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.
