Hi there! I've finally started actually routing this game instead of winging runs. To start off I have made a video on the first levels of Any%.

My philosophy going into the routing of this category was that the 3rd levelup of the boots would more than make up for the timeloss of getting them. This is routing for the first 3 levels.

All other theories, ideas, criticism wanted! I will post further routing stuff on this forum.

Did a little bit more testing to get the last bits of gold needed. The mastery "Icy Tomb" (get killed while frozen) is technically possible on the 4th level (bone barracks). It is however heavily RNG based. In order to get the achiefment what needs to happen is:

1. Get to the Necromancer and turn him into a lich.
2. Have some enemies around.
3. Get hit by the beam attack form the lich, without dying (requires more than 1 bar of health). This freezes you in place.
4. Get killed by a random enemy while frozen.

Now the biggest problems here are: not outright dying to the beam and the lich's attacks being RNG. The lich could very well spawn ghost, dive, spawn skeletons, spawn ghosts, dive, etc. It seems too inconsistent to me.

In practice i turn out to have enough gold after defeating the first boss. It's a bit late but its all I have right now.

I currently wanna focus more on something that has plagued me for months, the Morak fight. It is still a complete mystery to me. Even the info we got from Arrowhead turns out to be wrong. " Once in his vulnerable human form he will revert back to demonic form when he has been dealt a certain amount of damage. It will take approximately ten optimal attacks to kill him." This has been disproven by almost every run submitted, and most notably by IcyWorld's Holy grail Morak kill (2 cycle). IcyWorld's kill did involve a lot of luck however.

All I've got so far is that when the sword is doing an ability Morak will stay vulnerable. It also seems like if he is taken over damage cap cuz the sword is doing something, he will go demon again whenever the sword becomes available. Morak just sometimes likes to be generous with the amount of hits he takes. If we figure out what triggers this, we can manipulate it and speed up the fight.

I think I might be on to something. It looks like if you do too much damage too fast, you force him into demon form immediatly after the sword does its first attack (double slam). It looks like if you take more time after the slams morak can be hit for a lot more. I think so far this has only accidentally happend the times it did because it took ppl more time to find the real Morak. Every time someone takes more time finding him, they end up doing more damage than they should. The sword seems to be "thinking" of doing an attack or something. I think if we can figure this out more we might be able to 3 cycle him consistently.

So after the double slam there's a certain timeframe in which you will push Morak to demonform. Go beyond this timeframe and the sword is "thinking", so you can do more damage. I'll do some testing on this later.

Have not found any concrete proof to prove or disprove this yet.

It really seems like he is locked into some sort of behavior that prevents him from changing back, but I'm not sure what causes it. When you look at The Beast, it is seemingly unable to become immune to damage while charging or leaping, and this looks like a similar case. In IcyWorld's video, you can see that the sword isn't moving at all while he is killing Morak. This may be a behavior that it can't break out of early, whatever it is doing.

Alternately, I'm wondering if Morak only decides on a new action every so often, say every 3 seconds, and if you drop him below the threshold right after a check, you get the full duration of that time to damage him freely before he changes back. I haven't tested it yet, but the way to do it would probably be to try to hold off damaging him until right after the sword starts a new attack animation, then try to do as much damage as you can as quickly as possible.

Do the spike traps in the Tombs of the Risen count for the dying to spike traps achievement? There is a row of them directly after the first key pickup where the first big mummy comes out of his sarcophagus. Dying in them is quick, and it would have the added bonuses of not having to wait for that first pack of monsters to slowly kill you, and not scattering them around the room when you respawn.

That might be possible. You might need to kill some more enemies if you want to die bij the explosive as well. However dying to the explosive may not be needed, dying to spikes should also give you "Explosive exit". In any case I am really happy to have someone else thinking about this stuff.

Glad to be able to post some helpful things here, looks like you've been pretty alone here for a while now.

After playing around a little, I noticed you can actually die 5 times in Tombs of the Risen if you grab the extra life coin behind the third breakable wall. I don't know how much the silver version of Deader than Dead gives though, so it might not be worth the amount of time it takes. It should still be worth dying to an explosive barrel to pick up the Embracing the End mastery though.

I am able to somewhat consistently 2-cycle Morak with the elf now using the ring of mirrors.

The trick seems to be clearing out all of the illusions and enemies, then baiting a sword charge attack. It seems like you can consistently force this attack by making sure the sword is following you, and not just standing idle directly next to you. Ideally you want the sword to be between you and Morak when it starts the attack so that it charges far across the arena. When it is just finishing with the slash into the floor and rising up, you pop the ring of mirrors next to Morak.

Shooting him with regular attacks seems to almost instantly force him to transform back to his invulnerable form, which makes me think he only checks his health at certain times: when he is hit with regular attacks, and also based on a timer. If you can get your illusions spawned between his health checks he goes down. That's my current thoughts on it anyway.

Here's a bonus video that I am glad did not happen during a speed run attempt. The warrior would be so jealous if he knew.

gauntlet such a stable game isn't it. anyway morac techs look amazing and I can't wait to try hard runs with the void strategy. should make hard way shorter. might even get it down to less than 1:15.

Yeah I'll have to give a hard run a shot as well sometime this week. Easy runs now are pretty much down to getting lucky with the randomized levels and getting lucky with a Morak 1-cycle fight. The dark torrent spam in hard mode is a lot harder on the clicking finger, but the ice beam still cuts through everything like butter after a couple stacks.

I figured out a fancy new move today on the elf that I'm just going to call the vault skip. The first place I've found where it is useful is in The Queen's Chamber. I was able to save 55 seconds over a wizard run with it, which definitely makes it worth switching to the elf for this level and gets us a lot closer to a 45 minute run.

HOLY CRAP we knew getting out of bounds was possible there but we didn't know you could vault with it! We coudn't make anything out of bounds work cuz of the random walls and constant sinking but the vault skips right over that in QC. I'm immediatly going back to other places to help you find more

I checked every level for jump pad out of bounds locations like that one, but I wasn't able to find any other useful ones. There is one I was able to get out of bounds with at the very end of The Keep of the Demon Cult, but I wasn't able to quickly find a useful path with it, and it would only be able to skip a single room for maybe 10-20 seconds of saved time if an amazing path was found. I'd be super interested in seeing other locations and techniques for getting out of bounds though. I saw an old co-op run from v1.02 that had hilariously broken out of bounds exploits in basically every stage.

Would definitely be cool to see an updated GDQ run for the game. We're starting to pile up enough tricks that a lot of the run could remain pretty interesting I think. I wouldn't be surprised if their time could be beaten in hard mode now, since they used in-game time and we are using real-time (looks like they'd have around a 54:54 in real-time.)

Yeah thats the really old version, before it became Slayer Edition. Back then they used potions for trinkets and all weapons were skins. Sash and I tried abusing netcode a couple times already but it didnt work for us. On various jumppads we also tried cliping out of bound by spawning when the other was mid jump. This got us out of bounds several times but we didn't find any usefull routes.

You are on fire though, amazing work. I would also love to see an updated GDQ run.

It's really interesting that spawning mid-air can still get you out of bounds. I tried it locally with a controller and it spawned the character back on the pad I jumped from. There is one spot in particular I am thinking of in The Bone Barracks, right near the start where you carry an explosive barrel into the second room to open the secret that has a potion, turkey, and skull coin on the opposite side of a jump pad area. You could skip the entire level if you can spawn mid-air there and land right at the last room.

It seems to only work on most ledges in the caves and a couple in Hell. We tried all the usefull ledges in the crypts but they don't work.

We tried that one too haha

Ah that's too bad then. I tried every other skill combination with the jump pad that I could think of but nothing else did anything useful. Something I've been toying with but haven't gotten to work yet is using the Chaos Amulet relic and then knocking the targeted enemy over a wall. I haven't had any luck getting them to fly over a wall though. A good chance it's just not possible.

Got a somewhat consistent strategy to kill The Beast before he becomes invulnerable. It's at least 50/50 and easily becomes a 2-cycle kill if it doesn't work.