Speedrun Routing Thread

[lieronet]

I get bored easy. I've seen the DD speedrun discussed off and on, and decided to cure my boredom by figuring out a good speedrun route. After a day of dinking around, here's what I have so far:

It looks like once you get past the first four directional dungeons, you can pretty much always pick up a new trophy, so I don't think there's anything fancy that needs to be done in terms of beating dungeons in a specific order. The only stickler is the Naga Tail, which requires you to run into a specific subdungeon to get, sadly.

Gnome Sorc of Mystera looks to be the easiest build to roll into most dungeons, only really falling flat against SMM and Frank. Simple, easy to unlock, but one of the best strats in the game.

The first class to unlock should be Rogue, just for Bet on Boss.

What's the simplest consistent strat for GT? It's been a while since I've run that place. I recall it being fairly doable with an Orc Rogue, but I had quite a bit more stuff unlocked. What should we be looking for with our subdungeon unlocks? Do we need WHUPAZ/Dodge+Quicksilver? Can we just Gnome Sorc of Mystera it to death?

Lockering a Titan Guitar would definitely be a timesaver, should we run across one. Worth scumming for?

Do we care about the Alchemist at all? Translocation scroll is real bad with no quest items and probably no elites, but are Compression + Transmutation good enough to sink 1200 kingdom gold on?

Those are my initial thoughts, I'll be figuring things out as I go. Right now, I'd guess that the run would be around the four hour mark, I think most of the dungeons in the run are doable in ten minutes tops. I think the big holdup would be the RNG associated with finding the Naga subdungeon to unlock Ick Swamp (dislekcia pls). Your thoughts?

[Lujo]

^ Yeah, dat Naga subdungeon. I think it's an autospawn once you beat Hex, though.

Dwarf rogue should actually be fine against anything and everything and probably requires less busywork than any sorcerer. At least early. Only problem is the Goo. EM Orc Warlord should also be pretty good in most cases. Remember to locker Elven Boots from the graveyard subdungeon once you run into it, you might want to prep them occasionally.

[Kami]

One problem is that GT has some curses which may be on the situation a run killer.

The subdungeon is guranted but class,race,god subdungeons still can occur.

I would guess with fast play it could be 3H.
And a TAS would be 30min.

[Darvin]

[Tinker]

[Darvin]

[Darvin]

Aha, found it! Here's some brainstorming I did a while ago for "fewest possible dungeon runs" for a game clear:

* We must defeat Hard Gaan-Telet to win the game (1)
* There are four unavoidable "mini-dungeons" at the start of the game (4)
* To get to Gaan-Telet, we must collect every trophy, which means:
* The Halls of Steel, Ick Swamp, Labyrinth, and Shifting Passages all have unique trophies (4)
* To unlock those dungeons, we must defeat Creeplight Ruins, Hexx Ruins, Havensdale Bridge, and Rock Garden at least once each. (4)
* To unlock those dungeons, we must defeat Eastern Tundra, Southern Swamp, Western Jungle, and Northern Desert at least twice each. (8)
* Since we must beat each of those four dungeons with a respective tier 2 class, we need to be able to bank at least 1000 gold, so defeating the bankers in Den of Danger and Venture Cave is required. (2)

For those not keeping count, that's a total of 23 non-negotiable dungeon runs. Fortunately, that gets us the vast majority of the trophies we need. There are four trophies that will not be available from those dungeon runs (or, if they are available we'll need to leave behind a different trophy that we need): Meatloaf, Dragon Scale, Goblin Bone, Bandit Scalp. This means four additional dungeon runs are required to get those trophies, for an absolute minimum of 27 dungeon runs to clear the game.

The big question is - which four other dungeons should we visit? Cursed Oasis and Berserker Camp look like they're unavoidable. Firstborn and Tomithy aren't put into the random boss rotation until the Paladin and Assassin (respectively) are unlocked. While it should be possible to unlock at least one of the two, there is no realistic way I'm going to randomly encounter the exact boss I'm looking for, meaning Cursed Oasis and Berserker Camp are the only realistic ways to get those trophies short of dumb luck.

Goblin Bone and the Meatloaf are a little more nuanced. The immediately-obvious answer is that Magma Mines and Slime Pits are designed to provide a way to get those trophies from a static boss, but both of them are out of the way and offer no useful quests. However, both Lord Gobb and Super Meat Man are in the random boss rotation by default. Since we only have four bosses in rotation for a new kingdom, this means there's a 50% chance we'll get at least one of the two to show up randomly. With a bit of a gamble, we could revisit Den of Danger, which allows us to complete the moneybin quest. This unlocks a very useful quest line that would be hugely beneficial; aside from deities (which I have no control over), the shop and bank upgrades are the most important kingdom unlocks in terms of increasing the player's power. It's a bit risky as there's a 50% chance you'll draw either Aequitas or Frank (which will produce duplicate trophies that could be claimed from preset bosses later) but it seems like it could be worthwhile.

However, I still have some concerns. First of all, the sheer minimalism of the number of dungeon runs means a lot of stuff might not be unlocked by sheer luck. I'm particularly worried about Dracul, the star deity. We only do 5 dungeon runs in the east, and GG needs to be unlocked before Dracul is even put into rotation and even then he competes with the Witch for unlock space. Could be a real gamble to find him in time.

Thoughts?

[TheSchachter]

Yesterday I was inspired by this thread to quickly do a purist Dwarf Rogue run of Hard GT for a refresher and to think up potential problems that might come up during speed runs... My run consisted of the following floors:

Earthmother
Taurog with the 4-status curse and Golden Statue special monster
JJ with no EXP curse (UGH) and Illusion special monster (double UGH). The other monsters included two goblins and a meat man -_-

Obviously, Earthmother is a pretty great starting deity for the Rogue, and so is Taurog, but that last floor was really rough. I would not have won without being able to buy a fortitude tonic. IMAWAL and EM-boosted rogue allowed me to level up efficiently enough that I had enough popcorn to leverage two level-ups in the middle of the JJ floor as well as farm up Taurog piety to use three shots of Unstoppable fury. Not sure if that ended up being the best course of action, I briefly considered converting to JJ and desecrating EM to get a Chaos Avatar, but I don't think that would've worked out.

It ended up being really tight, and while there's a lot I could have done better, it's a reminder that Hard Gaan-Telet can vary a *lot* in terms of difficulty. The implications for both a speed run and a minimal-dungeon-runs playthrough are different, but ultimately planning for the worst possible HGT scenario is necessary. I'm thinking that maybe the Human Wizard might be a better bet for just how plain versatile and reliable they are. I'll go ahead and try a quick run soon, I'll comment back after.

-A speed run might simply benefit from scumming a good starting floor, but even then a scenario worse than mine for the later floors is going to force you to slow down a lot more than other scenarios... (other players are much faster than I am though, so it's hard for me to say). I don't know what the solution is for this, but I'm really not much of a speed runner.

-Obviously the minimal dungeon runs playthough has to take into account what will be used to finally tackle HGT... I'd strongly recommend getting access to the fortitude tonic, for how horrid Weakening can be. What implications does that have for the dungeon order? Especially considering the Witch appears randomly... Are there strats that can actually survive being forced to fight both the illusion and the Golden statue without curing Weakening? I know that Chaos Avatar can cure weakening and that GG can really solve the Illusion problem, but those obviously aren't reliable.

-A post on the steam forums reminded me of this: if you haven't unlocked a certain deity (entirely possible in either case), its floor will show up without an altar, which really needs to be taken into account. Besides, as instant-win as Dracul can be for the dungeon (in the hands of an experienced player, of course), even if you unlock him you're still less than 50% likely to find him... we need a strat that can win reliably without him.

-If you want to unlock any of the tier-3 buildings (and perhaps more importantly, their glyphs - I'm thinking Halpmeh, which is fantastic in GT and might be worth unlocking for the chance of it spawning), you need to do the "Earn Unstoppable in Venture Cave" quest since the upgrades cost 2000 and your lvl1 bank caps at 1500...

Unless it's possible to micro your economy so that you start a dungeon run with 1490-ish gold, then use Bet on Boss and something like a potions race to sell off as much junk as possible (preferably in rock garden for the three trophies) so that at the point at which your bank *starts* overflowing, it's already past 2000... since a BoB trophy can cap at 450, I think it might be possible (assuming the game isn't proofed against that kind of shenanigan in the first place). Whether or not it's practical, though I don't know. It's fun to entertain the possibility, though.

Thoughts?

[lieronet]

Witch simply isn't attainable for a minimum-dungeons playthrough, as it requires you to play Eastern Tundra three times: once to start the "find the witch" quest chain, if you're lucky you find the witch the next run through the Tundra, and the quest to unlock the Fort potion takes you to the tundra again. Again, in an RTA, you can simply scum.

How does the game handle overflow on your gold? Do you simply not gain any further gold, or does it reset to cap, then add the dungeon's winnings into overflow again? I've never actually gone into a dungeon with max gold before.

I've been playing the earlygame through a few times, and I think it's going to be really hard not to unlock all the gods (excepting Pactmaker), those subdungeons appear very frequently, and they don't take up the normal subdungeon slot. Drac may be a sticking point though.

Darvin - 80-90% success rate in GT is probably good enough honestly, at least for a speedrun. You don't lose the run by dying, just time, and three hours isn't the worst. Take the FFVIII speedrun; something like 95% of the way through an eight to nine hour run is a boss that there are no consistent strats for. If RNGesus isn't at your side, you just lose the run, and people still run the game. We don't need foolproof, just the best odds.

I wonder how much kingdom gold we get to play around with, and if it even matters. We get trophies from 20 runs in a perfect world, so we average 500 gold or so for each of those. Quest gold totals to something like 2500, so we have something like 12.5k to mess with. We spend roughly 4.5k on getting all our class buildings to T2, leaving us 8k to spend on preps and buildings. Probably more than enough to get everything.

T3 Bezaar/Elites is doable if you luck into Lord Gobb or SMM at Hexx, which would give you an excuse to revisit the dungeon and buy all the loots. Don't know how useful it would be, but it would be a strong incentive to get the T3 alchemist.

[Darvin]