-Much more optimized full room using Gaia's silkless start, although I really hate the ceiling orb pogo with sawtooth, but yeah it's definitely faster optimally especially for sawtoothless
-Doing the last orb like this is significantly faster for sawtooth and finally lets sawtooth match sawtoothless endings. If you take away anything from this, do this version of the ending if you have sawtooth
-The upslash on the guy is rng but can be backed up, not 100% sure if it's strictly better than silk gathering on avg but I think it should be. Strat suggested by plew_plew
I was testing some thorn jumps and came up with some ideas for this room. The thorn jumps itself are really easy to do, all you need is to buffer your jump and they are fully consistent.
First clip is with hitboxes on, you can see how small hitboxes are, that's why Hornet is not dying. First jump is really easy to do — all you need is to dash immediately of the bounce and then buffer you jump.
Second jump is harder, because you need to line up yourself and then buffer you jump. Visual cue is really obvious the place is right under the second ring pole. I also like to float just after the clawline since then buffering is exactly the timing of repressing the float (at least for me), but probably it's not optimal.
I did this room with 12.25 (second clip) despite not being a speedrunner (the comsob is 12.23 but roomsob is at most 11.86). Maybe somebody can improve it, I dunno. Also you don't need to use both of them, I think the first half has much more potential than the second.
Finally, you might want to learn these strats regardless, since they can save your run if you failed any other strat — all you need is to fall into correct part of thorns to jump off them (clips 3 and 4)
Scripted phase 1 of Clover dancers, although I'm sure better lines can be found this is what I've come up with. Quite hard so if people want to try and improve it that'd be cool. I'll get a few more scripted phase ones and post in the thread since there's a few ways to do this.
There's a tech I saw in jarlyk's low te awoo run where he'd cancel the endlag of this pogo with a float to regain height. It's possible outsude of TAS but it's really difficult to be consistent with it, except for some reason in father of the flame. I think there's like some micro hitstun that makes the pogo hammer extremely consistent. Here's a clip; it has circlet and a higher level needle, but the core idea should remain the same.
Should be the fastest strat for any category with silk soar and thread storm (probably only 100%ABAG). I try to stand on the small background rocks after the first larger rock to start the silk soar and cancel it early to adjust slightly for the correct horizontal position. You want to end up to the left of 4c to get leftward knockback.
Fastest quick kill so far. Farming silk at the start is important as doing 4cs heal less with the freeze frames is really hard and you don't even lose time farming. For the right rock my visual cue is the left of the lava fall. For the left rock there isn't a good visual queue but you kinda want to be between the seam between the 2nd and third platform and the notch in the middle of the third platform.
The opening I had in the previous post was a bit scuffed and awkward. Attachment 1 is a slightly faster and more consistent version of it. As long as your jump is after the second twig and last pogo is after the rightmost edge of the rightmost bush, it should hit the Skarrgard. Due to random inconsistency during pogo dashes, you may be much higher or lower than I was in attachment 1, but nearly anything works. All of the attachments use this opening, so this variation can be seen between them.
You can actually hit the Skarrgard an extra time during it's swing. This lets you kill it super fast if you get the perfect rng of 3 swings in a row (attachment 2).
The only reason for an upslash before a jump or burrow is to avoid the knockback of a regular slash - don't bother upslashing on burrows. If you find it hard to avoid getting hit by walking under jumps, you can just not slash before a jump and focus on the movement, or you can do a slightly tricky parry (attachment 3). It's really hard (but possible!) to actually hit the Skarrgard with the parry, so try to focus on perfecting the timing before that.
Other than all that's it's straightforward. If you're just trying to survive, try to work on perfecting your responses to attacks and then recognising them in the context of the fight. If you're trying to go as fast as possible, you can work on adding the harder strats
Some strats for the Skarrgard at the entrance to Hunter's March (assuming you have Silkspear and nothing else)
The Skarrgard has 150 hp, so it's optimal to start the fight with at least 5/9 silk, though more than 5 doesn't hurt, and up to 7 can help. You can get 6 silk really easily/nearly optimally from the enemies on the way to the Skarrgard from Bell Beast (including 1 from the Silk Heart)
The Skarrgard has 3 possible moves - a swing, a jump, and a burrow. You can tell that the Skarrgard is going to swing when it draws back it's weapon, and you can pogo the Skarrgard between the two individual swings to get in an attack. The timing is fairly tight but very consistent after some practice (see attachment 1). For the jump and burrow, the visual indicator is the same - a slight crouch. However, there is an audio indicator - if the Skarrgard growls before the attack, it will always be a jump. You should stay still if it is burrowing, and start moving towards the Skarrgard as soon as you see that it is jumping, to avoid getting hit. It's very easy to get hit if you don't react quite quickly. It's nice to get into the habit of upslashing just before either of those attacks, both because niche timings can make it so that a regular slash will only hit the Skarrgard if it burrows and not if it jumps, and because the knockback from a regular slash makes it easier to get hit on a jump. Very rarely, the timings make it so that you have to do a minihop before the upslash to hit the Skarrgard on either attack. Attachments 2 and 3 are examples of what a jump and burrow should each look like.
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