The holy grail of a morak fight for all difficulties is definitely landing a 3 sword hit on him on phase 1 with your illusions hitting him too. He's locked into his vulnerable form until the last sword hit has completed AFAIK. I don't know if you can clear all the enemies and morak clones and then wait for sword hits after a while to just simply lay your illusions on him without a massive RNG factoring in though (sword will target illusions btw), I haven't experimented with it yet but it's an idea. If anyone is still playing this game give it a shot!

If this is all blabbering nonsense check my video here (Skip ahead):

Hard mode is a much more interesting aspect to the game, but i could do with or without it. Gauntlet being advertised as hard and dying over and over again isn't really showcased in easy speedruns of the game, so it's a strong case to have the higher difficulty as a category. But on that same note we won't really attract many newer players to the game either way. That being said optimizing your gameplay further beyond resource management and having a good route is probably (as shown by the op) something of more interest to the players that already play the game.

PS nice NG+ run crushing my time :) I should have rolled as elf more and not made so many mistakes, I may come back to this game, but easy mode got boring after a couple of runs. The holy grail time save of 1 or 2 cycle morak is pretty offputting too.

PSS if you want someone elses Hard mode NG+ any% run to compete with, iirc i felt pretty good about this, even though I didn't complete the run (but let's just pretend morak doesn't exist...)

Me and Boomer are communicating good rules and categories for this game at the moment. Expect great options in the future, I also saw your live stream of the game malzahar, I immediately wanted to compete your time on the site but work had to be done here x) Here's to future gauntlet runs!

One very important thing I think that needs to be made available to users wanting to run a new file for the game should be instructions on how to start a new file without losing current progress (having 2 files essentially). Malzahar looks like he shares this troublesome detail with me, so it may very well be a somewhat of a bad idea to even keep the new file categories if it is not possible to have 2 files. Of course malzahars solution is a good one. We could call the categories NG+ No Item and NG+ with items

Thank you for updating the rules, it's much appreciated! The only bit that kind of bothers now is the english is a little bit silly in this sentence: "Time ends when you do the final it on Morak."

And also thanks for the new category, but also can you add New Game+? With the rules at the bottom of my initial post I think this would nice for people who want to speedrun the game but not on a fresh file. It also wouldn't obsolete previous runs which is a win win for everyone. Just a quick repost of that:

Time starts at "Start Game", complete all main path stages, time ends at Morak's Death scene trigger.

No going out of bounds or clipping walls in game, or other major game skipping/breaking/glitch methods.

You are allowed to use unlocked weapons, relics, and talismans. (And switch characters for different stages submit most used character)

Gauntlet is pretty fun to speedrun in my opinion and although it doesn't have much activity the current rules for speedrunning this game under all its current categories are completely unacceptable. Let's go over each and how it can be made better, more fun for the players and more entertainment for the viewers.

Glitchless (current rules): Time starts when pressing "Start Game", Time ends when cutscene after Morak starts

I'm ok with the time starting at "Start Game" and ending at Morak's death cutscene. Here's the issue though, this game is played on ps4/steam, once you've played through the game once you unlock all the stages to immediately pick. The vagueness of this rule allows you to select easy mode, and kill morak in less than 2 minutes (on the 1st phase even) if you're lucky enough to land 3 sword hits and a ring of illusions spawn directly on top of the correct morak. Which I have submitted as my own world record time being 2min 21sec.

No wall boosting, warps or any other glitches.

This is ok as a rule but it's also vague about what is and is not allowed. It does not point out what constitutes a warp, the importance here should be more directed at completing the regular stages without going out of bounds or clipping walls in game, or other major game skipping methods.

Additionally it is important to clarify in the rules whether or not you are allowed to use unlocked weapons, relics, and talismans. Preferably they should be allowed, as optimizing your character is not level based but preference based and once you unlock something for your character you keep it forever. Intentionally limiting yourself to 1 weapon (the default) allows for no creativity or variety in a speedrun. And of course limiting your talisman to the default makes elf by far the best option as he can clear multiple spawners more optimally than other characters default, and not having a relic just slows down gameplay further. There would be no planning behind a somewhat major cooldown for clearing rooms in a more strategic way.

Switching characters should also be fine, this game is very balanced (even the necromancer is) and some are better at dealing with certain stages than others, it's all a matter i guess if you want to sacrifice the time selecting another character for a certain stage.

In the end the rules should be the following imo: Time starts at "Start Game", complete all main path stages, time ends at Morak's Death scene trigger.

No going out of bounds or clipping walls in game, or other major game skipping/breaking/glitch methods.

You are allowed to use unlocked weapons, relics, and talismans. (And switch characters for different stages submit most used character)