I submitted the 49:56 run a little bit before I made this thread. I had also sent in the 58:07 run the day before. I'm not sure what is required for Boomer to verify runs but if he has to watch them all the way through I can definitely understand the wait. Going to do a few more runs before I start submitting more, since the run I just posted about is my first run since I made this thread.

Landed a 48:36 today with a surprise ONE CYCLE!!!! Morak fight. I was trying for a 2-cycle, dumped all my damage into him as soon as I found him to try to force a quick change back, instead he just sat the entire ring of mirrors and died. Still more that can be done to optimize it, and I got 2 Skype calls during the run that I had to tab out to answer (I should really do something about that) that probably cost me ~10 seconds. I think sub-45 minutes is definitely possible with lucky catacombs levels and a one cycle Morak fight.

I am able to somewhat consistently 2-cycle Morak with the elf now using the ring of mirrors.

The trick seems to be clearing out all of the illusions and enemies, then baiting a sword charge attack. It seems like you can consistently force this attack by making sure the sword is following you, and not just standing idle directly next to you. Ideally you want the sword to be between you and Morak when it starts the attack so that it charges far across the arena. When it is just finishing with the slash into the floor and rising up, you pop the ring of mirrors next to Morak.

Shooting him with regular attacks seems to almost instantly force him to transform back to his invulnerable form, which makes me think he only checks his health at certain times: when he is hit with regular attacks, and also based on a timer. If you can get your illusions spawned between his health checks he goes down. That's my current thoughts on it anyway.

Here's a bonus video that I am glad did not happen during a speed run attempt. The warrior would be so jealous if he knew.

It seems to be random, it might have a max range on it but I'm not sure. I've actually been trying the elf method more and might be making real progress on it. Lots of 2-cycle attempts.

Been testing a warrior strategy for Morak. It's not super reliable but if you use the "Murder" weapon with the "Chaos Amulet" relic you can 2-cycle kill Morak if both relic uses target him. Unfortunately you've got a 50/50 chance of it attacking the sword instead, and you have to kill all of his images and the other enemies first. You pop the relic, wait ~2 seconds, then use the "Demonic Cleave" ability right before it warps you to him. You can often get several more heavy attacks in before he changes back as well. It might be worth swapping to warrior for the Morak fight in NG+, since there is no rule against character swapping.

Haha, happy I could make it a little more interesting around here. You do lose out on the precision character movement of a joystick if you go with mouse and keyboard, but I think it's definitely worth it for how well you can aim, especially using the ice beam trick.

Glad to be able to post some helpful things here, looks like you've been pretty alone here for a while now.

After playing around a little, I noticed you can actually die 5 times in Tombs of the Risen if you grab the extra life coin behind the third breakable wall. I don't know how much the silver version of Deader than Dead gives though, so it might not be worth the amount of time it takes. It should still be worth dying to an explosive barrel to pick up the Embracing the End mastery though.

Do the spike traps in the Tombs of the Risen count for the dying to spike traps achievement? There is a row of them directly after the first key pickup where the first big mummy comes out of his sarcophagus. Dying in them is quick, and it would have the added bonuses of not having to wait for that first pack of monsters to slowly kill you, and not scattering them around the room when you respawn.

I've played a lot of Gauntlet, and just recently (2 days ago) got into speed running it. That might come across bragging, but it's mainly to give context to the strategies/glitches and results I'm posting. On my third attempt at a NG+ speed run with the wizard I was able to kill Morak in 58:07, a new record using the first strategy I'm going to talk about. The next day, using both strategies I was able to absolutely crush the old record, and kill Morak in 49:56 on my second attempt (the first one soft locked halfway through.) I didn't discover these tricks, but I haven't seen any talk about them here, and the first one seems to be almost unknown.

The Dark Torrent Trick: The first trick is harder to notice, and requires you to have "The Hollow Chapters" weapon equipped to unlock the void school. It uses the "Dark Torrent" spell, which is the cone of fire that slows and slightly damages enemies in front of you. It has no casting delay or cooldown, and you can walk while using it. Most importantly, the first damage tick happens the instant you cast it. By clicking as fast as you can, you can repeatedly damage enemies with it, at about the same rate ice beam would damage a single enemy. The sheer speed with which you can clear rooms of enemies more than makes up for the slower movement speed of the wizard compared to the elf.

The Ice Beam Trick: If you watched the video you may have noticed the other subtle trick I used. The one that shoots a horribly powerful ice beam constantly as I effortlessly kill spawners and rooms full of guys that you would normally skip. This is what puts the wizard into a league of his own. To pull this trick off you're going to need the "Golden Feather" relic equipped. You stand near a piece of food or a potion, cast your ice beam, then use your relic. If the food or potion was in range, you should now be able to walk around with your ice beam constantly casting. You can do this multiple times as you find more food and potions in a level, stacking several powerful ice beams into a single super powerful beam. You can still cast other spells just fine, so this works perfectly with the great AoE clear of the dark torrent trick.

Edit: The strategies mentioned below are outdated and elf is currently used for all 3 of the boss fights.

The other 2 particular things I want to touch on are 2 boss fights: The Sun King, and Morak. For the Sun King fight, you're going to want to actually pick up both of the potions, not use them to make ice beams. The heart has a damage threshold where it becomes invulnerable again, and using just the beams will require you to go through 3 cycles. Instead, when the heart comes out you should damage it down to around 2/3 health, then use your "Arcane Blast" potion ability to drop it below 50%. Rinse and repeat for the second cycle and you should be able to kill it.

In the run I posted, I was able to kill Morak in 3 cycles. I did 10-12 practice runs on Morak before I did the run, and not a single one was 3 cycles, so don't count on that amount of luck every time. I did however kill him in 4 cycles in probably 75% of the attempts I did, and 5 cycles in the rest, so it is still better than most regular attempts I've seen. The first cycle, you fight him like normal, but you want to make sure you don't destroy the food before you can turn it into a beam. The food spawns where the sword is when Morak returns to his invulnerable form, so make sure the sword isn't going to get hit by a spell, and make sure the food isn't going to land directly on you when he changes back. For the second and remaining cycles, I like to go invisible right as he is transforming so I can shoot ice beams at him in peace. Just make sure the beam isn't passing directly over the sword, as it'll destroy the food when he changes back.

That's about it for my hot wizard tips. There may be a level or 2 where you could get away with using boots of speed instead of the golden feather, but I tested 5 or 6 levels and only a single one of them was slightly (1 second) faster with the boots. You'd lose more time than that swapping back and forth. Maybe someone will find some new exploits, but until then I don't see anyone knocking the wizard off the top of the scoreboard.

It really seems like he is locked into some sort of behavior that prevents him from changing back, but I'm not sure what causes it. When you look at The Beast, it is seemingly unable to become immune to damage while charging or leaping, and this looks like a similar case. In IcyWorld's video, you can see that the sword isn't moving at all while he is killing Morak. This may be a behavior that it can't break out of early, whatever it is doing.

Alternately, I'm wondering if Morak only decides on a new action every so often, say every 3 seconds, and if you drop him below the threshold right after a check, you get the full duration of that time to damage him freely before he changes back. I haven't tested it yet, but the way to do it would probably be to try to hold off damaging him until right after the sword starts a new attack animation, then try to do as much damage as you can as quickly as possible.