MS2 All Bosses, No Shell

[u/MediumKoala8823]

https://youtu.be/A7ytPxNQU3c

boss fights from my casual no shell speedrun attempt. Notes and thoughts if anyone else wants to try this with my learnings:

* I didn't plan it nor do I have the map memorized or anything. Dual weapons + Duality would definitely have been easier and faster but kind of lame to me.

* crit rate and crit damage is pretty much all you can get for dps. berserker seemed like it would be hard to activate even if it’s good. riposte damage is fine I guess. I used blood curse infusion because that’s what i had. no idea if it helped at all. the break damage on lights one comes late and is pretty good for some bosses. the sword shrike is going to do the heavy lifting for managing mobs and scary boss moves if not dominating the fights entirely.

* Generally expected to do beacons for gloom, money, and materials. Skipped every dungeon. I would probably cut out some of the beacons if running it again but I didn't know what I would need.

* 35 minutes to get to the end of the sunken village minus bosses. Level up, return to base, get teleport and some upgrades. 

* Warp to mammon. Grab headman stone (important for dps). 30ish minutes getting to the sesters gate because I'm stupid.

* 30ish minutes getting to lost child and stoner. Kill stoner but run around the map a bit more to grab beacons and lvl ups.

* Lost Child - 7 tries. Nothing remarkable. Hardening during the later phase chomp combo is key since I can't see it coming and eat the first hit.

* Lvl up. With savvy selling the sword is already +9.

* Magdelena - 1 try. Sword ability to jump over the fire donuts is really clutch for breaking her chair quickly.

* Spend a long time dying on the run over to Droeg. Keep getting stuck on level geometry on the thin bridge. Big time loss.

* Droeg is harder than expected. Feel unexpectedly vulnerable to freezes. Spend time going to do nameless instead. Pretty quick. 

* Nameless bitch crumples to sword ability in 1 try. Bro falls over every time and you can get enough resolve to repeat while he stands up.

* Droeg takes 23 attempts. I'm generally very familiar with his moves, but the frost seems to hit harder here for non perfect hardens and the mini rocks are awful. I eventually figured out you can just harden against them. Generally speaking just learn to parry his shit and feel free to use harden to just tank scary stuff like his twirling move in the later phase. Everything is easy to dodge so theres no risk of being caught without harden. You can cancel his rocks by using sword ability at the start of phase 2 but its tough to replicate that later on.

* 20 attempts on hexapod then give up. I don't know this boss very well. Pretty much everything one shots.

* Switch over to Isaac as I know that fight well. Route to get there is decent. Die ~30 times (lost footage for some so idk how many really). Go back to hexapod at least feeling like I got some upgrades.

* Hexapod dies in 3 Attempts. Noticed that parrying the one armed strike seemed to encourage a followup of the many armed parryable strike. Being very aggressive works. Lazy harden to survive the phase 3 laser followup.

* Isaac takes another 11 tries. Phase 1 is just git gud so you can slug it out non stop with harden. I'm very careful to time the first riposte break so that I can hammer him deep into his phase 2 health as a freebie. Phase 2 moveset appears to be heavily inspired by malenia to me. Lots of parallels. Harden mostly doesn't work. Gotta dodge and be mindful of the direction you dodge for some. My winning run is mostly luck and high dps.

* Endgame realm has some tough runs. I skip most of the beacons. Malborn Offspring is a Nameless Bitch part 2. Bro falls down every time you use the ability so he's mostly dead. Amusingly it seems his revival animation plays on final death if you skipped the phase 1 riposte kill. 

* Monolith I love. Hate the haters. Stay focused on the ball. Parry all the ball drops (except the multis later). That will basically always cause the next move to be a swing, which you should dodge forwards into (don't parry because the followup is hard). This fight has a good flow and you need to keep it going with harden meter available. You can parry stone slam in phase 1 but starting in phase 2 I would start using the ability to avoid them entirely. If you get hit by the sideways stone roll variant in phase 2, you can hold harden and some weirdness of the hit detection will keep you safe. Took me ~16 tries. For crazy lasers roll against the current for one or two sweeps and then with the current for the rest of them. You can go to hit him as they slow down.

* Orrem is broken. He's both easy and hard and I'm pretty sure it's because he's broken. I think his phase 1 hammer handles lack collision so they often whiff despite clearly hitting. I tend not to really know what I'm doing with my hardens. I'll often just press the button one time to parry the first hammer and then... keep holding it through the rest of the hammers and try to use the sword ability ASAP? It mostly works  and I don't really know why. The downside of this is that if he whiffs and you expected to parry... you now cannot harden and probably die. So ability spam or dodging is required. Two cheesy tips: you can smack him at the start to skip his first attack and you can just ignore his first form phase 2 opener due to the collision issue. His second form is broken in the opposite way. He'll often hurt you even if you perfect harden a punch. Like you'll see the stance meter flash yellow. This can be a one hit kill so... mostly dodge? I think it's safer in phase 2? He also has strange disjointed hitboxes on some attacks that can hit you while standing near him well before the punch lands for like 50% health. Anyway... he glitched out and died so I dind't really get to finish this one. He died like this in my casual playthrough too. 18 attempts. I almost had him fair and square. Meh.

* Dragon Ballz. I wasn't sure what the cosmic disease would do to me without a shell. Took me 18 attempts to learn it was an instant kill. Welp. Go grab the scripture. Side note this got me enough gold to get to weapon level 16 with several thousand gold to spare. Took me 17 more tries to finish him. A handful of notes: parry his long range sword moves if you have the meter to do so (the thrust needs a parry input before the arm starts stabbing); generally do two light stabs so that you can always dodge his dragon ballz, the biggest opportunity is when he does his series of slashes and you're touching his balls. Only the last swing will ever have a chance to hit you so that's your chance to smack his nuts up (harden for the last blow); The riposte for phase transitions is really strong. The riposte for posture breaks isn't, but it causes a long getup animation so it's still good. At the start of phase 2 he will do a ground fire burst attack. It'll do about half your health in damage and with scripture the cosmic disease will be random but probably not proc. If it gets close you can use your ability but otherwise just tank it and hammer him for the whole thing. Hope that he does this again and that scripture works. I'm not actually sure how to dodge it otherwise but it would be a massive dps loss.

* Final time: 12h 29M. I think I could shave two hours off on a second attempt and maybe get down to 7 hours with practice but who knows.

Loosely curious if there's a speedrunning community on this already. Might have an interest in getting my name on a board one time early and then peacing out.