Hello all

I started speedrunning SOR2 about 2 months ago. I do not have a ton of time, so I started trying to speedrun on the easy difficulty as about 30 minutes is a sweet spot for me either waking up early before work, or at night before bed. I exceeded my original goal of a sub 30 min run, and now want to get to sub 25. I feel like I have plateaued where most of my runs end in the 28 minute mark. I try to constantly improve where my bottlenecks are at but still seem to be stuck at 28 which makes me want to ask a few questions: -Is playing only on easy teaching me bad habits? -I have been watching the Anthopants no death mania attempts on twitch and wonder if I should be trying to play on harder difficulties to improve my overall skill -Should I be developing easy specific strats? -Am I an idiot for even deciding a sub 25 on easy is a benchmark I want to obtain?

Sorry for the long post mostly just looking for advice of those that have done this before. I am fully aware that this may just be I don't have the necessary amount of time to make the jump to the next skill plateau and that is ok too. I am just curious what others have experienced.

Thanks!

Each characters and Difficulties change the way you have/can play the game, there's things you can do on Easy that you can't on normal or higher difficulties.

• Is playing on easy teach you bad habits ? if you want to play easy not at all, If you plan to do Mania 1cc or some other stuff like that, yes of course it seem pretty obvious.

• The game teaches you everything on Hardest in order to understand enemies AI and learn your character in the intended way. Mania is the step further, game speed is so fast that you only have the best options to use and it test your ability to react and improve the situations in a small amount of time but if you watch Anthony streams you'd know that already. Yes you have to play at least Hardest to have the full experience compared to the easy modes.

• You always do use strats in speedruns. It will develop once you understand the way the game work by experience and observations. SOR2 is impacted by RNG sadly though and some strats are used to avoid having to deal with that RNG.

• Are you an idiot to set a goal in your speedruns ? Yes ! go speedrun SOR3 it's a way much better speedrun with no rng lol. Of course you're not an idiot ! you can easily get that mark once you understand the game better and it's good to set up goals to reach for your runs otherwise it'll be pretty pointless.

For easy mode it's really simple so you don't need that much commitment to the game, just be consistent, never get hit/ko and get good RNG overall your run gonna already spike at 24mins mark. Trust me being able to reach the decent times is the easiest task and it's really rewarding i think.... At least i was glad when i reached that. The real deal gonna be the perfect run, that is a long grind and it is really frustrating.