Regarding UAC Diamond, I made a video of myself achieving it once with a Blademaster build. 20 minutes is more time than you may realize, so you don't necessarily have to rush for the whole thing. As for how many tries it took, I have 28 videos on my hard drive of attempts at it, though most of them are short and fail near the beginning.
As for easier high tier badges, Shottyman Angelic is easily the easiest Angelic badge. Maybe try for that one next?
I had actually watched your video before my post :). 28 attempts is a lot less than I spent trying and failing to get it, so that suggests I'm just bad, and that's okay, if I die due to being dumb I deserve it. What frustrates me is the feeling like I lost due to RNG, and 1/28 still isn't great for that---it sounds like you lost a lot of games early on.
Sounds like Shottyman Angelic, Diamond Speedrun, and Platinum Centurial are my best shots.
veteran angelic when done with angel of max carnage isn't luck based at all really. doing a scout auto build (the mortem i posted on here is masterless but i can't recall why i went that route exactly) will get you heavy powered chainguns early on which you can usually mod into a gatling gun, one shotting a great deal of early monsters. once you get the plasma gun you can turn it into the hyperblaster which melts through all the late game stuff with no problem. the trick of nightmare is corpse placement - you'll want to kill stuff in doorways, on liquids, or on top of other corpses to get rid of them, which does require a bit of patiences in getting the feel for exactly how many shots you need to kill something, and considering knockback if you're using shotguns. max carnage makes this easier because not only are your guns stronger, but takes out the dice roll guessing
Not wanting to waste time on corpse-stacking is a big part of the reason Nightmare doesn't hold much appeal for me.
Speaking of RNG, I'm sick of Phobos Base Entry. It's so boring, and a good chunk of the configurations seem to be impossible to approach without taking a shotgun blast to the face. I end up quitting here most of the time because it's so easy to go down to 50% health with both medkits used by the sergeants, and it's faster to just reroll it for better luck than to hope Phobos 2 gives enough health globes/medkits. Is there some reliable way to do it so I don't have to waste so much time on it?
The other level that seems incredibly luck-based is Chained Court (after the Arena). I have promising runs die there all the time. Is there a reliable way to do it that doesn't take an hour?
