you can do whatever thats why there are no rules clarifing what you can use and what you cant use. but it would probably be faster with an existing character.
Not gonna lie, this seems like a bad category without character creation required. IF you can just use an existing character then the bar for entering into the speedrun will become extremely difficult very quickly if/when this category becomes popular at all. BIS gear will be mandatory to even be close to competitive as soon as these runs have like 10+ runs on it.
For speedrunning of this game to take off there has to be better and clearer rules not requiring you to get extremely lucky and/or spend hundreds of hours on prepping and beefing up a character for a run prior to even starting. You already need to farm resources to do an actual proper run from fresh character. The less time we are required to sit and mindlessly farm stuff in order to prep for a run the better.
For example in Diablo 2, there isnt a "clear the dungeon" speedrun. People would do millions of mephisto runs and they time them but there isnt a load into the game and clear durance speedrun. There isn't a speedrun to clear andy, meph, diablo, and baal with a fully maxed out geared character.
I generally think this site is for serious speedruns, in a well-defined category, that has some popularity to it. I don't think if only one or two people speedrun something in the diablo series, it should be on the site (exceptions can be for some truly epic runs like MacroBioBoi's Hell Pacifist Sorc run - https://www.speedrun.com/d2r?h=Pacifist-Hell-Sorceress&x=zd346oe2-wl3d70y8.qyzvn021-2lg1mr7l.lr3e5gml).
I love seeing people speedrun! Whatever gets people excited to do a run, I'm generally for it... It just needs to be beyond some barrier of entry... Popular categories generally take precedence on how visible it is on the site. I think the most difficult decisions we have for this site is what is in the rules and what isn't... D2R has some very simple rules to it because it's a true new game experience. D4 unfortunately is weird because mats, gold, altars, obols, etc. are all shared.
Some mods on the team requested this category and although I will most likely never participate--I'm hoping that it gains some popularity or I will recommend to remove the category.
