that would be a segmented run. afaik all runs need to be one segment

I use D2SE for my plugy shinanegans, which is really convenient for keeping several projects completely separate

would all the runners need to get the advancements or only one or split amongst all players? how hard will that be to track / verify?

Some other notes on these runs:

Waypoints are broken, you cannot use them. The game still treats it as though you havent completed acts 1-4, and the only actual waypoint you can go back to, until you complete the other acts, is Act 1 Rogue Encampment

Blood mana is cast by Harpies in the ice caverns whenever you life total is lower than your mana total, which is the case with the energy shield strat, and it makes you use life instead of mana for casting spells, meaning your life depletes while you're teleporting. However, it automatically dispells when you're below a certain amount of life % and it shouldn't kill you. You can keep teleporting. It might just be easier for you to get tagged by something while teleporting and die if you don't have health potions

hey! This has been discussed before and I did some offline testing in a previous thread years ago, but nothing really came of it. If anything, it became somewhat of a joke to suggest runners use it to cheat a run despite how obvious that would be, haha. However, there has been some interest in it lately that made me pick it up and stream it, and got some pretty good feedback about it in my stream, as well as Indrek picking it up and playing against my time. Does 2 people actively running it make it worth being a category? maybe not, but I thought I'd post my VOD here nonetheless to see if more runners are interested in picking it up, and maybe trying out a more down-to-the-millisecond speedrun of Diablo 2. It can be a really good filler for long hardcore streams that "ended early" or it can turn into serious grind-time too. Fun for all I'm sure :3

Here is my vod for -act5 Sorceress, with a time of 6:40.38. I highly suggest including milliseconds in the timing of these runs as it eventually really will come down to it. I can see runs easily approaching 6 minutes with luck and minimal mistakes

To do this run, all you need to do is put -act5 in the parameters of the executable or shortcut, the same spot you would put -sndbkg and -w. I highly recommend making a new shortcut (called diablo 2 -act5) so that you dont have to edit it every time you want to switch categories :P Whenever you make a new character with this parameter active, they will be level 33 and start in act 5. -act2, 3, and 4 work too, with different starting levels (Individual-level style speedruns could easily be done for all act bosses, but for now I'm most interested in act 5)

Strat-wise, I've tried quite a few different things, including fireball and nova for some reason, but clearly Cold is the way to go. I went with Orb but you could go blizzard if you wanted, but Orb is much easier to control on the go and you dont have to watch for monsters to run into it, as well as covering more area. I specced 5 in Energy shield so that I take less damage and have more "health", and 8 in Static Field so that I can hit all ancients with 2-3 statics before circling Madawc and casting Orb, as well as hit Baal from a safer distance. I spec 15-20 points in Vitality since you will still take regular damage, and the rest in Energy. With this much mana, you can easily teleport all the way to Doc Farren with no mana potions and have leftover to cast a few Orbs to kill him, and hopefully get at least 2 mana potions and some gold / usable loot. Continue teleporting to Shenk and Eldritch for more chances at loot before going to town (unless Farren got you 25k and a magus wand, then you could skip these two groups and get your potions now). Going to town only once in the run is optimal, just to buy enough potions. Maybe shop for a magus wand.

If you dont go full energy / energy shield, you wont have enough mana for the initial teleporting. You also use less mana potions in general, and take less damage overall, so I recommend this build. Energy shieldless build You have to run to doc farren, which is easy time loss, or you have to pop a clickable and get a mana potion or 25k item, which will become very grindy. But I'm sure it could work, too.

Good luck to anyone trying out this run!

Side-note, I have also tried other classes, but they arent nearly as exciting as the sorc. Sin and Pally both with a time of 14:38 and Barb with a time of 28:51, but I only did a few runs with these classes and like a hundred runs with Sorc. If asked I can post the vods for these too, but they can definitely be way better times and strats more polished. The hardest part is figuring out what the best way to start is, and what you need to go for in terms of drops (you need to be able to kill mobs too so this affects your strategies, unless you're going for pop-chests-only....)

Mostly unrelated note: Personally I wouldn't mind seeing -act5 come back into discussion as a category, or at least category extension, becasue the short time I did play it for testing, it was really fun. Sorc can be 7 minutes btw, at least. It'd be like Individual Level timing in some other speedrun games

Definitely think that classic strats should come back, on the same basis most others say: it's a feature of the game

we definitely do need more mods. I'd volunteer but I'd only be available when I'm not working (but I'll probably be pretty active during my months off)

retiming runs I think should be done to top X number of runs, or at the very least those that are within X amount of time of eachother

Hytyme has these settings in Glide wrapper for streaming full screen game that isn't stretched out on a wide monitor, hope this helps: https://gyazo.com/85508b08c8eef79a6748a741ac6a2763 https://gyazo.com/819f00362b4608b3c98cb22c0f4912c4

as far as capturing it, I think you can use Display capture instead of game or window capture, and you can crop it with a filter

probably for the same reasons Diablo 2 has separate categories for sc and hc, even though fundamentally there is no difference. Was a community decided thing More people run HC because it's generally better content/suspense to stream to an audience, and thus there are more runs and therefor there are better times

I think adopting the base game leaderboard's overall rules is best and more consistent - why let some categories not allow Classic conversion but others to allow it? It was a meta for a while for a few categories to take advantage of drops but in my opinion it's not that big of a deal and you can still start a run without a Skull anyways. My WR run used it, sure, but that was just playing around with the meta and I'm fine with it not being allowed

the idea of using these ingame options to our advantage like this was fun while it lasted but if the community voted to not allow it, I think all relevant categories should adopt that choice

The autosplitter works by reading a byte in memory that changes whenever the game enters a loading state and comes out of it, as far as I know. Wafu would know more about it as he wrote it, I only tested it.

the script is a Livesplit integrated "Scriptable autosplitter" that a lot of other games utilize their own version of, so there shouldn't be a reason it would crash. I've been testing it and it seems to work

Updated the guide with a couple newer strats and some things I forgot to put in to begin with! New strats are mainly using stranglers instead of infector. thanks to Macrobioboi for that! it's a really huge development because it was such a choking point for the run, this new strat is far less punishing

If there were a way to detect when you are not in-game, say with Diablo Interface then an automatic game-time-counter could be made

I did no sound in my stream today, and it honestly didn't even feel like I was playing a game. The sound is just so iconic and key to my senses knowing what's going on in-game (audio cues of being hit actually make me aware of my health, for example). but there is no doubt a time save, even minutes across a hell run like Barb

like Kinkara said, the distance from wp getting you different results depends on a whole bunch of other random events happening before you get to your destination (eg Countess), such as any monsters throwing attacks at you, running through fire (chance to hit and damage rolls), enemy movement, generating shop items, monster spawns, Your Attacks, even little background critters that are scurrying in the background use the RNG seed to generate randomness, thus pushing forward the index in the sequence. So, it's really reliable for anything that takes a short amount of time to get to and you can guarantee doing it the same every time (champ spawns, superchests in LK) but not reliable for things like guaranteeing what Andy will drop for example, since way too many other things can happen that you can't guarantee will be the same by the time you get there.

There are seeded category speedruns for some games that also have seeded generation. Minecraft, for example. They find seeds that are perfect for that particular category and grind out the execution portion of it to get WRs

"1) I would suggest that the seed is active. Shrines stay the same. Monster groups stay the same. People share their seeds when they submit their run, and the seed value is made public. Everyone else gets the opportunity to explore the WR seed and try to do better."

Absolutely this ^

what I like about the possibility of Seeded runs is there can be a different kind of seed setup for different characters, normal and hell. It could also mean, what if we find a seed where jail setup isn't necessary? Where champion fallen packs show up at every corner along the way to Andariel for example, and Champ Beetles at every corner in act 2 and suddenly you're 18 at the same time you'd be 18 with jail strats, but now you're halfway through act 2. There could be a bounty put on such a seed. Runners who are pushing hard for this category could instead push for looking for a perfect seed, rather than a random seed that could be lost forever if it had a chance to be exceptional. And it could be a community effort, too. Anyone who thinks they found a really good seed for runners to use could share it. There could be a thread for sharing seeds, with clear rules about sharing them (make sure they are described well in the thread) with the current meta(s) being sticky/at the top

3. Challenge runs are a fun idea and always have been and make great events and races, but I agree don't belong on these boards. The one exception was Pacifist, which is a category many games feature on their boards or subgame boards because it is a common goal across speedrunning. Another challenge I could see being a category because it is featured in other games is All Characters, which is a hell-length speedrun that has a lot of possibilities for optimization and new challenges for runners of this game.

2 and 3) Speedruns that utilize something like Plugy to work will need clear rules as to what is and isn't allowed during the run and how to properly enforce them, if they were to be on the boards. Verification of runs is difficult for mods to do with the length of most runs, it would be moreso difficult if mods had to be 100% certain someone didn't use the Reset Skills button that Plugy features, for example

it's technically a mod of the game so I'd say leave it out for speedrunning purposes. Keeping the original bugs in the game, for better or for worse, is a part of speedrunning, and unless it's an official patch from Blizzard it should not be allowed. I'm sure casual players could appreciate it, though!

Clipped this from MacroBioBoi's stream just now, looks like a very good cheese for melee range, if replicable