Guide to Hero Perks for Speedrunning (GhostDragon)

## Purpose

This article outlines the Hero Line-ups and Perks for speedrunning, as of Version 15.6 (April 2023)

This is a very brief outline of speedrunning. Doomsday grants the player "Surgical Strike", "Rainmaker" and "Electrostatic Fallout" talents automatically.

Therefore, only Dune and Anvil benefit from it in speedruns as they are the only heroes that should be nuking.

For other heroes, there are still more important perks to pick in speedruns.

## Oldschool

The absolute record, across all seasons, for 4-Player Oldschool is 27m30s.

https://cp2.shortbit.de/stats/oldschool

https://cp2.shortbit.de/details/replay/18922

In this run, Fury was picked over Pyro to provide the Battlefield Promotions mastery. This mastery gives a total of 12 talents, divided equally over the heroes in the game, meaning that each hero in a 4 player game obtains +3 talents. This was done to mitigate the poor talent system, which do not provide essential talents right from the start for Dune such as the very basic Mud Stompers. In short, Battlefield Promotion is a mitigation of poor talent distribution design.

Ideally, Pyro should be used over Fury, and this would allow an even better record.

### Oldschool Hero Line-up

1. The first hero is Dune. He is an essential hero for an early general trigger and massive AoE damage with his overload and self-nuking all through out the game.
2. The second hero is Anvil. He is essential to scan and nuke the Omegalisk and leviathan bases to death.
3. The third hero is Swann, for his extreme damage dealing.
4. The fourth and final hero is realistically Fury. He is chosen over Pyro because of his Battlefield Promotion mastery, which aims to reduce the number of remakes to allow Dune to trigger the general early game with required talents. This is to mitigate poor talent distribution design, some of which should have been baseline for all heroes, such as Mud Stompers and Nimble Feet.
5. Ideally, Pyro is preferred over Fury for better lag management. Pyro's firestarter and heatwave abilities allow him to melt zerglings, broodlings, primal mutalisks, and other small units that cause the most lag. Less lag allows Dune to move out and perform his functions in a speedrun game.

We exclude Nova, Aquila, Predator which are terrible heroes for speedrunning Oldschool due to their very low overall damage relative to other heroes.

Tychus, Atlas and Tassadar are all decent damage dealers, but outshined by Messiah, Swann and Fury/Pyro.

## Hellwalker

As of September 2022, the absolute 4-player Hellwalker record across all seasons is 45m27s. The previous record of 48m57s was impressive. However, this new record is an incredible feat that would not have been possible without world-class players and proper planning.

https://cp2.shortbit.de/stats/hellwalker

https://cp2.shortbit.de/details/replay/19345

However, this new record is even more compelling for the following reasons:

1. It is a clear 3min30s faster, which, in speedrun times, is a light-year.
2. Nightmares are much more dangerous to Dune and Predator compared to the older version of the game. Nightmares are especially deadly to Dune.
3. The previous version of Mercenary was more powerful in delivering more nuke damage, more vision range and an adequate amount of minerals. The new Mercenary no longer boosts nuke damage by +250 and no longer provides +3 vision range, meaning that not only is the early General trigger harder, but Dune cannot nuke deep into certain areas he previously could with increased vision range. For example Leviathan and Brain Bug Bases are just 2 examples. This means increased delays.
4. The fact that Mercenary now provides 10,000 minerals instead of 5000 minerals does not offset the disadvantages above, since the game was completed with much more minerals than needed. Speedruns only require specific targets to be nuked, and minerals are plentiful. Therefore, the previous version of Mercenary was more powerful in delivering more nuke damage and more vision range. The new Mercenary is a nerf for speedrunning.
5. Predator's Battlecry has taken a significant nerf in the new version of the game, reducing spell damage resistance. Heroes now take 220% the spell damage they took compared to the previous version of Battlecry. In absolute terms, Heroes take ADDITIONAL +15% spell damage.
6. This means Anvil and Nova are much more vulnerable to spells such as ravagers, nukebacks and hybrids. This requires additional planning on their part to survive.
7. This also means heroes such as Nova are pigeonholed into taking Armageddon mastery just to survive, despite being fully stacked with Battlecry. This means significant delays (>30s) in completing the Odin Fight by the 22nd minute. This is extremely significant in speedruns.

As such the difference in times between the new and old record, with all things considered equal, should be much greater than 3min30s.

### Hellwalker Hero Line-up

The line-up required would be:

1. Dune remains essential
2. Anvil is a necessity to scan and trigger bosses without activating their bases. This is especially important for the Leviathan Base. Additionally, Anvil deals tremendous damage to ground targets such as hives and nightmares, as well as being invisible and impervious to the hybrid lifting spells (although he still takes damage from them).
3. Nova becomes essential. Her 15% damage increase mark debuff is excellent, on top of allowing Dune to pick Doomsday instead of Air Support. Her Armageddon mastery is finally put to good use to eliminate other targets on the map with mass general nukes that occur twice. She will unlock her score by the 18th minute (Level 40), and melt the brain bug by the 21st minute. Although she has cheaper nukes, other Heroes such as Dune and Anvil have more powerful nukes with Doomsday. Minerals are not an issue on HW speedruns, as long as they are directed with precision to well-defined targets.
4. Predator is important because of its ability to reduce spell damage from nukebacks, ravager shots and his necessity to engage the general twice with the mass general nukes.
5. Interestingly enough, Swann should be a better candidate than Predator because Swann can also survive all nukebacks and deal massive damage. A team of Dune, Nova and Swann will survive all nukebacks, while Anvil will have to defend himself with proper positioning.

We exclude Aquila and Atlas. Their DPS are the lowest of all heroes in a speedrunning context.

Tychus, Swann, Fury, Pyro, and Messiah can be immensely effective in the dynamics of HW multiplayer speedruns, in different and interesting ways.

### Table for Hero Perks for Hellwalker Speedrun Games

The table below shows the original perks for non-speedrun multiplayer OS and HW games:

For Hellwalker speedruns, the above table simply needs to be modified:

1. Eliminate Aquila, Tassadar and Atlas as speedrunning heroes.
2. No Helldivers. They die to Nukebacks and when pushing out, they will die too fast against non-stop drops, making them obsolete at all points of a speedrun game.
3. Most heroes have 3 core perks. As far as possible, heroes must pick Mercenary perk. Only Nova cannot afford to pick Mercenary since she has 4 core perks.
4. For Dune, with Doomsday now including the Electrostatic Fallout talent and Surgical Strike talent, he should pick it as the Hellwalker Perk number 4.

### Mercenary over Helldivers for Hellwalker Speedrun

Helldivers upgrade for each major boss kills, which are the Brutalisk, the Omegalisk, the Leviathan, the Brain Bug, and the General. There are hence 5 levels of upgrades. In Speedrun games, we swap Helldivers for Mercenary for 2 major reasons:

1. Nukes and nukebacks provide much higher DPS compared to even Maxed Helldivers. Mercenary provides 10,000 minerals for each major boss and hive killed. Mercenary provides the minerals for non-stop nukes, and correspondingly, non-stop nukebacks.
2. Once you start to move out, Helldivers unfocused fire, irritating ability to aggro enemies, their frequent deaths, etc are more of a liability than a benefit. Therefore, replacing Helldivers for Mercenary is a logical choice.

## Links to the guides

* Introduction to GhostDragon's Guide
* Guide to all Hero Perks for Normal Games (GhostDragon) (OLDSCHOOL and HELLWALKER Version 15.6 (April 2023). Solo runs excluded.)
* Guide to all Hero Mastery Orders (GhostDragon) (OLDSCHOOL and HELLWALKER Version 15.6 (April 2023). Solo runs excluded.)