Is it faster to do Tower first (route in BBhab’s PB) in No OoB Gravitron Skip than the usual SS2 first? I always assumed that it was faster, since it has that whole WZ teleporter setup, but I just realized that the gravitron skip WR doesn’t do any of that, so now I’m not sure

as far as i know, BBhab's PB route is the best known route for gravitron skip. HOWEVER, i would strongly recommend you to use the route that mohoc and myself used in our 12:06 runs (you'll have to toggle showing obsolete runs to see them) or follow the route in emmoji's PB. in general, if you aren't sure what to do somewhere, it's often a good idea to see what emmoji does (which may not be the fastest, but it will be very consistent).

here specifically, the checkpoint death + tower first strat saves 1-2s in total, but you will lose a significant portion of your runs to skipping the two really annoying checkpoints on the way to warp zone. in addition, you are forced to start with the easiest level and go almost in descending order of difficulty, which is very suboptimal. it's much much easier to get a good run with the route not using checkpoint shenanigans at the start, even if it's "optimally" slightly slower.

Thanks for the reply! I’ve gotten pretty consistent with avoiding those two checkpoints at the beginning, so I’ve been running the faster route lately. I think I’ll take your suggestion and go back to the other route for a while though since it is a lot easier and doesn’t cost much time