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Great question! It definitely looks a bit odd to see turns that are essentially wasted, but it's a function of a few things. The current route requires Water early on -- Exit (19) and Escape (23) for movement -- and later game requires Earth for Magic Barrier (36) to survive bosses. Since this category doesn't have time to collect many extra spirits (and can't duplicate them), this shoehorns us into getting our damage abilities from one of those 2 elements. Despite the missing, the base damage for a single hit of Avalanche is much higher than any other spell that we would have access to -- even with Fargo and Beigis being vulnerable to Water. For the missing, there are 2 components to that. For the actual rock contact with the bosses, we have mapped out the overlaps of Avalanche rocks with boss radii, with the casts having anywhere from 1-3 expected hits per turn depending on boss size. Some will miss, but we have to trust the math and keep going. For the actual "Miss!" on Avalanche, that's a function of Brian's Agility vs. the enemy's -- with Brian's being significantly lower in this category than a casual or non-glitchess run. We can't do much about that, but the overlap math will still give us (on average) 1 or more accuracy checks, vs. a single check for any other spell / melee attack. We've experimented with other routes and elements, but Water / Earth has been the staple for a while now, but it'd be interesting if someone worked out an alternative.

@@schooliedee melee is way weaker? If not, maybe u can use it in the small size enemies, where avalanche fails the most, and save some turns where u have to replenish mp

@@Ale_Redondo The melee attack is reduced when your elements are unevenly distributed, but it does bypass the spell damage reduction for guilty and mammon. Nepty would be a good candidate for using a melee attack to offset us normally arriving with 20 mana though, yeah!

I don't think the community has a video guide -- most of the discussion happens in the quest 64 discord etc. One of our folks did take the time to write out a guide for the recent ESA run by Fuzzy, who did play this category! Their page has a link to the discord also: quest64.streamlit.app/

@@schooliedee Nice to know, I'll have to give it a watch, thx for assistance