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.
beginner tutorial for 1221 double spike. shows simple example of how to perform, and then explains more in detail, and attempts to go through in a way to help understand the most common issue with the trick.
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.
Inspired by this post, some slash setups for double spike timing. These are based on the timing of the first aspid kill, so they should be more consistent/more accommodating to weird aspid kills than movement-based setups.
I've included two setups. The first is just to buffer 7 slashes following the aspid kill and jump at the same time as the 7th slash (first clip). To avoid bonking the ceiling with your nail, I recommend jumping from the bottom plat at the same time as one of your slashes (4th slash or earlier, any later and you can't make it in time).
The second setup is to jump from the bottom plat at the same time as your 4th slash and just go straight through to the normal setup without waiting (second clip). This is exactly the same timing as the first setup; if you were to continue to do slashes the 7th would line up correctly with the jump. This makes it easier to avoid bonking but also means that missing any of the movement will likely result in you missing double spike too, so ymmv.
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