Yet another Petra Arena strat zVypurr and I have cooked up. I think this one is quite good.
At its best (first clip), this strat saves 0.7s to the conventional Fury Petra Arena. The double forward slash prevents the problem mentioned in the above post where the first Petra of the pair flies away too early, and jumping back up immediately for the second Petra in the pair means you no longer have to wait for late attacks.
At its worst, you'll need to react to an early attack from the second Petra (second clip), which breaks even or loses up to 0.3s an optimal normal strat depending on when exactly it attacks. To do this, listen for the Petra to start its attack. If it does this too early for you to be able to kill it before it attacks (which you'll be able to gauge with some practice), dash immediately to the gate and do the normal kill.
You can lose a little less (0.1-0.2ish) on some early attacks with a higher dash (third clip), but this runs the risk of forcing the Petra too high to reach (fourth clip), so I would recommend defaulting to going down to the gate.
If you have Dashmaster, activate the left collapsible platform after the first Petra kill as shown to avoid the first Petra of the pair getting caught on it. If you don't have Dashmaster, you'll have to skip this since the platform won't come back up in time for faster Petra spawns.
For the double slash on the first Petra of the pair, jump and slash at roughly the same time to lead the nail hitbox into the Petra on the way up. This is faster, but also safer since it pushes the Petra away sooner.
Alternate strat for the pair in Petra Arena (first clip). Prevents the situation where the first Petra in the pair flies too far to hit with the normal rotation (second clip) and forces the second petra to attack sooner, which lowers the chances of/possibly prevents a late attack that you have to wait for to not get hit by (third clip).
This is really tough to time because of all the possible patterns, but from video comparison it looks like this loses about 0.3s when both are done optimally. Anecdotally though it's much harder to greed the normal strat than this one, so I suspect on average this strat would go even with less chances to fail.
Fastest and most consistent arena I can think of. Lowering the platform makes the first petra double consistently. Wave 2 is a little tricky to always get hitless, so it's not too much slower to just play it a bit safer. kinda rough example in 2nd clip Nothing is as fast as getting an rng double on whatever petra is further from you, but it's super unworth to go for imo
If you cancel the cdash going into petra arena as soon as you trigger the arena (the orange line in I'm next to in the pic) and stall for a brief moment, you can nearly guarantee getting all the 12 geo from the first petra, since it will move to the center of the platform as soon as it spawns.
This method of breaking the planks after petra arena (first video) saves about 0.1s-0.2s over the normal strat (second video). It also avoids the issue in the normal strat of being able to grab the plank wall and not being able to hit the planks. This really seems like one of those strats that's been discovered multiple times but isn't the norm for some reason. I noticed it in zVyper's trap bench ComSoB.
For the first petra in petra arena, you can stand underneath where the petra spawns without getting hit. This allows you to stop your cdash earlier for the 1 slash kill, which makes it easier to handle fast spawns which would normally fly upwards too quickly. Doing the slash from underneath the petra like this means you will be too close to VS double consistently, so after doing the nail slash jump backwards before firing VS.
Left side petras without c-dash. This one has much more consistent doubles and get more soul than right side, it overall saves about 0.5-0.8 on avg to right side (If you don't do safety wings before 2fbs, if you do it relatively breaks even).
The first petra is little bit harder but its key to delay the dash before the fireball in order to get the double. I tried to see if using any other entering movement and none of them worked that well. The monarch wings before the second petras fireballs isn't needed but highly reccomended for more consistnet doubles and to kill the close petra.
saved 0.04s over decent cdash strat, but dash buffers mean they are way more consistent than timing the cdash strat well so on avg i saved about 0.1-0.2s
this strat gives geo more consistently than the normal one and it's only 0.4-0.7s slower so it's worth if you're low, but rng can screw you over if the geo flies to the left. if you get geo you'll probably get 5-12
jump when the petra is on the right of the platform, not immediately sometimes the big geos don't land on the platform so you'll have to catch them midair
variation of AlejsXY's strat for petra arena thats slower, but works better with asynchronous spawns and also has a faster backup, first video is optimal strat, second is backup
Edit: after a few hours of Trap Bench IL's, this strat is for late spawn right petra, if you get a fast right petra dont go for the pogo and default to the other strat, although its not that bad to go for this one obviously since the backup is forgiving
another tip is that if you shoot your fireball when the petra decides to attack, their attack cancels the recoil so they won't double, so either wait until after they shoot or hope they decide to not attack
Do a big walljump before the first fireball and dash before the second fireball, this is not consistent but with good rng is the setup that I found to get doubles on both mantises
15
9