I've recently gotten back into running this game since a friend told me I could use Flashpoint to play flash games. I learned the new Assassin Build and to my own surprise managed to beat my 2 4-year old PB's with it on my 5th attempt after getting 3 total MSH's in zone 2. https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/737030156115378306/963790065551704094/unknown.png?width=310&height=701 sadly I didn't record since I wasn't expecting to PB so I can't submit anything yet but that's ok. :) Afterwards I started thinking about more things to improve in the route since I found it weird that the two top times used different routes. For me it's hard to say which one is fastest atm (for 100% at least, for any% I'm fairly confident the assassin route is not beatable with the gunslinger route without any changes) as it'd be hard to judge how fast a really lucky run would be for both routes, but as I started looking more deeply into things I found a couple of interesting things which I don't know if they were known/tested before. The first thing I tested was whether or not there is a difference in speed between different types of attacks. I timed from the frame before selecting the attack to the first frame of the enemy attack (in both cases there was no enemy killed, no team mates, and no poison damage or anything else), and I found that there actually is a difference: (timings done at 30fps) Melee (Quick strike/Smash): 58 frames (~1.93 seconds) Ranged (Magic/Electro bolt): 50 frames (~1.67 seconds) meaning a 0.26 second timesave for every ranged "bolt" style move compared to any normal Melee attack (might also be worth it to time how long skipping a turn takes, there could be a very very small chance it could speed up the Omen fight a little bit by only attacking when he uses his ability). This would obviously give the Gunslinger route a hidden advantage since I'd estimate you do around 100 attacks in a 100% run which would mean a 26 second timesave just from faster attack speeds for the gunslinger route. I don't know exactly how much this affects the current routing scheme but I definitely think it's something that has to be taken into consideration for further timings. The second thing I couldn't quite wrap my head around is the way piercing works. From what I understand piercing increases both critical hit chance and the damage critical hits do but since I couldn't really find anything detailed on the wiki nor anything else it's a really hard stat to quantify for me and makes it hard to guess which purchases or calls are worth it or not in the moment. The last thing I quickly considered was shifting training fights to zone 2 after the 1 shadow assassin fight if you haven't gotten any MSH yet (since all 3 training fights have a 5% chance of dropping one), if you're going for an RNG-dependent playstyle. Haven't messed around with this idea though so it remains to be seen. Other than that the run will always be a MSH/Tribal Weapons-grindfest no matter what way you put it so that's always fun :D

The issue with using an Assassin build for the 100% route is the stat gains from paladin armour. Paladin armour buffs Lightning Piercing and not Physical Piercing, which obviously is better suited for a Gunslinger route firing Electro Bolts. This matters quite a lot on the final battle of Zone 4 as the Assassin build doesn't quite have the damage needed to beat it while the Gunslinger build does.

On the topic of the timing of attacks, I did notice that magic attacks have faster animations compared to physical ones. Probably the biggest example of this are with the ZPCI and most enemies with guns, since their SWAT Fire attack has maybe the fastest attack animation in the game.

It's been over a year since my WR and I have yet to come up with a strategy that doesn't overly rely on RNG, so I haven't played the game in a while. I feel like at this point, a new glitch needs to be found in order to improve all routes.

well, generally it is the way that projectile attacks (like magic bolt and electro bolt) are slightly faster than melee attacks as it skips the move-towards-the-enemy as well as the move-back-home parts. What's REALLY fast though are guaranteed-hit attacks as they hit instantly and don't shoot a projectile. Unfortunately, there is no such attack available for sonny in this game (unlike in sonny 2, where ... withdrawal is a thing).

But okay, let me try to summarize what I remember about time-saves and time-wastes regarding animations:

• as mentioned, melee attacks are slightly slower than ranged attacks

• whenever a unit receives either damage or healing over time, a damage popup occurs that takes roughly one second. Multiple effects on the same unit don't waste additional time as they are calculated against each other. This is actually much more important to keep in mind than one might think for the glitchless category. Basically, using stuff like wound loses one second per turn, UNLESS that enemy has already been poisoned by veradux: in that case, using wound doesn't lose time (because the enemy already gets the over-time popup anyway - can make for some interesting on-the-fly decisions in glitchless, not so much in any%)

• I actually never tested if focus regeneration or autosave lose any time. Might be worth timing that.

• another consideration is, that menuing is quite slow in this game. So it would probably be a good idea to figure out, how many items we need to "eat" in order to get certain ohkos and how long that takes. But then again, it's very hard to say that without knowing the exakt damage (and crit) formula and with the amount of randomness regarding item drops, meh ...