There's no point in having a category when nobody has done a run. If you end up doing a full run, sure, post it here and we can add a category for it.

(personally, I think it stops being interesting when you think about what the actual fastest strats would be - throwing grenades and restarting mission until you happen to get whatever vehicle is optimal for the mission)

Hi!

I'll start off by saying that all the runs on the leaderboards at this point were done on patch 1.0.6 or earlier, and the patches since then have had major negative impacts on the speedrun route.

1. Level scaling setting should have no effect. We used to already manipulate it by changing difficulty from easy (very light) to nightmare (heavy) for getting proper XP from quests that are lower level than the player, or otherwise scaling with level. In the newest patch they made it so the game forces a load screen when changing difficulty or scaling options, so this strategy costs much more time now. However, I haven't even verified if it works anymore, because other factors make it so that you will almost never be overleveled in this patch, rendering the strat useless.

2. There used to be a way to powerlevel from lvl 6-20 or so by doing certain high level quests early, however this was also fixed in a patch. There aren't really any skips other than doing the minimum required objectives for quests.

3. Newest patch massively changed damage calculations, so it's not certain if the same Hunter build is still optimal. For the build used in old patch runs: Max the passive abilities for poison, hunter damage, assassin damage (mostly for the crit dmg). Battlecry of Ares for the huge damage boost. Devastating shot is the main damage dealer. Some other useful skills include Vanish, Multishot, Rain of Destruction, Overpower bow strike, Rush assassinate and Critical assassinate. For gear, priority was poison damage (only when using poison bow) > hunter damage > headshot/crit damage.

As a person who also really loves this game, it's great to hear that you're interested. Aside from the long travel sections, I really do enjoy this game as a speedrun. I think most runners (well, basically just me and Ector) are waiting until the patches slow down before doing more runs, since it's really annoying to have your route completely ruined by a patch.

Definitely join the Discord server linked in the sidebar if you want to discuss this stuff further :) I've done some testing after the powerleveling was fixed but before the hunter nerf, so there are at least some ideas for how to do the run massively underleveled. There's also the possibility of downpatching your game to 1.0.6, which I haven't done yet, but I think it should be possible.

Hope this was helpful :)

Cool!

I remember seeing a clip of this glitch back when the game first came out (by BnH247 I think?) but had trouble reproducing it and assumed it was just a one-off thing. Inspired by your clip I went back and tried again, and actually managed to reproduce it this time!

What I think is happening: When a blackout ends while you're being assassinated (has to be that specific animation), your character gets tethered (linked? synced? there's probably a better word) to the enemy that was assassinating you. Because the blackout ends, you get separated and can move again, but the movements of the enemy also affect you. Most prominently, whenever they turn, you rotate in a circlular motion around them (the sliding).

Here's skip concepts for 2 missions:

Other related glitchiness: If you assassinate an enemy you're tethered to, both you and the dead enemy teleport somewhere far out of bounds. This seems to be a set location for each chapter. If you shoot an enemy you're tethered to, this happens: I don't have a better video for it, but the tilting glitch seems to make enemies unable to attack/see you properly. Could be very useful.

Some other remarks: To get the assassination animation, you must perform it at least once, wait for a blackout cycle to happen, then have the enemy aggro to you while you're "unaware"/looking the other way. Just turning around while in combat is not enough. One good way to trigger it is to keep pushing the enemy until the timing is right, then looking away when they get back up. Thankfully the timing window for getting the glitch to work is fairly large. I managed to clip inside the final elevators in Babel and Ascendency, but you can't activate them without collecting enough orbs, so that's not useful. The glitch ends if you proceed far enough, or if you reload the game. The game seems to only load the current mission/section, so it seems unlikely that you could skip more than 1 section at a time. For example all the parts where you're walking outside are separate zones, and you can't bring an enemy outside with you, so skipping those doesn't seem possible so far.

Fully routing the game with this glitch seems like a lot of work. To make it fast, you would have to pay a lot of attention to the blackout cycles, and route big sections instead of reloading the game between each mission (as this makes the enemies forget the assassination move). It's also very difficult to control the sliding, and very time consuming to set up the glitch, so testing and messing around to find skips would be hard. With enough effort though, I think it's possible to figure out consistent ways to slide a certain way. For some missions, such as the ones where you have to collect a bunch of orbs, it may be worth it to do the tilting glitch for faster paths while ignoring enemies.

Maybe someday I'll try to route this into the run. If anyone else feels up to the task, I wish you good luck!

I edited my answer to question #1 in my previous post.

Also just to clarify, deleting the movie directory affects the CINEMATICS, not the in-game cutscenes. Level start and end cutscenes will still be there, as well as the few missions that are just a cutscene. The deleted ones would be the cinematic movies usually found at the end of campaigns, such as Arthas' Betrayal or The Destruction of Dalaran.

Question #1: Timing for individual level runs. - Option B: in-game Using IGT would forbid saves which I don't like, but it's ILs so who's gonna waste time reloading anyway. EDIT: Cody brought up the fact that you can wait in the start cutscene of some levels and the start of the level will be influenced. I feel that starting the timer after the cutscene is not in the spirit of speedrunning: from when you enter the level, you're spending extra time to complete it in order to get a faster time. This feels like timer manipulation, not fast playing. Therefore I vote for IGT, which factors in the starting cutscenes. Alternatively, timing rules for RTA could be changed to account for this.

Question #2: Movies - A: allow deleting movies directory In a run you would skip them almost instantly anyways so it's not like you're changing the run dramatically. Plenty of other games allow similar things to prevent crashes/other problems.

Question #3: Prologue in full game runs (RoC) - B: Prologue may be skipped If the category is meant to be Any%, there's no justification for requiring it. If it's meant to be All Campaigns, then it's clearly required. The basic speedrun category for most games should be Any%.

The cinematics don't work at all for me, it just displays a black screen and shifts all the windows on my desktop around which is incredibly annoying. I fixed this by just moving the video files away from the game folder so they don't play at all, is this acceptable?

Also I'm interested to hear why exactly the prologue campaign is included in the full game category. Isn't the goal of the category to be the "basic" speedrun category of beating the game as fast as possible (usually called any%)? Even if you create a new profile which resets your progress, you can skip the prologue entirely. I don't see any point in forcing runners to do what is essentially an optional tutorial. Even on the SDA page the total run time listed doesn't include prologue.

What OS do the PCs at the event have? I would not trust Wheel of Time to run properly on anything other than windows 7. I can play on my laptop if required (HDMI only).

Wheel of Time has a donation incentive that can take either ~20 seconds or 4 minutes depending on if I watch the credits (which provides a good build up) or use a save file for the after-credits scene. I also made a post about this in the donation incentive thread.

If you decide spending 4 minutes for a 20 second joke is not a good idea, the estimate for Wheel of Time should be lowered to 22 minutes.

The Wheel of Time: Watch the after-credits scene

This can be done in two different ways; watch the credits or use a save file. Watching the credits provides a good build up to the scene, but I understand that spending 4 minutes for a 20 second joke might not be good for the schedule.

Donation goal should be fairly low.

I'm also going to post in the schedule thread about lowering the estimate a bit if you decide to go for the save file option.

I was a dummy and didn't pay until the last minute, and since I paid through my bank the payment might not arrive until tomorrow. Hopefully that's still fine.