I've played a lot of Gauntlet, and just recently (2 days ago) got into speed running it. That might come across bragging, but it's mainly to give context to the strategies/glitches and results I'm posting. On my third attempt at a NG+ speed run with the wizard I was able to kill Morak in 58:07, a new record using the first strategy I'm going to talk about. The next day, using both strategies I was able to absolutely crush the old record, and kill Morak in 49:56 on my second attempt (the first one soft locked halfway through.) I didn't discover these tricks, but I haven't seen any talk about them here, and the first one seems to be almost unknown.
The Dark Torrent Trick: The first trick is harder to notice, and requires you to have "The Hollow Chapters" weapon equipped to unlock the void school. It uses the "Dark Torrent" spell, which is the cone of fire that slows and slightly damages enemies in front of you. It has no casting delay or cooldown, and you can walk while using it. Most importantly, the first damage tick happens the instant you cast it. By clicking as fast as you can, you can repeatedly damage enemies with it, at about the same rate ice beam would damage a single enemy. The sheer speed with which you can clear rooms of enemies more than makes up for the slower movement speed of the wizard compared to the elf.
The Ice Beam Trick: If you watched the video you may have noticed the other subtle trick I used. The one that shoots a horribly powerful ice beam constantly as I effortlessly kill spawners and rooms full of guys that you would normally skip. This is what puts the wizard into a league of his own. To pull this trick off you're going to need the "Golden Feather" relic equipped. You stand near a piece of food or a potion, cast your ice beam, then use your relic. If the food or potion was in range, you should now be able to walk around with your ice beam constantly casting. You can do this multiple times as you find more food and potions in a level, stacking several powerful ice beams into a single super powerful beam. You can still cast other spells just fine, so this works perfectly with the great AoE clear of the dark torrent trick.
Edit: The strategies mentioned below are outdated and elf is currently used for all 3 of the boss fights.
The other 2 particular things I want to touch on are 2 boss fights: The Sun King, and Morak. For the Sun King fight, you're going to want to actually pick up both of the potions, not use them to make ice beams. The heart has a damage threshold where it becomes invulnerable again, and using just the beams will require you to go through 3 cycles. Instead, when the heart comes out you should damage it down to around 2/3 health, then use your "Arcane Blast" potion ability to drop it below 50%. Rinse and repeat for the second cycle and you should be able to kill it.
In the run I posted, I was able to kill Morak in 3 cycles. I did 10-12 practice runs on Morak before I did the run, and not a single one was 3 cycles, so don't count on that amount of luck every time. I did however kill him in 4 cycles in probably 75% of the attempts I did, and 5 cycles in the rest, so it is still better than most regular attempts I've seen. The first cycle, you fight him like normal, but you want to make sure you don't destroy the food before you can turn it into a beam. The food spawns where the sword is when Morak returns to his invulnerable form, so make sure the sword isn't going to get hit by a spell, and make sure the food isn't going to land directly on you when he changes back. For the second and remaining cycles, I like to go invisible right as he is transforming so I can shoot ice beams at him in peace. Just make sure the beam isn't passing directly over the sword, as it'll destroy the food when he changes back.
That's about it for my hot wizard tips. There may be a level or 2 where you could get away with using boots of speed instead of the golden feather, but I tested 5 or 6 levels and only a single one of them was slightly (1 second) faster with the boots. You'd lose more time than that swapping back and forth. Maybe someone will find some new exploits, but until then I don't see anyone knocking the wizard off the top of the scoreboard.
Hoyt this is fucking amazing and I love you. We used the potions on bosses and ice beam but you made it way more consistent. Also we had not used keyboard for ice beam, which made it neigh impossible to control. Great to see that using keyboard makes that a whole lot easier.
Haha, happy I could make it a little more interesting around here. You do lose out on the precision character movement of a joystick if you go with mouse and keyboard, but I think it's definitely worth it for how well you can aim, especially using the ice beam trick.
Fiddled around with it and got a 4 cycle on Morak, these strats work like a charm. Gotta get some practice in and then I'll beat your 49 mins :P
Been testing a warrior strategy for Morak. It's not super reliable but if you use the "Murder" weapon with the "Chaos Amulet" relic you can 2-cycle kill Morak if both relic uses target him. Unfortunately you've got a 50/50 chance of it attacking the sword instead, and you have to kill all of his images and the other enemies first. You pop the relic, wait ~2 seconds, then use the "Demonic Cleave" ability right before it warps you to him. You can often get several more heavy attacks in before he changes back as well. It might be worth swapping to warrior for the Morak fight in NG+, since there is no rule against character swapping.
You might be better of by popping the elfs clones like Icyworld did in his 2 cycle kill video. The tricky part here is indeed to get the clones to attack Morak and not the sword. If I recall correctly the clones attack the closest enemy. Manipulating this proves to be tricky however, since the sword follows you around when its not attacking. I'm asuming the Chaos amulet targets randomly and does not go for the closest target?
It seems to be random, it might have a max range on it but I'm not sure. I've actually been trying the elf method more and might be making real progress on it. Lots of 2-cycle attempts.
Since we can't keybind 2 keys to the same attack, do we allow an external macro for faster Torrenting? Obviously not an autoclicker but we could like macro G to also "press" mouseclick? We need Mod's opinion on this too.
Landed a 48:36 today with a surprise ONE CYCLE!!!! Morak fight. I was trying for a 2-cycle, dumped all my damage into him as soon as I found him to try to force a quick change back, instead he just sat the entire ring of mirrors and died. Still more that can be done to optimize it, and I got 2 Skype calls during the run that I had to tab out to answer (I should really do something about that) that probably cost me ~10 seconds. I think sub-45 minutes is definitely possible with lucky catacombs levels and a one cycle Morak fight.
Niice dude, I actually got a one cycle just now as well haha. When are you actually gonna start submitting your runs, you can break all the records. Gonna be training a bit more on keyboard before I submit agian I think.
I submitted the 49:56 run a little bit before I made this thread. I had also sent in the 58:07 run the day before. I'm not sure what is required for Boomer to verify runs but if he has to watch them all the way through I can definitely understand the wait. Going to do a few more runs before I start submitting more, since the run I just posted about is my first run since I made this thread.
So I was training more Morak and got a 2 cycle, seems like 1 cycle might be purely luckbased. There was something odd about the 2cycle though. Morak just kinda died while having 20 %ish health left. The final cutscene played but the battlemusic was still going on, even through the credits. When I left the credits everything was fine and the game is beaten. Weird
1-cycle fights definitely seem to be luck based still. I'll probably try some more things with timing attacks on Morak, but it's probably best to try to just force him out of his first cycle as fast as possible until we come up with a consistent strategy for it. If you have a video of him dying at 20% it'd probably be worth looking it over to see if there is some way to just force end the fight and go right to the end cutscene.
Looks like elf is the way to go for The Beast as well as Morak. Pretty effortless to get a 2-cycle kill on The Beast, I managed to get a 1-cycle kill on him that was pretty funny but took a lot of attempts. I also crash if I restart on that stage so it was a bit of a pain to practice.
Actually I have consistently been getting 2cycles on beast with Merlin as well. Get the first potion as a beam stack & get the potion on the left + a stack from the food there. After knocking him into intermission phase just start getting beamstacks and when he comes out you have like 4 + potion while he does his initial attack and hes gone.
I would like elf for Khamun however, since you don't get any beam stacks on Khamun. I think his ability to keep enemies at range while on the pedistal combo'd with his great mobility and decent dps will outdo the time needed to switch.
Probably pretty close either way, wizard can go invisible on the buttons so that you don't have to run from the boss, elf is going to be slightly faster getting to the boss, probably a bit faster damaging the heart.
Invisibility is really useful on the levels where you have to work the cranks. Just pop it and crank away worry-free. You're also invulnerable to Death while invisible, and it will quickly despawn him too.
