Currently I think that the flames or dagger may be the best for a speedrun, given the crowd control potential of the former and the dps of the later, but I feel like other people may have found thongs I have missed thus far.

Charon Aspect on the Axe, Apollo cast is goated as fuck. My best time 12:59, but I'm sure people have gotten better with different stuff. That's what I'm working with right now anyway.

A lot of people seem to be running Aspect of Momus (staff) as you can spam non-omega special much faster than the attacks. Usually paired with Poseidon's special boon and other Poseidon's stuff and then ideally getting some extra damage from things like Zeus' Static Shock.

Well basing it on Hades 1 speedruns, people will most likely run new file the most. Soooo staff.

@redinfact Any Heat is the most common category in the first game, not fresh file. This one has much more difficult fresh file run, so I don't think that's gonna be the most popular category.

Just was playing with the skull special, it reminds me of the Beowulf Shield and Aspect of Achillies, probably will be running that a lot

yeah @Wafu that's the build, @DrkFrst (who is the record holder for Hades) just got 7:38 with it

aaaand he's now down to 7:26, he's going all in on White Antler

Pillows just came in with the 7:17, sub7 coming in fast!

Once again same build, Poseidon Keepsake then White Antler.

He saves a couple of rerolls to get a Chaos gate from Charron before the fields, that skips 2 encounters.

Here is the run:

And here is the Arcana setup:

sub7 has been achieved, the starting boon here is Hera instead of Poseidon, then White Antler of course.

Here is Arcana and Fear setup:

Momus is the clear standout right now, but I think a lot more setups are going to be viable than people think outside of it -- Hitch stacking from Hera + multiple ways of applying Hephaestus bursts + vent (+backstab with Melinoe Blades) is very exploitable for near instant-clearing encounters at every level and the setup translates very well to single-target damage too, I've cleared in ~11 mins multiple times with that setup using both Melinoe Axe and Melinoe Blades just running casually against the Fear timer, not even optimizing Fear/Arcana/Keepsakes/Aspects around it.

yeah the blades look promising, today gremlin got a 6:33 with Aspect of Pan

I think that it's going to be Aspect of Pan and Aspect of Momus. The problem I find with Pan is the channeling time and mana consumption, whereas Momus is ultra-reliant on getting Double Moonshot as an early hammer (otherwise it's just kind of not good.) Disclaimer that my fastest is a 9 minute.