You successfully printed the Combine checkpoint from Half Life 2, failing to see the problem here

Do you hear pops when the filament flows out of the nozzle?

I just got finished fixing some weird oozing problems. All the settings I tweaked, the best I could get still had stringing and blobbing at the end of every layer.

Turned out my hotend had fragments of bowden tube clogging it. I don’t know how, but assume I had the heat cranked too high at some point. There’s no real cleaning that out, and I ended up replacing the entire hotend.

I also had a clog or damage or something causing heavy resistance in the pull-tube going from my spool to the extruder. Replaced that too and everything is printing beautifully again.

Stringing like that coming out of nowhere happened to me when a got a batch of filament that wasn't properly dried. It was so wet I could hear the water boiling off as small pops when it flowed out the nozzle. I went through all the calibration stuff but nothing helped until i dried out my filament.

What temperature range is the filament rated for, and at what temperature are you printing at?

Oozing is a fact of life. But it's a lot less of a problem at lower temperatures. Also how old is the filament? Has it been sitting out absorbing humidity? Wet filament will drool a lot too.

Make sure your filament is dry.. It can make a big difference for stringing.

Filament oozing at the start is normal, that's how you know it's up to temperature. The start of your g-code should have a wipe at the edge of the build plate before starting the first layer to deal with the initial oozing.

What variable was being modified in the stringing test print in the image? Personally I would just keep doing those stringing test towers and modify a different retraction variable with the z-axis each time. You could also modify temperature to see if perhaps the filament is not sufficiently fluid at 185C.

For reference, on my Ender 3 Pro I use 8mm retraction distance at 80mm/s.