big appreciation to you not being afk atleast, so we still get mechanics updates 
- even if it gives Zantai grey hairs 
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Watched first 6 of those runs. I believe you if you say they are consecutive but those layouts are still incredible. Good density, a nems at a close spawn point in most chunks, good bosses in the bossrooms. Only 1 bad chunk between those 24 is incredible.
But this playlist is a very good example of how bad current SR still is: the maps themselves, the spawns, the weights on the meter rewards for enemies, all of it.
It’s basically a bossrush mode that very heavily favors builds with movskills, and Dervish will always be the fastest with a target sprint to any visible map point (SS) and high speed of raw movement (Vire).
As soon as you get a room without a boss, the timer drops by 40 seconds (runs 4 and 6). As soon as you face a two-phase boss you are forced to lose another 10-20 seconds for nothing.
Just a very bad mode. Was horrific once so it has improved over the years from 0.5 out of 10 to 3 out of 10. I really hope something will be done to it for FoA release to turn int into the actual endgame mode from a boss rush sandbox.
p.s. good runs as always! you guys are killing it in SR
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Not everyone tries to speedrun everything in GD…
I am fine with SR as it is. The randomness keeps it fresh. So have your homogenous CR. Which to me is a boring 0 out of 10.
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I agree with you both. I don’t particularly enjoy SR. It feels a little aimless and as banana said, it’s basically a boss rush mode. Finding the boss and killing it is often the most efficient way to advance. There’s not a whole lot of tactics. I also personally never understood the modifiers. I have no influence over them and I can’t adjust my setup/tactics based on them either. So… 
CR is to me very similar to me, just less random/variation and you don’t have to search for enemies 
Either way, I hope FoA keeps the main campaign more interesting for longer. (And the build norm doesn’t drift off much further)
If we were to get an inbuilt SSF mode it would pull me to play MC again… Could even try doing beginner builds. But without it…
That’s a bit of a harsh take, I gotta say. SR and it’s random nature is what makes it fun imo. It also makes it all the more rewarding when getting a good layout/fast run. And with all the improvements over the years to it, it’s far from perfect but not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. Not everything has to be perfectly balanced around nerds, living in their moms basement, running sub 4, and I mean that with all due respect. But c’mon now.
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Agree 10/10
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Right. Search the nemesis as fast as possible. Luck has a significant impact. At good luck, SR is a racing competition, but it can be stroll/wander at bad luck. It is annoyed after you search all 4 spawn points, find no boss, and then have to face distributed/scattered enemies.
A player said that putting in a lot of effort to improve your builds is not better than good luck to randomly get a good map. The impact of maps is greater than the strength of builds.
Tbf i dislike endgame modes in most games of the genre. No one besides PoE 1 to this day has nailed smth really engaging and replayable. D2 was supreme for the time that’s why everybody played it so much, but in the modern gaming 200 Mephisto runs don’t look as appealing, do they?
It’s just that i believe that Crate is capable of nailing it.
Also i’m getting really tired of people on this forum jabbing this “you filthy speedrunner” argument at me. Where did i ever say anything about how smth slows my speedrunning? Is it I who post chains of sub 4 min SR runs?
The 2nd boss phases.
You stand there. For 20 seconds marveling at the boss second phase transition animation that you saw thousands of times. Doing nothing. There is no gameplay. You don’t prepare anything. You just stand there while the game is wasting your time. I call it out. What does it have to do with speedrunning?
The big barren rooms in SR.
You navigate convoluted rooms searching for weak enemies hiding at the corners to fill your meter. This is ENDGAME of a post-apocalyptic game where monsters are ravaging the lands. Supposedly a big challenge where you expect to be in constant danger. But in these rooms there is not dangerous and there is no challenge. The challenge is to build your SR meter faster than your ragequit meter fills up.
People united in complains on the backtrack in PoE2 - it got changed. People complained about backtrack in D4 - even the Blizzard listened. But every time i bring up how SR spawns make some rooms boring and tedious, there’s always a squad of people to defend it as randomness.
I like randomness, too. But i want random things to be 1) engaging 2) at least somewhat fairly weighted to each other.
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This unfortunately is absolutely true. It’s very hard to compare builds to each other or feel the impact of the progress if your current build when the game balance is as good as it is now and at the same time the edngame randomness is as high.
Fair enough and I wasn’t directing the comment at anyone in particular but rather the mentality of it.
I wonder how SR would look if maps were more dense and the way you clear them affected your loot. But not in a way that you get punished for having a slow build or being a bad pilot, but rather being a bit more rewarded for doing better in terms of piloting and build power.
I agree with a lot that has been said here. SR shouldn’t be homogenised, but these things are flat out bad and pull down the overall experience:
Not a question of elite vs casual or anything like that. It’s just not fun to be standing around waiting for a boss or running through an empty level looking for mobs.
Also this:
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it’s funny how people complaint about 2nd phase bosses, and then saying it also has nothing todo with speedrunning(by extension speed) and applying to casual players too, when it’s possible it might actually have a “purpose” for casual players or lesser speed considerations (even if perhaps accidentally):
Granted i think phase transition is just a collateral effect of using existing bosses. But, since i do enjoy so playing the devil’s advocate, since Z has repeatedly emphasises SR continues to not be made with 4 boss gangbang in mind, and actually scaled bases on 1v1 potential
Phase change does give you a potential break without being as wasteful/uesless as peopel make it out to be; you simply go kill the other bosses in the meantime
This is a monster slaying game if I need a break I will use town portal and go to town. If I am out in the wild I want to be slaying monsters.
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Well some of us like small breaks. 10 s break is a good pacing. And also not everyone hunts nemeses in the first three chunks. I have zero problems with mob density. On some maps like the aether ground one I would prefer even less density. You can pull a lot of them there by accident and even two nems often…
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The thing is, SR is not the campaign. It doesn’t have a story, pacing, a sense of place, etc. It’s just a jumbled collection of levels and a kill-fest. Which is fine - but I would like to get on with the killing.
If I want that I just press escape.
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Even killing mobs needs to have a pacing. Having to constantly kill something is tedious.
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Honestly SR needs more density in larger maps and the ‘respawn’ heroes just should have 1 form. Beside of that, SR could use some improvement but is in a good shape.
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Replace every monster with nemesis at this point.
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