Hey y'all. While I've been attempting to reclaim the Any% world record, I've been doing some routing on the side as a backup plan. Unfortunately, I have absolutely zero experience routing, so it hasn't gone well so far. 😅

I've thought up of a strategy that might have potential, but it leads to a slower Zone One and before I continue to Zone Two, I want to make sure that it's actually viable. I know which build I want to try out; it's just a matter of finding the right balance of stats to save time.

Luckily, the wiki is an invaluable resource for this. It lists precisely how each move scales with each stat and it also provides info on each enemy, so in theory, calculating what stats are needed (and thus what items and crits are needed) to beat each enemy as quickly as possible should be trivial.

There's just one problem: This doesn't work in practice. Attacks can do more or less damage depending on the enemy's level. This wouldn't be an issue if I knew how to take the enemy's level into account, but the trouble is that for all the excellent info which the wiki contains, it doesn't seem to give any formulae that factors in the enemy's level as far as I can see. It lists the level of each enemy, but not how that affects how much damage they take.

tbh, I don't really feel like routing through the entire game using trial-and-error alone (there are far too many stat and item combinations for that; I could be using that time to try to beat the record!), so plotting a route mathematically is the only available option from my perspective. Provided that I can work out exactly what stats are needed for each battle, that should be doable.

That's why I'm here. Most of you will have far more experience with routing than I do, so I was wondering if anyone had any tips for going through the process more efficiently? More specifically, how does one go about accounting for the enemy levels when trying to think up a strategy? Even if that particular problem can't be fixed, are there other ways to streamline the process?

Hmm....should I help with this? Technically I would like my WR to remain standing for as long as possible XD

Just kidding, I was going to focus on this anyways so I'll get down to work. Yesterday I was poking around the games code, and while I'm completely new to actionscript, I am familiar with Java so as long as I can find the right scripts then I can get the formulas that calculate damage.

I've also been trying to find out how the game determines what items drop, but a preliminary search suggests that it's based of a Math.random number which is not good.

Keep in mind though that this is my first attempt at looking through code to determine glitches/secrets/exploits so don't expect anything revolutionary, or for my findings to be entirely correct.