Well hello everyone, didn’t think I’d be back here so soon.
For anyone who’s new, or just doesn’t know who I am, I like doing new account speedruns to progression titles for a mix of fun and to inform the community of how the early to mid game has changed, nice strategies to use, and other random bits of info.
Most recently with the introduction of the crucible, I decided to redo my valiant Speedrun, and managed to bring the time down from 21 days to 16 days.
But something about that Speedrun annoyed me afterwards. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and the run was incredibly unclean, due to a combo of irl sickness and a messy crucible run, the Speedrun was a few days longer than it realistically should have been. In addition, 9.1 released literally days after I finished, which annoyed me as it was a much easier road to valiant (as exploration gives 3 t4a).
However it didn’t annoy me enough to do the Speedrun again, I had still cut a lot of time off my run and I didn’t see anybody beating it soon.
Fast forward nearly 3 months to the last 2-3 days. I load up YouTube for some content while I’m playing arena, and notice that Nick136 and Pepe have both started Valiant Speedruns. I was surprised, but decided to tune in to see how they would approach the challenge compared to how I approached it. That’s when I noticed a few things have been updated sometime since my Speedrun:
1. New players start with 45 energy, and reach 70 energy at lvl 26. What a fantastic change! New players now get a lot more energy per energy refill and level up, making the start of the game less refill intensive
2. 10 phcs after the first quest. A very interesting and huge change for new accounts. The chance of getting an early 3/4 star is increased massively (for example Nick got one).
3. A MASSIVE increase in iso and gold (example picture of an act 3 quest attached). Whether this was due to my feedback or otherwise, this is a great change for new players. Iso was always the limiting factor for the Speedruns in the early game, I had to essentially go all in on one champion and get to shooting stars level with them.
These was the 3 main changes I noticed, all which have happened very very recently. It intrigued me to how it would change the early stages of speedruns, champ acquisition, rankups etc.
Upon watching a few days of his streams, I realised that Nick is on track to just about beat my time, especially because of 9.1 vs the crucible. And so the race is on!!!
I started a new account yesterday, and set up the basics. We got a 4 star Hyperion, which will be a major carry to act 6, and I’ve got some other good champs such as 5 star venom.
I didn’t know whether I wanted to Speedrun, so the first stream on my channel from yesterday is just titled new account fun, as I was testing how I felt about it.
But I’ve decided it’s happening!
This will be my 3rd and FINAL (but actually this time) F2P Valiant Speedrun. The goal is simple, explore 9.1, do a path of necro, and that should do the job. I’m hoping to break 14 days with a decent margin, but like last time showed, things can go wrong quickly.
I’m gonna do a similar format to last time, a mixture of forum recaps, videos and streams, so there is a media that everyone likes. Not all content will be done on stream though, as explained before it doesn’t fit with my schedule.
So this is it. Let’s break that record and hopefully break the record Nick is likely to set!
