Arcuz 2 Glitched Guide

# **Arcuz 2 Glitched Guide**

For the fastest run possible it is necessary to stack attack potions to massively increase your damage over time. Stacked potion effects however will reset whenever you use the accept button in the skill panel locking you out of learning new skills while maintaining your increased damage. This means that there are only a few discrete points in the run where you learn new skills, because they gain enough time afterwards to warrant resetting your attack power, which splits any run into up to 4 segments, depending on what category you play.

# Segment 1: Level 1-6

During the tutorial part of the game the shop as well as any form of duping are not freely accessible and only unlock so towards the end of the segment. This means that you will have to play this segment like a glitchless run and at the same time select suitable skills to learn, doing your early quests and getting “Lore Keeper” for some extra cash. The reason you have to extend this segment up to level 6, in spite of it being possible to complete at a lower level, is because dual-wielding unlocks at 6, allowing you to glitch out your basic attack speed to boost your initial damage massively, meaning that any potion stacking and by extension having the glitches that allow you to obtain the potions needed prior to level 6 is pointless. To speed up segment 1 along the way, it is also quite suitable to get some axe skills and unlock axe reaper, a very powerful aoe skill to be going on with. This however requires 5 skill points atop dual wielding, while you only have 5 points total via levelups, leaving you 1 point short. This means it is very advisable to reset a single levelup during the tutorial part preferably from level 2 to 3 at the earliest possibility to gain that extra skillpoint, which can very well be done while still reaching level 6 at the end within the limited amount of enemies the tutorial gives you to kill without backtracking. Strength is the only stat that should be invested.

# Segment 2: Level 6-20

Once you clear the tutorial part of the game at level 6 you will immediately get an attack potion and defence potion which you can start stacking right away. Use the one minute duration to handle the remaining essential tasks. Once the shop unlocks get an other attack, a berserk, and a magic resistance potion as well as some dupe fodder and dupe them up a bit, while starting stack to attack and magic resistance potions, as you are entering the dungeon. You will eventually need enough magic resistance potions to bring your magic resistance to 100% and enough attack potions for the rest of the game. You can use item drops you get along the way as duping fodder. For some healing you can dupe up the small rejuvenation potions you get during the tutorial and use them as needed. While not necessarily worth buying or duping it is advisable to also stack any defence potion you may find along the way for the extra survivability. Once again strength is the only stat that should be invested.

# Segment 3: Level 20-61

At level 20 you unlock level 3 Sprint, which is the only skill in the entire game worth resetting your attack stat for, meaning your damage will be reset and has to be stacked up again. In theory one could argue to go for level 10 or 15 for level 1 and 2 Sprint respectively, but since these segments would be very short till the skill improves again, you wouldn't be able to reraise your attack power enough to gain the time back and more crucially would also lack sufficient power to deal with the minotaur at level 17. And while there is not a lot of time between level 20 and 28 aka between getting Sprint level 3 and the beholder fight to reraise your damage either, it is enough time since the beholder is not very tanky. Also since your damage resets you will not only want to learn Sprint level 3 with a level 1 glitched cooldown, you will also want to learn a variety of other skills that increase your damage immediately, to not lose too much time until your attack potions make you op again. This means a level 2 Berserk with a level 1 glitched cooldown and level 2 Fire Elemental. Since you glitched for an extra skillpoint early on you’ll have 20 total, 7 in purple skills, 1 in dual-wield and 5 in axe skills. This leaves you with 8 more points, which is just enough to get axe reaper maxed out, giving it much shorter cooldown and much greater damage upfront. It is also a viable alternative to instead of level 20, reset your stats at level 21, which gives you Fire Elemental level 3, which gives you a much better initial dps boosts then Fire Elemental level 2. With this setup you will progress all the way to Balor which can be fought at level 61 at the earliest. Once again strength is the only stat that should be invested, although swapping it out for agility for some extra block rate could be an option, if your damage is sufficient and you are not playing for Balor 2.

# Segment 4: Balor 2

The postgame forces you to reload via the credits, shutting down your potion stacks. But since you need new and more skills for it anyway, this is a nonissue. As you won’t be spending over 5 minutes doing the prepwork for the fight, using potions for 100% magic resistance is not an option, instead keep or buy some item(s) with magic resist compose(s) and stack that to 100%. Since skeleton archers and a few skeleton kings will be all you fight using your own weapon damage, stacking your attack stat is not too important and if you have invested strength for the entire game even a few attack potion stacks will be enough. The prepwork itself apart from setting up magic resist and a little bit of damage is about getting a huge stack of diamond angel tears and some large rejuvenation potions and learning all the skills needed for the fight. You should max out Deflection, Damage Reflection, Berserk, Battle Frenzy, Last Stand and Enlightenment, all of which contribute to your survivability and damage output against Balor 2 and come up to a total of 41 skill points, which works out perfectly from a level 20 last attack reset, but forces you to get an extra point somewhere from level 21 somehow or go level 62 instead. It should be noted that enlightenment, any form of agility investment prior or having any armor apart from a shield for high block rate equipped, will decrease the reflected damage on Balor 2. But at the same time, since battle frenzy causes berserk triggers to occur uncontrollably all over the place, you still want some basic defences to handle skeleton kings and archers spawning in, which is why Enlightenment is still very advisable.

Arcuz 2 Glitchless Guide

# Arcuz 2 Glitchless Guide

Arcuz 2 glitchless makes for a both extremely dull and extremely interesting speedrun. Since the game suffers from very poor balancing in general the resulting strategies and tactics are mostly very simplistic and many features of the game go largely unused. On the other hand since the game randomly creates the dungeon, every single playthrough, enemy layout and resulting situation ingame is different. This means that playing this game fast is very much about managing the few tools you have into the randomness that the game throws at you.

# General Considerations

To cover the aforementioned simplistic strategies we need to look at a few basics of this game.

## Weapon Choice

The choice of weapon is a very simple one: Axe + Shield. This has the highest base damage and also the highest damage against armor of armored enemies. You also get access to the hugely powerful and spammable axe reaper skill. The offset of course is the low basic attack speed, but since you fight a lot with skills in this game, basic attack speed is not that relevant and for when it is, you can also use the sprint skill, which doubles your attack speed, raising it to the attack speed cap and entirely removing this downside of the Axe almost entirely.

## Resource Management

In Arcuz 2 you can buy healing and SP potions in stacks, meaning as long as you have the money for it, using skills and healing off damage is a near infinite resource, which pushes all other forms of resource management to near irrelevance and simplifies it to a simple money management game.

## Composition for item effects

Since the power of an effect compose scales exponentially with it’s level and so does the failure rate of crafting it, the timeinvestement/payoff ratio of crafting composes in Arcuz 2 is extremely bad. The only composes that can be worth trying are level 1 or level 2 % attack modifiers on accessories, since you can keep them for the entire game and they do provide a reasonable damage gain, but this is also only really interesting for the longer categories.

## Character Stats

Since the base stats of the Hero scales exponentially with level and invested character stats are only added to that, any such investment into Strength, Agility or Constitution provides little actual stat gain relative to your base stats. Luck on the other hand has a very bad conversion rate to critical ratio and the basic drop rate in this game is very high. What it boils down to is that strength is the sole stat that is ever worth investing in, since enemies later in the game are extremely tanky and you just need to push your basic damage as much as possible and going strength only is just the best way to get you there.

## Skills

The only general mechanic in the game that is exceedingly complex and requires much attention to detail is the skills. You gain one ability point per levelup and some from certain quests, which you can use to learn a new skill or improve an existing one. There is a large variety of skills and learning the correct ones and then using them correctly in combat (in case of an active skill) is a crucial part of this game, both in a casual and a speedrunning setting. In the following list the optimal skill sequence for Any % will be given. Balor 2 glitchless speedruns require different skills to succeed and will be shown after the **OR** in the list whenever they vary compared to the other categories. And while certain changes to the sequence based on personal preference can be reasonable, what skills should be aimed for in general stays the same.

Level 	Skills learned

2-6	Axe Proficiency lv.1, Axe Final Blow lv.3, Axe Reaper lv. 1

7	Berserk lv.1

8	Charge Slash I

9-10	Berserk lv. 2, Sprint lv.1

11	Hurricane I lv.1

12-15	Berserk lv.3, Sprint lv.2, Fire Elemental lv.1, Charge Slash II

16-17	Hurricane I lv.3

18	Fire Elemental lv.2

19	Hurricane II lv.1 

20	Sprint lv.3

21	Fire Elemental lv.3

22-24	Hurricane II lv.3, Axe Final Blow lv.4

25	Blade Storm lv. 1

26-27	Axe Final Blow lv.6

28	Blade Storm lv. 2

29-30	Axe Reaper lv. 2, Axe Final Blow lv.7

31	Blade Storm lv.3

32-34	Axe Final Blow lv.9, Axe Reaper lv. 3

35-44	Enlightenment lv.10 OR Battle Frenzy lv. 10

45	Summon Storm lv.1

46-47	Axe Proficiency OR Master of Defense lv.1, Deflection lv.1

48	Summon Storm lv.2

49-50	Axe Proficiency OR Last Stand lv. 2

51	Summon Storm lv.3

52-62	Axe Proficiency OR Last Stand lv. 5, Shield Bash I lv.3, Shield Bash II lv. 3, Damage Reflection lv. 5 (Balor 2 should get all 3 extra points from quests throughout the game)



# Speedrun Route

At the start of the run head towards the well and mash space for a bit to get the free potion, then go to gran and buy all items he has on offer. They cost nothing and sell for nothing, but in the next chapter, they will be worth money to sell, so it is effectively free money from the two weapons you don’t need. After checking back in with Wayne, head to Paul and mash space at the tree to his left to get the other free potion. This will net you the lore keeper achievement and 2k gold as a reward, which make for good starting funds. You will need to restart the swf for every run, because the difficulty of getting these free potion increases with every one you get and this does not reset when you start a new game from the menu, only resetting the swf entirely will do that. After this, progress the quests and buy all the health potions from Susan when prompted to. They are at their cheapest in chapter I, so buying later loses money. Proceed through the tutorials and fully clear the spider forest for the antivenom quest before handing it in, which should net you level 6, giving you axe reaper from the get go in the dungeon. Once you hit chapter 2, be sure to buy all sp potions and the attack and berserk potion, and more health potions if you feel the need from them. With such plenty resources for sp and health, you can progress to C4 quickly and rescue Celeste. This will net you the ancestral set with 15 extra damage as a set bonus, which makes it offensively superior to any random armor you can find, since armor by default can not have damage boni outside of critical hit ratio. You will also now be able to restock on potions and also buy medium health and sp potions, meaning even more resources to use, if you can afford them. And afer this is basically where all dedicated and semi-dedicated strategizing drowns in the randomness of this game. The Ancestral Set should be carried all the way to Minotaur and combined with a good shield and axe, net you a pretty doable win. Attack, Defence and Magic Defence Potions will help with this atop you equipment. After that your entire gear will turn into an assortment of whatever random drops give you the best stats, since the ancestral set just has too little basic defence to be going on with for much longer and the damage bonus of becomes increasingly insignificant before you raw base damage. Later during the run, Blade Storm and Summon Storm offer significant power spikes and you can start doing trials with them to get lots of experience and good items. There are no sidequests worth doing except for those that are part of the main questline and those that gain extra skillpoints for Balor 2 runs. With accessories you can go and craft for level 2 % attack and level 2 crit modifications. This is only worth the time in the longer runs and of course you can use stuff you get dropped if it is any good as well. No other composes for effects are ever worth it since you just keep getting new golden gear from various sources, whose higher raw base stats tend to outweigh anything composition could offer on lower level items.

# Random Dungeon Generation

The final part of the equation of this speedrun is reading what little you can read of the random dungeon generation. You can sometimes pinpoint staircases or outrule the possibility thereof based on door transitions you see in adjacent rooms. You also need to be ready to get thrown into random boss battles with a dual headed giant or a skeleton king at any time. Effectively breaking the armor of all sorts of armored enemies and maintaining your combo for maximum experience are also important, but there isn’t any secret tech to this, just do the best with what the game gives you in terms of rng. If you are ever short of a level threshold you need to get, just save and quit when you reach a teleport platform and thus generate the dungeon anew.

# Accidental glitchuse and prevention thereof

There is a large variety of glitches in this game most of which can not happen by accident during a speedrun and some of which are even allowed in glitchless by default. There are however also glitches that can easily invalidate a speedrun, so an overview is on this is needed.

## The unavoidable stat-stacking glitch

If you press the accept button in the skill panel, while having hp on kill, sp on kill, extra weight or magic resistance effect composes on any of your equipped items, these stats will compound themselves. It is unreasonable to ask the player to ditch any item with such an effect. It is also unreasonable to ask the player to never learn new skills with such an effect equipped. The community has settled to the following rules to minimize the potential of this glitch. First you can never press the accept button in the skillpanel without actually having invested at least one point. Second you have to reload the game to reset this glitch before any of the 4 major bossfights. The reason for this are for ease of verification and consistency between runs.

## Problematic glitches

Next up are glitches that can easily happen during play, which will invalidate a run, if they happen.

### Glitched Cooldowns

If you increase the level of any active skill, this will increase it’s cooldown and improve it’s effect. However this increased cooldown does not update until you also reassign that skill anew to your skill hotbar, but the improved effect is still applied. This is why you are required to update any active skill in your hotbar by putting it into it from your skillpanel, every time you increase it’s level before you are allowed to use this skill again.

### Potion Stacking

If you have any potion active, that boosts a stat visible in your character panel and then open the character panel to show the increased stat, while you have unspent character points, and than press the accept button after the boosting potion has run out, the boost will be permanently applied to you until you save and quit. This applies to attack potions, magic defence potions, defence potions and archangel potions. And since you level up quite a few times and invest stats during the run and also use boosting potions quite a lot, this glitch can happen quite easily, if you are not careful. This can also happen with the Holy Light skill, which is also not allowed, though boosting potions are far more likely to invalidate a run by mistake via this glitch.

## Explicitly allowed glitches or exploits

There are also some glitches or exploits in the game that are accepted in the glitchless category.

### Animation Cancelling

If you pause the game you can use the pause timer this applies to overwrite some ingame delay timer. This allows you to regain control quicker after using certain skills, but also allows you to dodge some attack much better or cancel them completely.

### Detrimental Glitches

There is a variety of ways a players stats or movement speed can detrimentally glitch out in this game, some of which are outside the players control. The player may continue play or fix such a thing via save and quit if it happens at his own leisure or however it loses him the least amount of time.

Optimal route for Minotaur% (Obsolete)

1. Complete tutorial , and go to doungon (buy 1 town portal)
2. Comlete cave 1-3 (remember about portal).
3. Cave 4, after talking to Celeste use Town Portal on hotkey. (remember about portal).
4. Complete ,,Stoned" Celeste.
5. Buy Schimitar lvl 10 when you finish  ,,Stoned" Celeste in the village.
6. Equip Gear you get after helping Celeste.
7. After talking to Wayne go as fast to Celste as possible to skip Cutscene of Chapter 3 with starting quest of beating minotaur.
8. Before going back to duengon go to Paul and start mission to get trap.
9. Complete duengons 1-3.
10. Complete duengon 4 as fast as possible, and collect trap, after collecting use town portal and give it to Paul and get 1 AP, if there is time sell usless stuff (don't buy anything).
(remember about portal).
11. Enter duengon 5 (use Sprint to beat duengon quicker).
12. Complete duengon 6. 
13. If you didn't reach level 19 and completed duengon 6 Save and Quit And Continue.
Duengon will be restarted and you will have more EXP to reach level 19.( Level 19 beacuse Minotaur have level 21, if you get to level 20 Minotaur will get to level 22, But if you will be at level 18 Minotaur will still be at level 21, and you will deal smaller DMG to Minotaur.
14. After Getting level 19 go back to village and Finnaly Buy Gear and Schimitars, and potions. After buying quickly do Combination.
15. Beat Minotaur (this won't be hard with 1 trick i'll explain later)
16. Timing ends when minotaur drops his chests.
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Skills strats:
Priority of giving points.
1. Luck (for critical hits).
2. Strenght (for carrying stuff and more DMG).
3. Constitution (for more HP and Mana).
4. Agility (usless, beacuse shield doesen't help that much.
---------------------------------------------------------
Ability points strats:
1. To duengon 1 You need to get Falchion final blow to level 3 and its super-skill Falchion furry, this will help.
2. After reaching level ten Priority is to get Charge slash I , second one is at level 15, get that as quickly as possible beacuse its recomanded for Minotaur fight.
3. Spend rest on: Sprint skill, health regen skill, battle frenzy ,and berzerk.
---------------------------------------------------------
Minotaur fight strats:
1. Do Charge slash II after Minotaur does The Axe Slash (only after that)
2. Use Falchion furry after he is Semi-knocked out.
3. After Minotaur is at low health, he Roars, you can use this opportunity to do Charge Slash II.
4.Remember to stock up on potions and use Sprint.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day.

Name	Author
Arcuz 2 Glitched Guide	Bimbelimbim 1 month ago
Arcuz 2 Glitchless Guide	Bimbelimbim 1 month ago
Optimal route for Minotaur% (Obsolete)	kiraa96 5 years ago