As of May 2017 there is a new HDN community Discord which will serve as a home for both general fans of the series and speedrunners for the foreseeable future. The Discord aims to be more gameplay-focused than other HDN servers out there with a dedicated room for each game/set of games, though there is still a room for Nep media.

You can use this link to join: https://discord.gg/JPJKHFH

Most of the channels are public. If you're a speedrunner of one or more games in the series you can get a "speedrunner" role to access more administrative rooms such as those for marathon planning and leaderboard administration - just PM any user with the CPU role once you've joined.

For NG+ there is no need for safety saves at all because the bosses become way to easy at around level the high 50s or so and up. Except the cpus during true end I don't actually remember what level they become easy but I would guess in the 70s.

and as of now NG+ with paid and without paid dlc will be providing super close to the same times once you get to the level 300+ range and your combos become super op but under level 100 with dlc should be minutes faster iirc.

My biggest mistake and the thing I forgot on 90% of my runs. This is why I'm saving my True End NG relearning for a much later date.

Yeah the pc version was ported pretty badly by IF/CH so not much we can do there.

Dang that is a nice cut man congrats

and for the grinding, after 99 the metal dogoo is about the only way. You can get a lot more exp by sending exp scouts there. I think 20 mil max if you include the dlc scouts?

and for the weapons. I would look at what other runner use for each character. We try to use the strongest weapon that has the max combo for a button. Then find out what items you need to get to develop the weapon. It's not too tedious especially compared to grinding the metal dogoo. It should take an hour max since you don't need to get a weapon for every character.

On NG+ there is no need to separate the free dlcs.

I can see having a no dlc NG+ like there is for NG but that will be up too the runner and for it to have it's own category that even the PS4 version doesn't have would require at least another pc runner who thinks the same imo . No point in making it another category though as almost every runner will use the level caps dlc for faster gameplay.

But adding no character customization is kinda pointless. You can grind for the best ingame weapons, armor, and accessories just as you can grind to lv 99. No reason to make it a rule for that just to have a separate category.

For now though you can run the game how you enjoy. No need to get into all of this stuff just yet since you are the only NG+ pc runner. Go and max out you time. Grind to 99, get the best weapons, and have fun.

This is just my thoughts on it. I mod but I usually let the other mods do all of the main decision making

Pc is a different category from PS4 anyways so your run will be world record. Just keep grinding it out and maximize it with your set of rules. It's never a bad idea to do arbitrary runs, especially if you like doing the run. That is where the NG with DLC, and ILs came from afterall. Get enough people in the future in on it and who knows it may become something someday.

My first run way back when was with levels in the 50s and was a bad end. Never a bad idea to finish grinding to 99 then you can see how fast your run can really go.