I think we would benefit by having the various difficulties, hard and lunatic, included in the runs such as Main Story NG+. Normal difficulty can easily be done with auto battle bringing it down to who can make the best team, press buttons the fastest, and have the best internet connection. Higher difficulties would make runs much more strategic in nature rather than based on very little player interaction.

Another proposal that I would like to bring up is making it so the times in Main Story, New Game Race to 20, New Game Race to 40, and Book 1 do not include download time. Download time will only go up over time as the game grows and will make older runs nearly impossible to beat.

Agreed on all points, except making the best teams and pressing buttons quickly are the case for all runs, auto battle or no. Download time needs to change because until a recent update, my main story time was basically unbeatable by someone with a bad connection. The issue though is that all loads are dictated by connection to a degree, so it's extremely hard to tell how much load time removal is too much. If I do a 1 hour run, and have to load 60 maps in that time, and each time is .25 seconds longer than another runner, it's unnoticeable, but at the end of the run, that's a 15 second difference.

I absolutely agree with Ragu on this. The only issue I see with the Lunatic modes is that since each map costs 10 stamina, it would take about 7 or 8 (if my math is right) potions to do a run, which will quickly dwindle. I would love to actually route a Lunatic run, since it would require much more engagement from the user instead of mashing autobattle. Removing the download time from the mix would make people more willing to run NG stuff, since it has nothing to do with skill and more to do with who has the best connection as MeezerMox stated.

Update on this issue from Viviana via discord: Lunatic isn't on the leaderboards currently but I'll tell you guys the same thing I told mox. If you do a lunatic run, I'll add the category to the leaderboards.