We haven't counted drop in/drop out exploits as co-op so far. I know there are other games with speed runs that use multiple controllers, though I don't know how many control multiple characters that way. Definitely would be a pain if you didn't have 2 controllers though!

I found a lot of skips, but every once in a while someone surprises me with a brand new one. I've looked around out of bounds a good bit, but haven't run into any time saves since that last NG+ video. I haven't paid much attention to the extra stages for the "all levels" run, so those would be more likely to have some drop in/drop out exploits. I think Any% is pretty ripe for a serious time save, as the run is a bit old now and could probably benefit from some of the drop in/drop out tricks.

When Siopilos found the out of bounds skip in Pathway 2 I told him it was going to make all runners pull their hair out forever. There are some things you can do to help make it through the level, but if you get a bad level (like one that just goes 4 or 5 screens to the right at the start) you kind of just have to cut your losses and chaos amulet back in bounds. Getting a feel for when you need to slightly walk over a path to lose some altitude and start descending when you're going to high is important. Also, once you're under the map and descending, it's time to chaos amulet back in as soon as possible. Honestly, if you're on a good pace I would suggest not bothering with that skip if you're not comfortable with it and recovering from an unlucky level. My best time in a run with that skip is 1:45, my best time without it is 1:51, so the single-level 1:03 is fairly deceptive.

The one-cycles are definitely something I had to practice to get the timing down for. One small tip that is easy to overlook for Khamun is that you want your potion to land on his heart as well, since the potion does a bit of bonus damage on top of the damage the arrow does. On The Beast, you want to be all the way against the right wall, since his charge will knock you back and interrupt your potion if you leave a gap. Those tricks definitely seem like ones that will be harder on a controller, with the long distance shots required.

Currently platform is just a field in each category, but if the PS4 version differs from the PC version, a PS4 section would be cool. I haven't ever played the PS4 version, so I can't really comment on which PC skips might not work on PS4, or if the PS4 version might even have additional skips. It will be cool to see what you all run into on the PS4 version if you're putting together runs.

Howdy there! It's awesome to see some more interest in running this game. It would be cool to add some of the PS4 tips like making a new save file to the "guides" section, since I don't believe anyone who was running the game previously used PS4.

Found a slightly faster way to kill Khamun the other day. It's 2 power shots instead of 5, use ring of mirrors, and fire your ultimate arrow right as, or very slightly before, they fire their first volley of arrows. Your ultimate arrow should hit right as they fire their second volley of arrows, killing Khamun.

That sounds good to me. Still end up with some loading times but if you load the level once, it really minimizes the loading time after that, probably by caching the level assets. It's a shame we don't have automatic split support but I'm afraid that is probably beyond me.

I think there used to be an in game timer before they released Slayer Edition. No one has submitted individual level runs so the rules are outdated and not really very good currently. Maybe we could start as soon as the loading screen starts transitioning into the in-game screen, but it kind of just does a smooth transition from the loading screen to the playable screen, with no black screen between. The end always goes to black though, either before the "Floor Cleared!" screen or before it kicks you back to the level select screen if you picked up 0 gold in the stage, so I'd say the first totally black frame would be the best time to end it on. The level start is a bit harder to say, one option that might work if we want to go super accurate would be the first frame when the tips/loading screen starts fading to the in-game screen. I circled the easiest to see spot where this happens. It is the black bar directly above the tip text. It becomes transparent on the first frame of the transition and makes it easy to see when it starts. We don't always have to time it exactly, but it would be a decent rule to use and would make it possible to compare 2 extremely close times if it comes down to that.

Howdy, great to see someone else posting around here :P

It would be cool to see the side levels added to the level leaderboard. That's what you mean by the silver levels, right? The colosseum levels might work in their own category similar to the level leaderboard, since there are a lot of them and they cycle through daily. It would be hard to get the names of all of them though since I don't think anyone has written them all down yet.

Finally came up with a pretty reliable way to kill Morak in a single cycle. I've been killing off all of his illusions and other enemies, hitting him with 3 regular arrows, then kite the sword until it does the ground slash attack. When it starts, I land a mortar shot directly on Morak and pop ring of mirrors next to him and let it finish him off.

Landing all the one-cycle kills, getting lucky with maze levels, and landing a couple lucky keys from polymorph should allow for times in the mid 42:XX range. With incredible luck in maze levels that might be pushed down below 42 minutes but unless we run into another huge skip I don't think it's really possible to go below 41 minutes currently.

The strategy for The Beast is to fire 2 regular right clicks, then fire your first potion shot as soon as he starts doing his charge animation in order to get both potion shots fired in time.

Just came up with a pretty reliable way to one-cycle kill The Sun King as well. If you get the timing down you should be able to do it consistently. It's 5 right clicks, pop ring of mirrors, fire your potion off to hit at the same time the illusions hit with their arrows.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Invisibility is really useful on the levels where you have to work the cranks. Just pop it and crank away worry-free. You're also invulnerable to Death while invisible, and it will quickly despawn him too.

Probably pretty close either way, wizard can go invisible on the buttons so that you don't have to run from the boss, elf is going to be slightly faster getting to the boss, probably a bit faster damaging the heart.

Looks like elf is the way to go for The Beast as well as Morak. Pretty effortless to get a 2-cycle kill on The Beast, I managed to get a 1-cycle kill on him that was pretty funny but took a lot of attempts. I also crash if I restart on that stage so it was a bit of a pain to practice.

1-cycle fights definitely seem to be luck based still. I'll probably try some more things with timing attacks on Morak, but it's probably best to try to just force him out of his first cycle as fast as possible until we come up with a consistent strategy for it. If you have a video of him dying at 20% it'd probably be worth looking it over to see if there is some way to just force end the fight and go right to the end cutscene.