Note1: anytime talking to an npc where the camera moves to focus on them: zoom in if the camera is facing the front of them, zoom out otherwise

Note2: gate scrolls are your panic button: returning from using one gives a few seconds of delay before the enemies react to you. (be warned there is a 1 or 2 frame window where you are vulnerable during the gate out animation)

Note3: stats don’t actually do what it says on the box: STR: base melee damage +.25 damage per point strength(multiplied by slashing/blunt multiplier), 1pound per point strength in capacity, .25 attack accuracy per point strength DEX thrown and bow weapon base damage +.25 points per point DEX, defense (damage reduction) .5point/point dex (I am not quite sure how the enemy damage roll is calculated but this is a general increase) STA: .5 points of health per point of stamina rounded down, roughly .01 points of health regen per second per point health regen. INT same as stamina but for mana ¤Level gives much higher bonus to mana and health as well as the regens than points of int and stamina.

Note 4: For optimal runs do not touch stamina and dex until the final stat glitch uses. Having points in these stats can make getting killed intentionally take more than two hits. (Alternatively you can take intentional damage to enter the medallion challenge with lower health)-needs testing

Note 5: save the first whetstone you find for the weapon you will use on the endgame bosses (vanarhost and cazicthule)

Start: (can sell armor to free up some weight, not required) Buy 2 health tonics. Enter war

War: Longstaffs are the best weapons that drop outside of fire and ice weapons. A cracked longstaff is level 1, a longstaff with no prefix is level 3. The ideal situation is to get a cracked longstaff out of 1 of the first 2 chests and a longstaff from one of the later ones. equip these as soon as you can.

Open all of the chests in your way and kill enough kobolds to hit level 2 off the second large kobold and level 3 off of the last or second to last wraith. Just mash x through nataslas dialogue. When you hit level 3 put all of the points into strength and 1 skillpoint into disease bolt. This is the last time I do skill points until plane of torment.

Kill everything on the main path through the rest of the plane of war. Should level up on both shamans and rallos zek and end more than halfway to level 7.

Rallos Zek: fire a diseasebolt immediately before entering the cutscene, if it stuns him go behind him if not dodge the explosion and run up to his right knee. Rallos’s ai has a weird detection on his right knee: if you manage your placement well you can do the entire fight without having to stop attacking. Also disease bolt him as much as you can because it doesn’t have to do the attack roll to try and hit him. When he dies pick everything up and if you are close enough, go through the teleporter before his cutscene starts.

Before you enter innovation you want to do a minimum of 55-60 damage per hit. If you haven’t picked up a weapon that puts your damage that high you should do the stat glitch to increase your strength til your minimum is in that range.

Innovation: Kill the overworld enemies that are in your way and tag the teleporter on your way to the mines. The last area before the mine is a major pain so I just run straight through it. Kill about 1/2 of the enemies in the way in the mines and you should be fine on experience.

For the boss of innovation: always move counterclockwise so the arrow attack doesn’t kill you. Bait a melee and then attack its back until you have to block the swing. The bomb guys do decent damage to the boss so take advantage of them. Take the teleporter back to the plane of innovation teleporter and give the thing to the gnome and gatescroll.

Pit of ill omen: you want to enter the pit with a minimum of about 90 damage per hit and its good to have about 100 int as well for killing droon and broon. Only kill the trident dudes and frogs that are convenient, droon and broon will both give you openings if you can get behind them and get them to do their fart poison attacks. Outside of that you can just spam diseasebolts to do damage. For broon you can also stay just outside of melee range and spam disease bolt so you don't get screwed. For proon you can just attack him from in front and guard his attacks.

Open the chests in droon and broon's arenas: I’ve had good luck with weapons from them before and you can open them during the fight without wasting time

Final island: I haven’t actually found out whether the other entrances are faster or slower but I take the first possible entrance. Kill enemies until you are a bit past level 10.

Plane of water: if you feel like your damage is good you can go into water without doing any stat increases. Otherwise go until your damage is around 150. Kill trident dudes where convenient. Remember to hit the teleporter in the center. I do left center right but it doesn’t really make any difference. When pushing the pillars, if you can get the right angle on the side you can push it faster than when you are straight behind it but it is easy to just walk past it, so I don’t go for it very often in the more dangerous areas. Kill pretty much all of the skeletons in the path you take. By the end of water you should end up around 1/3 of the way to level 12. Its okay to be a bit lower than that but you will have to kill more enemies in torment.

Torment: before entering need around 600 500 50 100 can go much higher on DEX and STA if you want to be able to take more than 1-2 hits from cazic thule Level up upon entering torment, 1 point into life tap, endurance, engulfing darkness, rest into whatever weapon type you are using. If you want you can level up diseasebolt for a little extra damage, but not necessary and tracking makes it harder to aim in fights with multiple targets. In the second area of torment there is a skip. For the skip first clear out this area

Then clear to here and steal the flame and shadow step back to ^

This allows you to skip going around a large loop.

From this point just run through the cathedral and skip as many of the enemies as you can(including the miniboss)

Disease: Plane of disease is pretty standard. There isn’t much to say other than when spider webs hit you attack once and they will break.

Plane of valor 1st and 2nd time is just a run to mithanial marr

Plane of fire: just run through normally until you get to the lava pump puzzle area Go down the ladder that leads to the area where you have to go around to the pumps. Run past the enemies to this point and kill the fire guy that is here.

Then shadowstep across the gap to the other side. Then just go down the ladder and you are at the boss.

Fire Boss: Run to his left foot if he does a fire breath attack away and then guard the swipe. If he swipes guard it and run back into position. Pick up a little bit of gold on the way out to buy potions for plane of storms

Plane of storms: run to wenglox abusing gate scrolls if necessary with the invincible enemies Wenglox: run back into the entrance area and kill any dogs that follow. Kill wenglox with diseasebolt without activating his ai. Run and grab all of the drops and gatescroll away and teleport back to the mountain.
In the mountain you have to kill all of the rodents but the shamans are assholes and revive them so it is stupidly hard to not miss any During this section open up all the chests to get the money for the rest of the run. If you open all of the chests without having multiple trapped chests, you will have upwards of 90k gold. Buy a lot of mana potions and a fair number of health potions. (if you don't have a weapon by this point, buy one of the mid to upper range available from the shop)

3rd trip to plane of valor go to marr, skip through his text and do the next area as intended, potentially with summon skeleton to help get openings on the minibosses.

Halls of honor: do the forward middle path first to hit the teleporter and then do the side paths to get the scrolls and gate then teleport to get back to the middle. No need to kill any of the enemies except around the teleporter.

Faydark: run back into the elevator immediately to skip the dialogue and travel down Forrest: get the one on the right and then do the big loop to get the rest.

Plane of nightmares: run through the hedge maze into the portal and run through the archer gauntlet to vanarhost.

Vanarhost: ideally you want to have summon skeleton and a crit weapon for this fight. Hit him down until he is just over half health and wait for a fresh cycle so you can get him as low as possible before he goes into blocking mode. Summon skeleton so he will switch targets and you can hit him. Be warned the skeleton will die in one hit so the window for attacking is very short.

Cazic thule: hit him when he is summoning skeletons in phase 1, kill the skeletons as fast as possible. Phase 2 don’t get greedy: bait an attack and then hit him once and bait a new attack.