Hey y'all, I'm currently trying to get into the No Major Glitches category and came across a piece of tech that would be a big time save if it's allowed under the No Major Glitches category. In a recent video by Proxy Gate Tactician (www.youtube.com/watch?v=31ITUKPyhZc) he showed that when you go into the final Ketheric fight you can use the pixie to turn you into a frog and fast travel back to the surface rather than fighting him and it will let you just leave Act 2 and give you his stone anyway

Using that tech would let you skip getting the smokepowder bombs and doing the fight with him, which would be a potentially huge time save (just buying all the bombs takes at least 4 or 5 minutes of resetting the vendor inventory and the fight adds at least another minute or two). I don't think it's currently outlawed by the category rules and personally I don't see it as a major glitch, it's more of an avoidance tactic like we use in a lot of other places in the run, but I want the community's input before I put time into practicing that route

So I think technically this stays within the spirit of the run (although It's been a while since I've been active so thats up to debate) -- with that being said purely from a routing perspective, you are going to have to do the rooftop Ketheric fight for this to work, as without that cutscene the army will not leave. You will also need to leave Act 2 at some point (there might be another way around this I forgot) in order to get rid of the Pixies Blessing so that you can speak to her again, which would add some time. Other than that seems like a cool route!

Ah, thank you so much for pointing out that it's the rooftop fight that makes the army leave! I wasn't able to reproduce being able to leave Act 2 because the army was still in the way. I am going to try that out and see if that fixes it

As for routing this I did a bit of work on that and yes you have to fast travel out to the Mountain Pass and back to talk to the pixie again but I don't think that's a huge problem because the load times are excluded anyway. If you do have to fight Ketheric on the rooftop then that would add some time back in but I wonder if you could still just use some bombs to do that, but not as many as you need for the traditional route. You only have to get him to half health so you should only need a handful of bombs to take him down. Even if that just saves you from needing to level yourself and Lae'zel twice and from needing the hireling it could be worth it since that's a significant time sink. Also if you didn't need the ring to boost the bomb damage or as much money it would make the gauntlet faster since you wouldn't have to go to Balthazar's loot room

The biggest (and possibly insurmountable) challenge with this route that I ran into is that you don't end up with Jaheira because you don't defeat Ketheric, which makes the Gith intermission and Act 3 much much harder if not impossible. If there's another way to get her into the party then that would be fine but I don't actually know if that's doable