it are that the dummy switches don't let you choose an idle position for them in the room (like if you want a dummy close to the wall, or farther apart from each other), you don't generate plasma off of hitting the dummies, and you normally can't test some "upon damage received" effects like Willow the Wisp, or Casket parries.

Some work-arounds that I've found are that you can push the dummies with shield bashes and with sidearms like the drill and parasol (though the parasol short toss can't hit the aerial dummy), you can generate plasma in the underlab off of the Joule Syringe trinket with sidearm usage, and you can use the spikes to trigger Burning Beastnium to then trigger most damage receiving effects (though oddly, with the Casket you can only block the fireballs when facing left). This still isn't perfect since you can't properly test the Chain Capacitor with parries without losing your combo boost, but you can always just test this outside the underlab by turning on the display damage dealt modifier.

(The combo is Joule Syringe, Plasma Funnel, Vascular Syrup, Reckless Beastnium, Warding Beastnium, and Desperation Bonnet)

If you've seen or you know anything about MtH speedruns then you know how broken mist jar is when paired with the joule syringe and vascular syrup: you can dash through the entire map with uninterupted i-frames, clear 5 tile gaps by chaining a ground jar dash into a jump into an air jar dash, and top your health bar with plasma from any lone enemy, or even top up your hp without expending vials by dashing into groups of enemies, while Vascular Syrup removes the risk of being at 1-hp by giving you time to use a vial or dash into an enemy if you take otherwise fatal damage. But when you have all trinket pouches and have access to every trinket, how do you best expand upon this?

Given that we're going to be draining our hp a lot anyways, the bonnet can shine here and give us 1.25x damage to our main weapon and our sidearms when we're in red hp bar range. Aside from being a 5% improvement over the uranium ring, it has added synergy by also reducing the health cost of sidearms using the joule syringe, which lets us build a little extra hp off of a single enemy when we spam the mist jar, which can save us from taking fatal damage and forcing us to use vials. But when we use our vials, that'll put us out of the health range for the bonnet, and if we need to drain our health again every time we heal just for a slightly higher damage bonus than the uranium ring, then isn't that bad?

Enter Warding Beastnium. Our vials can now only convert one fifth of our stored plasma to red health at a time, letting us control our hp range to increase bonnet's uptime. And as a bonus, its 20-ish percent defence increase can be helpful for spikes and in scraps with enemies, letting us tank more hits and dish out more hits before having to resort to our mist jar. Though, not being able to heal to full unless enemies are grouped together is a pretty huge trade-off, what if there's no groups and we need to do some platforming without using up a vial every time we make a single mistake?

Reckless Beastnium to the rescue. To quickly explain what it does: once a vial is used, the next 3 hits from either your main weapon or your sidearms get **double damage**, but as a tradeoff, if you get hit before dealing these three hits, the damage you receive is tripled and you lose the attack buff. Additionally, it vastly increases the healing done by the mist jar so that a single dash restores around 1/3rd of your hp, letting us bypass warding bestnium's penalty so long as there is one enemy we can use. And crucially, since so much of our healing is done without vials, this also lets us convert our excess vials into huge damage to quickly take out bosses and large enemies, which is the cherry on top. If you accidentally fill your hp to full when you want bonnet's attack buff, you can even purposefully take triple damage to get into red health range again.

The last trinket slot can be anything, but the funnel makes the most sense since this lets us get our 2x damage buff up faster vs bosses, and although you can't die as long as you press the consume vial button before your syrup health reaches 0, the funnel does provide some extra assurance that you won't be hit out of the drinking animation. You could run a useful platforming or utility skill instead, or lightning grip for the added synergy of getting a guaranteed lightning proc after healing, but the extra damage hardly feels necessary. You could also run another beastnium trinket for the feat that requires you to use exactly 3 against a boss.

This build isn't the greatest for platforming areas with not a ton of solid ground like bone beach or the orrey, but in most areas it works swell. If you try it out, or have any suggestions, let me know.

My goal with these builds was to effectively cover as many different quests as possible in the least amount of prowlers trained. The only matchup that I don't have a build for is Lao but I do what everyone else does when that quest comes up and leave switch to hbg. If you're interested in trying out prowler then try out one of the first two builds. Also the seams where I merged my images together are sometimes super obvious but I don't care to get them perfect.

I made a doc explaining my reasoning for each one here. I've spent a not insignificant amount of time on it, if there's a build you're curious about I'd recommend reading about it.

The reason why this looks bad is cuz I recorded by stitching switch captures together

The goal of the entire strategy is to set up EF so that she is paraed while you are in a good position to siege pierce down the trunk length, which will break the trunk in 2 sieges if aimed well. To set this up consistently, you'll ideally want to be in Valor mode and have used 1 or 2 para shots by the time EF enters the trap, though bad RNG may cause you to need to adjust. The trunk can't receive any part damage until the ice is cleared away, and the ice won't break if EF is paraed or pitfalled, so the ice absolutely has to be broken before the para. Being uphill from EF causes the trunk to be obscured by the terrain which is why I eat for explorer to enter the area from the bottom.

The easiest way to set up the para consistently is to break the trunk ice with a para shot. If the trunk ice's break threshold is reached while EF is pitfalled or paraed, it will be left with 1hp, which happens after about 6-8 siege shots. Visually, it will also look like the ice half-breaks as EF exits the trap. If elderfrost is allowed to select an attacking move after the ice is gone, there is a chance that she'll either move way out of position, or she'll just instantly put on a fresh ice coat by using her sassy snowball throw at you, so breaking the ice with the para shot is actually pretty important for consistency's sake. Since it doesn't take that many siege shots get the ice to 1hp, you (usually) have a lot of leeway to load the para and set up the aim, then you fire once you see the half-break happen.

What's difficult with this farm is RNG creating occasional inconsistency. Elderfrost has 2 starting positions: one where she starts facing away from you, and one where she's already walking towards you, and the frequency seems to be an even 50/50. The first pattern is very consistent because no matter what EF does, you'll have a lot of time to enter valor mode and fire 2 paras; the second pattern by comparison is a lot tighter and less consistent, most attacks EF can do will still work fine, but the big problem attack is if she picks the "sweeping the floors" move right away. If EF does this then you only have time to fire one pierce clip to build valor before she enters the pitfall, so you have to roll away from the trap about 4 times and enter valor mode ASAP for you to be able to cause the trunk ice break with the para. If you do this fast enough you can do this before she starts her roar, then valor sheathe the roar and fire the final para shot (if your paras are all fired close together, you will only need 3). If you break the ice with pierce instead of para, you might just have to be patient on when you proc it if EF stomps or vacuums you. If her trunk becomes coated again, use a shock trap to break it.

Some other notes:

- You should only throw the smokebomb if EF is in the 1st starting position.

- You can use the ledge as reference on where to place your trap. The 1st starting position can place the trap a little past it while with the 2nd you should place it a little behind. Ideally you place the trap near the edge of her roar range so you fill valor faster with crit distance.

- Bring cleansers in case she snowballs you.

- If the hit that causes the trunk ice to break is also the one that procs the para, the ice will break first, then the para will happen after the animation finishes

- If using the Orcus, then you don't have to worry about firing para shots before she enters the pitfall, after firing enough pierce to break the ice you can enter para siege, fire one para shot, then when you see the trunk ice crack you fire 2 more. With 10 less raw than the Daora HBG you will have slightly less leeway to break the trunk during the para however, but it's worth it for having consistency for the 2nd starting pattern.

- If you're only halfway to Valor mode when EF enters the trap, and you charge the other half of the Valor gauge by firing down the trunk, you'll only need about 3-4 siege shots to get the trunk ready, so you should end your siege early to load para ammo