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.
Alternative to Nebula's setup that uses buffered inputs for the timing/positioning. Some notes:
This loses at most 0.1s to a fully greeded version of this, but realistically will go even with other run setups like the visual cue Nebula posted
The dash after the drop before the upslashes needs to be neutral to lure the spore a bit to the right to avoid running into it after the mushroom pogo
For the mushroom pogo, I hold right out of the dash into the wall and start holding left at the same time as the pogo. Switching to holding left too late can cause you to run into the spore
The timing here works out so that hitting the spore as soon as you're low enough to fit under the ledge greeds the spore height well
I tend to go neutral after the explosion to make sure the pogo reaches
Consistent alternative to ouipogo for routes without fireball. Pretty easy , you wanna upslash the spore to explode it. Ouipogo has a low chance to send you the wrong way, so this eliminates that possibility and is the same speed. For reference, about 0.45 faster than the classic epogo and 0.35 slower than a good firepogo. The visual cue is to walk off when the spore gets to that mushroom in the background. play around with it a little bit because the way you pogo the mushrooms matters for the timing
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