I just ran a route attempting to get all of the player skills as early as possible:

I know it can still use some improvements. The section in the cathedral in particular is pretty sloppy, because I started getting lost.

In either case, routing the skills this way with no hiccups will easily take about 45min to an hour, but since the shard cost of nodes on the skill tree is based on how many shards you've already invested, I'm curious to see if this would enable you to grab some optimal skill upgrades with minimal shard investment, farming some perks during/after finishing retrieving all skills.

My initial thoughts on continuing a full run from this would be to farm T1 perks, kill the Area 1 boss and see if that's enough to set you up for farming T2 perks (and thus getting you closer to being ready to take on the Area 2 boss)

In this route I grab the corrupted Leaping Device because cannon strats + glide help navigate a few of the Cathedral areas.

so on my insane play though I'm doing currently i don't take the same route you did. i literally just went straight up the cathedral i didn't touch the right side of the map at all. so i feel like you could do that instead of going around the long way. its amazing what you can do using the up attack between each jump and wall jump. you can easily climb directly up a wall and if there are enemies attacking you then its even easier to climb directly up. this was all on a full resist play though as well so i didn't corrupt any abilities. I feel like in a speedrun of this you wouldn't get the cannon at all as its not needed. to finish the game. you ¤might¤ be able to skip the air dash, but i use that to climb the cathedral a lot. not sure if going the long way on the cathedral is a time save over getting the dash. you should defiantly be using the up attack more often when climbing it helps a lot.

Yeah, since making this clip I've discovered some more efficient routes in Area 3 for pathing to the skills - in my speedrun I used corrupted dash to go up near the 1st elevator to start continuing the path up towards the wall run, which shaved a bunch of time off the strat. In the video in this thread I wasn't as familiar with Area 3, I kept getting lost and dying because of it lol.

I'm not 100% sure, but I thought the path to the cannon was necessary in order to unlock the Area 1 Boss room. In either case, the cannon is extremely versatile as a utility tool, especially for momentum.

• The earliest place it's useful is right after you get it - you can use it to bypass the entirety of the puzzle before the Area 1 Boss room by going up to the top, firing a shot backwards and doing a doublejump halfway through your trajectory to jump yourself in the area with the hidden shard.
• In my runs, I find that I Return to Sanctuary a lot in Area 2, because there are a lot of divergent paths, especially if you're trying to pick up skills and route to bosses, etc. You can use the cannon to launch yourself into Area 2 or Area 3 the same way, face backwards, fire the cannon, double jump, then attack (or glide if you've unlocked it).
• In Area 3 I use these backcannon jumps + glide to fly over wide open areas, such as the area before Wall Run and the path to the T3 chest arena from the upper right (sorta disconnected) elevator. I think there are similar spots you can use it near the grappling hook skill.

I can definitely agree that the up attack has its uses, it's a mechanic I'm still trying to work into my runs. I haven't practiced the up-attack climbing strats much yet, but I find myself only really needing that stuff in Area 3 and corrupted air dash seems to fit my use for this for right now.

In my experience learning this game, it seems that some level of farming is necessary - you need skill upgrades to compete with the mobs in the new areas (especially area 3), and perk upgrades give a huge bonus when you can farm T2/T3 chests.