Alright, here's the run. There's several spots where I dropped, like, multiple seconds worth of frames, but oh well, nothing to be done about it now.

The biggest potential time save I could see is just cutting some corners on the final setup, or even coming up with a different setup altogether. As I mention when I get there, I was originally optimizing for safety, not speed, so it would not surprise me at all if a faster strat is out there waiting to be discovered.

Case in point, I had a new idea after uploading the video and my thoughts at the end about other difficulties are already out of date. Golden quintar might still be skippable at level 60 on easy. It requires burning through Tira's veil stacks by hand though, so I can't confidently say that it's faster without more thorough testing.

Just running the hollow itself is another good option, yeah. I think you've got the right idea as far as assuming a fully complete, max inventory save file as a baseline. Trying to do any curation beyond that would inevitably end up favoring certain strategies over others and cause problems if faster setups get developed that the given item set doesn't account for. Could even still have subcategories for level 60 vs level 99. Unfortunately I haven't done a lot of testing at level 99, so I can't really speak to what that run would look like in much detail, other than that there are almost certainly faster options than the team comp I've been running.

TBH I don't like using discord that much, but I've joined, and I'm happy to keep workshopping this however is most convenient.

I also recorded a full run earlier today. (And got it down to sub 4!) Will drop a link once I get it uploaded.

So I've never really considered myself a speedrunner, but I have spent a long time optimizing full clears of discipline hollow. Once there was no optimizing left to be done, I decided to work backwards and see how long it would take to do an all bosses run while also assembling all the tools I would need for the hollow. After workshopping that for a while, the conclusion I've reached is that you pretty much need to play on easy/unrestricted for it to not be ungodly long, but with that in mind the route is actually really cool and deserving of its own category imo. Personally my ideal ruleset for it would look something like:

• Decouple the difficulty setting for the hollow from the rest of the playthrough (i.e. you can run the main game on easy and then swap to hard for the boss gauntlet itself).
• In place of the standard/unrestricted split that exists for the current categories, have a split specifically for the max level up assist option, with everything else being fair game.
• I'm more or less ambivalent on whether or not you still need to actually beat the game and roll credits after you're done with the hollow. On the one hand, it's an extra ~5 minutes at most. On the other hand, it raises more questions that need answers, like whether you can drop back down to easy again or need to stick to the difficulty you completed the hollow at, or whether or not you need to do the true ending.

I recognize that those rules are kind of arbitrary, but I really do think they strike the best balance between having different options and making sure that all of those options are completable in a relatively reasonable timeframe. For reference, running the hollow on hard without increasing the level cap is what I've practiced the most by far, and I've got it down to a little over four hours. (Sort of. I haven't actually done the whole run in a single sitting yet.)