efficiency, Naxxramas, speed run

We did our second speed practice run of Naxxramas in an hour and 23 minutes on Tuesday. The conclusion of the post-run discussion was that with a lot of work we could probably get it down to an hour and 10 minutes or so, but even if we did that it’s just not all that impressive.

The Problem with Naxxramas

Naxxramas has a few problems with regards to doing impressive speed runs.

• The zone just isn’t that hard. The more difficult the content is, the more room there is for improvement. Since Naxx is so easy, even after months of practice and playing our best there simply is less to gain. Even playing absolutely perfectly, we can only shave so much time off.
• There’s no tricks to it. There’s barely any skippable trash, there’s no “creative use of game mechanics” that we can exploit to finish it quicker. It doesn’t matter what order we do the wings in. In SSC there was a few optimizations you could do to boss kill order that saved a good deal of time. There was trash you could skip. Black Temple was FILLED with skippable trash if you took the effort to plan your attack route.
• The zone doesn’t take long enough to complete. Our original SSC video clocked in at just under two hours, and that was a *feat*. Our BT video clocked in at about 2 hours 45 minutes and that was a *feat*. We were clearing Naxx in two hours with no effort. The longer an instance is, the more opportunities there are to find niches to exploit.

Naxx Speed Run We Barely Knew Thee

The overall consensus in the guild is very much a lack of motivation to keep working on speed runs of Naxxramas. It would only be noteworthy if we could get it under an hour and most agree that that’s not possible with current gear. It pains me to say this because I had very much looked forward to having Fusion produce a speed run video but alas it was not meant to be. We’ll check back with Ulduar in about 6 months I suppose.