HFW Melee Pits | Ultra Hard — The Enduring — 26 seconds

Per the speedrun community's rules, the on-screen timer begins as soon as I start the challenge and ends when the text "I yield" appears.

This is a new strat that is able to knock the Enduring down using only two Block Breaker sequences. This works because attacks that apply the resonator have an additional (still not very well understood) bonus multiplier. That bonus is why some of my heavy attacks do 570 damage instead of the usual 136. However, you need to wear down her armor before you can do that much damage with a heavy attack.

While exploring the Airslam attack for a different melee pit boss, I realized there's a chance that the Airslam will bypass armor* when applying the resonator, which means it can do 499 damage very early in the fight—and it will wear down the armor so that future heavy attacks could do the high damage attack. The math for this also happens to work out beautifully. In order to knock the Enduring down so that you can stab her, you need to do about 2900 damage.

The run is constructed out of Block Breaker sequences, which include the following elements: 1) Charged heavy attack (CHA), 2) Block Breaker, 3) CHA with resonator bonus, 4) Shoot the resonator target. In previous attempts, even with the resonator headshots, two sequences wasn't enough damage, because the first time I reached step 3 my CHA only did 136 damage (her armor wasn't weakened enough for the big 570 hit). But now that I am able to deal 499 damage by using an Airslam for step 3 during the first sequence, it's exactly enough:

Sequence 1
1) 136 damage
2) 128 (I actually missed one of these attacks, but that doesn't matter)
3) 499 (!!!)
4) 660

Sequence 2
1) 136
2) 128
3) 570
4) 660

And then a CHA to knock her down for the critical strike: 136

Add it all up, and you get just over 3,000 damage—which means it's stabbing time. If the 499 had been 136 (as it was in previous runs), we would still be 200 damage short.

*I'm not actually sure that anything is being bypassed, or if there is actually an armor threshold for the CHA, or what is going on—I can only go by the numbers I see on the screen, and it's never occurred that I got the 570 damage CHA during my first sequence.

[gpodobas]

I actually had to change from normal to easiest at this part :) I'm so bad at melee combat :)