Upon further discussing this we have decided to keep the rules as they are. Restarting may be repetitive, but there's no disctinction from choosing your first power and susbequent ones in terms of how they are integrated in the gameplay. As decision making is a part of the run, any decision will be counted, even the ones you might already have made before starting the run. Think of it as an advantage over someone who just goes into the run without having a specific starting power in mind.

Other card based games like Slay the Spire also have heavy initial RNG factors that lead to many resets as well, while still having to be timed from the start, so we're also choosing to follow the precedent set by similar speedrun categories and games and keeping the entirety of what constitutes a lab run as part of the speedrun.

Cool, I've linked it instead of the official LOR one now.

All previous runs have been moved to "normal", which is the equivalent difficulty of all pre 2.5.0 runs.

Yikes, a backup of some sort really should have been made.

Thing is, I don't actually think you can do it by getting AP on nunu at all now. Reason being you use up your snow ball to pop the scuttle's shield (dealing no damage to the scuttler itself, unless your snowball deals over 636 damage which even at max snowball damage requires you to have upwards of 300 AP at that point) then all you have is Q and smite, and neither scales with AP (Q on minions is fixed true damage with no scaling, smite is smite). So after the shield is down Q + smite always deals the same damage, 500 + 430, which isn't enough, and AP doesn't change that.

The quickest way to kill it on Nunu now I'm pretty sure is to do what I did in my submitted run (Buy a longsword and either Sheen or Kircheis Shard and tp back to the crab) and if you can get a basic attack out within the 3:16 window it's possible. I don't think there's any possible way to do it while building AP on Nunu because of his ratios.

Ok, I guess that's fair enough, I just figured the way the monster functions itself being directly changed was a factor, but if it's all considered on a season to season basis that's ok I guess.

I know, I'm just saying the nunu times, which are all pre 10.25 should be removed. There's just 2 valid current version world records right now, not the 10 or whatever shown on the leaderboards. Doing it with Gragas is a completely different strat.

I noticed today most times that are tied for first place in this category use nunu & willump before patch 10.25. These runs should now be put in a spearate category from runs completed afterwards, since this is no longer possible, due to a change to the scuttle crab in update 10.25, documented here, under patch history:

https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Rift_Scuttler_camp

Without the 25% damage increase (which includes true damage from q and smite), Nunu no longer clears the crabs as quickly with that setup. Therefore, all the runs should be invalid in comparison to more recent 10.25 runs, and have their own category.