Hello everyone. I've been interested in running Dragon's Crown for a while now since it is my favorite game. However, the categories and rules here seem pretty rough to me. I'd like to propose some ideas that I have thought of for new categories and rules, and how to better organize them.

First of all, I believe that runs should be separated by character, as each character plays very differently and will have different strategies and ways to speedrun. The game is decently balanced, but the top characters would be pretty uncontested if they were all in the same category in my opinion. Take a look at the leaderboards of Streets of Rage 4, since this is how I envision it will look: https://www.speedrun.com/streets_of_rage_4 - separated by character, and then difficulty. Co-op runs should also be a completely separate tab like they have it in the Streets of Rage 4 page.

For categories, we can have the 4 difficulties listed, and have the following categories in them:

A Routes: Defeat every A Route boss. The run ends once you defeat the 9th A Route boss (Level up screen). B Routes: Defeat every B Route boss and the Ancient Dragon. The run ends once the Ancient Dragon is defeated (Level up screen). All Bosses: Defeat all A Route and B Route bosses, and defeat the Ancient Dragon. 19 bosses total. The run ends once the Ancient Dragon is defeated (Level up screen).

Example of Level Up screen, where a run would end:

The rules would be to play a character capped at each difficulty level (except Infernal), and to use equipment only up to that cap. So a level 35 character for Normal and 65 for Hard. This is just to keep it a bit more fair, your characters do sync down and everything, but they will still be much stronger because of their affixes. For example, if I bring my level 255 Sorceress into Normal mode, she will have access to the Salubrious glasses that give her a 50% chance to use 0 MP, which of course you can only get from Labyrinth of Chaos or Tower of Mirages (rarely).

When it comes to Infernal, I believe that once you unlock Ultimate difficulty it will uncap your character (correct me if I am wrong, I don't remember clearly). I am pretty sure that you need to do the requirements to unlock Ultimate to progress further into the Labyrinth of Chaos. Keeping the cap at 99 will keep you at floor 6 I believe, so you wouldn't even be able to get some of the unique pieces of character equipment. That is why I think keeping infernal runs uncapped is fine. However, you wouldn't be able to use Ultimate mode equipment - those are much stronger and should be saved for their own category. For Ultimate runs, of course nobody should be expected to be level 255 - I think the difference isn't too crazy anyhow.

Demon King: Labyrinth of Chaos and Tower of Mirages can have their own categories, the Demon King category. This would just be doing floors 1-9 as fast as possible, ending once you defeat the Demon King at floor 9 (Level up screen).

New Game: This run would be started on a fresh file, and starts as soon as you make a new character. The reason why it should be a fresh file is so everyone starts off at a level playing field - no saved equipment, no skippable quests, and no skipping the tutorial, visiting Morgan, or resurrecting your first ally. The run ends after defeating the Ancient Dragon, when the character ending artwork screen appears, before the credits. Example for Sorceress:

All Quests: For this run, you would prepare a character by getting them to Hard mode without doing any quests. This way, you can do all of the quests in a row, since there are some locked behind defeating the Ancient Dragon for the first time. I'm unsure if this run should be done in Normal or Hard mode, but I suppose it could be done in both, following the same level cap rules as the story runs (capped at 35 for Normal, 65 for Hard - don't use characters from higher difficulties). The timer would end upon the final quest turn in at the Adventurer's Guild.

Universal rules: No NPC allies, no hacked equipment, no online.

One more note: Hacking is a big issue in Dragon's Crown, and players can have hacked equipment without even knowing it, by burying character bones that have hacked equipment. To prevent cheating, I think it would be a good idea for players to head back to town and go through the equipment in their bags on video, at the end of a run:

Hacked equipment is usually pretty obvious. You can't have more than 2 colored affixes on a piece of equipment, so if a piece of gear has more that is usually the easiest way to tell.

I would also like to mention that it is a good idea to use one of your extra files for doing a run. I use file 1 as my main file, file 2 as an extra copy for experimenting and such, and will use file 3 for doing a run instead. This helps you do certain runs repeatedly, and keeps you from uncapping a character when you clear the difficulty.

If anyone has thoughts on these ideas and rules, I would like to hear them. Any improvements or points I might have missed would be appreciated. I am going to do an introductory run for each of these categories as soon as possible, and if they sound good then I hope we can add them to the leaderboards, and separate each character, and co-op on the leaderboards as well.