I will not personally attempt to beat hammer runs with hammer, since I find it rather boring, but having the time to beat is a good challenge for me.

I think it's fine to leave it open, it's only a few maps and even those are questionable. I'm pretty certain that probius is faster than Hammer on Towers of Doom for instance. Got a run that was 9s slower than WR with pretty bad micro.

So far the most annoying map to play because of how frequently the siege giants and minions block each other and randomly path into the keep. You can push them by walking up against them, but it loses time compared to not having to do it. Just need to get lucky and hope the minions walk through.

Nice time. How often did you try this? I tried braxis for around an hour today. My start is a bit better, but the -armour camp always dies way faster than in your run.

Just fyi, this was probably my third or fourth attempt, so I was still figuring out how to minmax during the run. It might still be very hard/impossible to beat, because this was before Hogger's PvE damage got nerfed.

I'm not sure what happened to the Twitch VOD, but it should be accessible. If not, I reuploaded the run on Youtube:

Was my first try with vikings, not sure if they can be faster than raynor

I don't think Sgt. Hammer is the fastest hero on any map, assuming perfect execution.

Warhead and BoE should be faster with Zarya, but require very precise management of health and energy. The only map I'm not sure about is Towers of Doom. There are multiple strategies that could be faster than Hammer. Vikings with delicate minion micro on every lane should be faster, also Zarya/Zagara could be faster if executed perfectly. And in my opinion, ARAM maps are less important for speedrunning.

If you want to see what good minion micro looks like with Zag (there is still tons of room for improvement, too): You basically want to preserve the ranged minions as much as you can, by manipulating tower shots and freezing the wave.

EDIT: I just watched the ToD run; You kill the 3rd fort at 3:32. I definitely think it's possible to kill 3 forts faster than that with either Zarya or Vikings. And these Heroes would also allow you to reroute the run, possibly getting the camp after you cap all 3 towers.