Starting a new thread to discuss difficulty. I removed hard from every category, since we had no contested runs and hard really is not any different from easy 90% of the time and the changes don't add much for speedruns. Chaos I only kept for the character runs. I can also add it to NG+ anthologies if someone runs those categories but for now they were just empty. I think this is as streamlined as we need it to be? But anyone can suggest new difficulty discussion here.

Good idea, this discussion was all over the place.

I am for keeping Hard mode for the NG categories specifically, but I know there hasn't been competition yet, so I'm okay leaving it out and then adding it once there's competition in the threads like we did with other runs. Once I feel like Any% is in a good place, I plan on running Hard Mode Any%.

The big difference with Hard Difficulty Any% (besides difficulty, better item drops and more exp) is the fact suddenly 4th weapons and orbs enter the mix. While orbs is probably not important, I imagine 4th weapons could be. We could end up with a completely different Easy and Hard mode meta.