Hammers

Recommended start is Twin Shot to really take advantage of the crit chance, with Triple Shot being a viable alternative. Twin shot has much better single target damage than Triple, except where you can attack larger bosses up close and take advantage of all three arrows. Triple shot can be better in rooms with lots of smaller enemies, giving you better range and allowing you to target enemies in multiple locations. Personally I find Twin Shot results in better times as it can make it much easier to hit the breakpoints of larger enemies and clear rooms with just a few larger enemies very quickly. A breakpoint is the total damage you need to deal to kill an enemy or break their shield. As much as possible you want a single attack to be high enough damage to hit an enemy's breakpoint. Twin Shot has the added advantage of being two attacks at once, meaning that with enough damage you can hit the breakpoints for both the shield and the health in a single attack.

Secondary hammers depend on personal play style, but Point-Blank Shot, Flurry Shot, Perfect Shot, Chain Shot and Explosive Shot (listed in order of my preference) are all perfectly viable. While I prefer to play with Twin Shot and Point-blank Shot, Twin Shot + Flurry Shot has some fantastic DPS that can deal with most things in the game without difficulty.

Shackle Start

As Zag Bow has crit chance built in it is very adaptable and benefits a lot from the extra damage provided by the Shackle trinket. I wouldn’t recommend this build path for someone who isn’t already experienced with the weapon as you will need to adapt to the boons that show up in your run, and you won’t have the AOE of TDash to get you through the smaller enemies in Tartarus. To counter that you may wish to take Flurry Shot as your first hammer, but doing so will lose you a lot of extra damage from either Twin or Triple Shot. This can easily pivot into any of the other build paths depending on the boons that show up in your run, but it can be difficult to give up the extra damage provided by Shackle. You can also just luck into a Poseidon start to get TDash through Tartarus anyway.

Starting Boon

TDash start (Tidal Dash from Poseidon). No question. Without either the AOE of TDash or the rapid attack speed of Flurry Shot Tartarus small enemies take up a lot of time. If for some reason you don’t want to start with TDash you might find you need Flurry Shot as your first hammer to exit Tartarus in reasonable times. Depending on the rarity of your starting boon getting one or two poms into your Dash early can make hitting Tartarus breakpoints much easier making clearing out rooms of witches/pests/numbskulls/crystals easier (and quicker).

High % Damage path

Take a high % attack boon. Epic Aphrodite being preferred as the highest % boon you can be given in the game, but almost any Epic attack % boon should be acceptable. Aphrodite also has the advantage of opening up the Heart Rend Duo if you can pick up a core boon from Artemis, which will give your critical effects more damage and Sweet Nectar with Poseidon (which you probably already have) to make getting extra pom damage easy. Another possibility is Epic Divine Strike from Athena to try and get Deadly Reversal with Artemis, further increasing your Critical chance. For this build you will want to put a couple of poms into your attack as well as your dash. If you don’t like to play the bow without Flurry Shot this may be the easiest path to take, giving you consistent damage with every shot. It’s worth noting that Hunters Mark procs on any source of critical hit, so getting Hunters Mark from Artemis will also benefit from any critical strikes from your normal attack.

Crit Build Path

Take Artemis attack as soon as available, this gives you huge crit chance, and if you can pick up Hunters Mark you will easily have in excess of 60% crit chance per shot (on a marked enemy). This build really benefits from either Triple Shot or Twin Shot. Twin Shot doubles your crit chance giving you a minimum 60% chance of at least one crit with just Arty attack, going up to over 100% with Hunters Mark. Triple Shot gives you higher crit chance, and you can take advantage of this against larger bosses, but is otherwise difficult to apply to individual enemies. This build path has the benefit of not needing any poms in the attack boon, meaning you can dump all of them into your dash, or any other FDS boons you find along the way. It's quite easy to start with a crit build and expand into a crit-FDS build as you progress.

One point of interest for this build is that it benefits a lot from having Artemis’ Hunter Dash adding damage to your dash strikes, giving you huge early crit damage. The problem with taking that is you don’t have the AOE of TDash to get you through Tartarus and can lose a lot of time that way.

It’s worth taking a core Aphrodite boon when using this path to again open up Heart Rend. You can open up Deadly Reversal with Athena on special, but this isn’t recommended as you aren’t likely to reflect many attacks without either Athena attack or dash. You can mitigate this by taking Holy Shield or Phalanx Shot to give yourself extra opportunities to reflect attacks, but by this point you’ll need so many boons it’s not worth aiming for.

FDS (Flat Damage Soup)

FDS builds refer to any build that takes boons with as much flat damage (as opposed to % based boons) as possible. Starting with Tidal Dash (with common dash damage of 35) you already have the basics of a build like this, then you can pick up Ares/Zeus attack or special boons, almost any cast and vengeance boons. FDS boons can be picked up while working on a “main” build as secondary extras so you will often find you have at least a partial FDS build by the end of a run. One disadvantage of a build like this is that you need poms everywhere with nearly every flat damage boon scaling very well with extra poms. Often, it’s a good idea to pick a main source of damage, like TDash, and dump about five poms into that. But don’t roll to put poms in it and instead put them in whichever is your main source of damage when given the option for your pom. Secondary boons from Zeus and Poseidon are particularly good and scale well towards the end of a run.

Duos for FDS builds are good, and can usually be opened up with other build paths as well if you luck into the right gods. The simplest Duos are probably Sea Storm and Vengeful Mood. To open up Sea Storm you will need a core Zeus boon and another core Poseidon boon after the dash, the most useful probably being Poseidon cast. For Vengeful mood you will need a core Zeus boon, a core Ares boon and a revenge boon from any of the gods that offer them (Ares, Zeus, Athena, Aphrodite).

Chaos

Critical hits benefit from having higher damage, so any attack/dash strike boons are very helpful. Assault boons also help you to hit break points of smaller enemies and shouldn’t be passed up if you can’t get straight up attack damage.

Hermes

As with every weapon in the game getting Rush Delivery (RD) can massively increase your damage output. The optimal boons from Hermes are Hyper Sprint (with Greater haste as a weaker alternative) to start, with Rush Delivery as your second boon. If you can’t get those then taking + dashes can help you move around the various biomes much quicker and improve your time that way. It's worth remembering that if you have common Hyper delivery and you take too long to charge a shot you can lose your speed boost and so lose any extra damage from RD. Minimum charge short range shots are the easiest to maintain damage with.

For the best RD chances you should never take a call boon before your second Hermes as this increases the number of boons that Hermes may offer you. You can also start with the mirror option of “Stygian Soul” to remove Greater Recall from the boon pool further (slightly) increasing your chances of RD, it also makes getting the legendary "Bad News" possible. Bad news is slightly bugged and doesn't work as the description suggests, instead it makes enemies receive 50% more damage from all sources as long as they do not have a cast in them. Rush Delivery is still better, even common RD, because RD can take advantage of cast bonuses and Ichors that you can find in wells to boost your speed.

If you’ve picked up Flurry shot somewhere along the way and you don't manage to pick up RD or dashes then a useful alternative can be rare/epic Swift Strike, but it's not very useful without Flurry Strike as it only applies to standing strikes (meaning attacks from a standing position, not after a dash). Common Swift Strike is not often worth taking over something else that could be helpful.

Mechanics

Different build paths have slightly different ways to play. If you take Tidal Dash to start you will have a very aggressive playstyle, dashing directly into enemies so that you can take advantage of the dash to kill most small enemies before ever firing a shot. If you have a less protective dash (or no dash) you will maintain more of a distance and try to conserve your health.

Generally you will want to dash strike to attack. This is where you press attack and dash at the same time (or at least, before you stop moving from your dash), keep holding attack after you finish moving to charge your shot, aim at the enemy and release. After just a little practice this can be very smooth and fluid. You should not be using special very often, if at all. Casts can be useful and quick sources of damage, you can cancel the casting animation by dashing immediately after you cast. Firing off a cast as you dash towards an enemy before you hit them with your main damage rotation can be a good way to get that extra bit of damage you need to hit breakpoints when your build is a little weak.

While Zagreus Bow is technically a ranged weapon you will find that you often want to treat it like a melee weapon, getting in close before you attack and then moving on quickly. The further away you are from the the enemy the longer it's going to take for the arrow to reach them. Movement and mobility are just as important for the bow as any other weapon, and you're going to want to dash close to an enemy, kill them and then move on. You may find that dashing somewhere central and firing off shots in many directions (turreting) is better for dealing with groups of small enemies, especially when you have Flurry Shot.

Breakpoints are very important, you don't want to fire three shots at an enemy when one will do, but as there are so many different build paths it's difficult to give guidelines other than very general ones. So, after you get your first boon/hammer any unarmored small enemy in Tartarus (numbskulls/pests/witches/crystals) shouldn't take more than one attack to kill. An attack can be one damage rotation, so if your first boon was TDash an attack would be dash into the enemy and fire off a single shot, although a single TDash is usually enough to kill small enemies in Tartarus. If you got hammer a single twin shot should be enough, or any attack boon should scale enough to kill small enemies. This should remain true throughout your run and if you find it's taking more than one shot to kill easy enemies it's a good sign that your build isn't strong enough to get a good time.

Larger enemies, like unarmored thugs, usually take two damage rotations, and if you had an unlucky start and got bad rarity for your first boon, may take three. By the end of Tartarus you should be able to kill any unarmored enemy with a single attack. Armored enemies have a lot of extra health for you to deal with and may take several attacks.

You should always be paying attention to how many attacks it takes you to kill enemies so that you never use more than necessary. While "Attack it until it's dead" is very effective at killing individual enemies you will lose precious seconds in every room if you don't realise when to move on from something that's dead already.

In summary: get close, movement and mobility are crucial to good times, use the minimum number of attacks possible, play to the strengths of the build that you have.

PseudoTech

There is also an animation cancellation tech found by Pseudo. When you do a dash strike the animation is cancelable by most actions except the standing strike. However, you can cancel it with a special, and then you can cancel the special with a standing attack. This is most noticeable with the Flurry Shot hammer. This gives a slightly faster attack rotation than you can otherwise achieve. It is not necessary for fast times, and most times currently on the leaderboard do not use it. This also works on Hera, Chiron and Rama. It's harder to use on Hera because of everything else you have to concentrate on. Chiron works exactly the same but requires playing Chiron. Rama also works, but the timings can be different.

Here is a video from Pseudo explaining the tech: