Just to clarify and bring it up in a more transparent way to the Batman community: the old rules here under the pacifist category were generically written and didn't mention enemies couldn't be hit stunned while running that category.

Dxtr's current pacifist run, Baize's now-deleted pacifist run and my old pacifist run all never hurt an enemy (but the runner enemies were also allowed to kill themselves in the electricity fields, mainly because some do so in an unavoidable way). Anyone familiar with the game who has practiced the category (as there have been a few runners who tried) all did so without ever hurting an enemy. This was always the standard and exactly what made that run category challenging.

Moving forward, the rules now reflect the same:

• No hit stunning enemies.
• No sub-weapon use at all during stages (e.g - you can't batarang the ceiling machine into hit stun in 2-3).
• The running enemies (as long as you don't hurt them) can be harvested for ammo drops for the use on bosses.

So, why is hit stun not allowed?

Because every single enemy can survive a single punch in this game and it changes the intended route and challenge drastically. There's absolutely no way the actual intended route (which is much harder to avoid enemies or take strategic damage boosts and deaths) would remain competitive with the new route exploiting hit stun. If hit stun were allowed, you could literally punch through the entire game as the only enemy that can die in one punch are the dropper enemies that fall from the ceiling. Plus pacifist infers no violence anyway, so literally punching the head of every enemy is pretty silly.

A mistake was made from the rule standpoint which made the rules unclear, and now it was corrected so the precedent in what pacifist actually entails moving forward can be better established.

Thanks for reading.

Three times, Chambers. :[

Also not every enemy in the game can survive a punch, but its rare.

I know it won't change anything, but personally I prefer my version of the pacifist run because its the Batman%. Batman punches people, but doesn't kill them. Batman won't kill, but doesn't have to save you.

It also changed the actual game because while you want ammo, you can only get it via farming -- not from killing enemies. That is the main difference. Because taking hits, and thus deaths is mandatory (and you can't use a continue on a boss) when you can't kill, you have to use a lot of despawns strategies and intended deaths. The routing is entirely different from any%, even with hitstun.

I know the rules won't change, but just wanted to throw that out there.

Well, I think the smarter idea objectively would be to create a category based on that (if there's interest) than obviously try to change a pre-existing one and its already established rules. Doesn't make sense to change what came before, but that doesn't mean no one could one day accommodate what comes after. That's all hypothetical reasoning for now though.

The route difference would be insanely different from current pacifist because (Zimond actually recently posted in the Discord why some enemies sometimes die) but it's basically frame perfect, basically all enemies can be punched through. That removes all strategic damage boosts, all strategic deaths and literally changes everything. We had a category like this to begin with basically which was very similar to what you did, it was fist only%. I think the record in it at the time before Baize deleted his account was like 11:XX. It was neat to see how optimized you could run this game considering how ammo-centric it is, without any actual ammo.

Anyway, overall, sorry for the confusion as the rules should have stated as such.

Thanks for being cool in general and cool about it.

[Edit]

Zimond knowledge:

"Tracked back a bit and found that about dirks doing double damage. It’s basically just like how the batarangs works. So they deal damage every fourth frame, which means that in some cases when the hit box is big enough and you throw them precisely you can deal double damage. And actually that’s how the fist works too. It deals 2 damage, then 2 frames later (if the fist damage box is still inside the enemy hit box) it deals 2 damage more"

THAT is how I was able to kill firebug just by spamming punches in the corner. Fists were sometimes doing double damage.