In This section I will talk about what sets and strategies I use to speedrun all the musous and upper shiten monsters. I'm not saying this is the most optimal way to do so, its just what I think will result in the fastest times. I have been wrong about this in the past too so take everything with a grain of salt.
I will only show sets that I think are best suited for the monster completely disregarding price. All of the musous can be slain and even speedran with cheaper options, sometimes a 1% damage increase will cost millions of rdp/bc. If you want a cheaper option or even comfort builds and strategies dm me and I can either tell you or add it to the guide.
It is incredibly important that before you start speedrunning you have max level transcendence, unlocked the Perfect Defense (med) caravan skill and have reached the maximum My Mission level.
In the respective Moveset Guide sections I will only explain moves that I think need an explanation, or where there's a trick to it to deal significantly more damage. I'm not going to explain every move.
Here you can move on to whichever monster you're interested in:
The Z-Sigils are Sigils that will appear in your item bar once equipped. After using them they will give you incredible attack or elemental power for a limited time. The perfect Z-Element Sigil gives a 2.8x multiplier to your element for 27 seconds with a cooldown of 103 seconds. The perfect Attack Sigil gives 330 raw for the same amount of time with the same cooldown.
For SnS the Z-element sigil is incredibly strong and it's almost impossible to compete with record holder times without it. For this reason some of the builds will change according to if you own a z-sigil.
Currently the only way to get a perfect Z-Sigil in the Rain server is to either achieve the Speedrunner Role or complete the Time Limited event Bounty BBQ21 Extreme Road F150. To achieve the Speedrunner Role its however anyway not allowed to use it.
Being able to calculate how much damage a given build or strategy does allowed me to come up with new ideas how to tackle some of the musous. In my opinion its a very valuable skill to question already established strategies, especially if their best source so far is "trust me bro". When I started playing/Speedrunning I was always of the impression that combo element weapons and therefore the Prayers outperform other options on SnS but here we are at a point where almost always an Evolution weapon is the strongest option.
If you are interested about exact math behind the Z-Sigil and the Skill Ceaseless Up take a look at the SAF Guide by Mel and Dak. I'll only gloss over these since the math behind it isn't really that relevant for SnS. I know I'm not good at explaining the details here so if you want to know more or if you want to contribute yourself please contact me (@baluhga).
First things First. To calculate any damage I highly recommend you use the Damage Calculator on Doriels Website the Wycademy.
The Left most Column will have a toggle or list for all the skills that influence your weapons attack power.
The Middle Column will allow you to toggle anything weapon related as well as some other buffs like transcendence.
The right most column will be monster and hitzone related settings.
In Frontier Monsters have two kinds of HP. One is the True HP (THP) and the other is the Effective HP (EHP). This stems from the fact that there is a stat called the defense rate which is essentially a multiplier on the players damage. That means if you the formula to convert the HP is: THP / Defense Rate = EHP.
This means a very simplified formula to get the damage to a monsters THP is: Attack Power * HZV * Defense Rate * Motion Value.
Element works slightly different as in it does not get influenced by the motion value of an attack and is therefore good if you do many hits and generally bad if do few hits. In frontier this is only half the truth though since many skills like Fencing or Determination heavily influence the viability of Element. The reason why its incredibly good on SnS is for one we don't have high motion Values, Beam Slash adds an additional Hit, We get +15 Elemental HZV through just Determination etc.
All of the above info is however not really necessary to use the damage calculator to try and find out which build performs better. My methodology was to take the builds, plug them into the damage calculator and the higher number it spits out wins. Now in reality its a lot more complicated than that (at least in some matchups) since many skills aren't active 100% of the time, Hitzone's you hit change and Ice Age/Z-Sigil/Transcendence are also a thing.
The damage Calculator is also able to calculate Ice Age damage. The numbers for that are generally really low and represent the damage to the monsters THP. Since Ice Age ticks once every second I usually counted in previous runs exactly what instances of damage the monster received and added all of these up with the numbers from the damage calculator from different builds. This generally gives you a good grasp of how well a setup performs in a run but is by no means proof of a best build. In runs like Narga where Rush Up is essential because of the infinite stamina effect it is impossible to really quantify the benefit of the skill, this is where intuition and trial and error still play a huge role. This is also the reason why I sometimes have to still recommend multiple builds because there are just not enough runs where you could see that a given build is better.
Even though math helps, runs will need to be done and only through that way we can be sure if a build performs the way we assume.