Dungeon Siege - Utraean Peninsula - Speedrun (

Welcome to my Dungeon Siege - Utraean Peninsula speedrun, the third and final one in my Dungeon Siege series. Just like with all of my speedruns I used segments in order to get the best result, so once again this is not a valid record but just for fun :-)

I actually thought about running without cuts for a moment, but changed my mind pretty quickly:
- you need a lot of luck to get the right spells from the merchants, without them, you can restart!
- without combat magic boosting items, leveling at the beginning takes considerably longer!
- teleporting ingame via hubs takes much longer, especially if you have to run back to them like in Meren!

Considering those cons, I decided to teleport by quitting and restarting the game, using the starting town as a way to quick travel. This also gave me the possibility to "secretly" save and make sure that all merchants had exactly what I wanted from them :-D

The next challenge was finding the fastest route. Contrary to the previous two maps, this one offers you to teleport across the entire map by using the hub (or the main menu), given that your hero is strong enough! In addition to that, the towns in the beginning are not placed linear but in a more circular way which allows shortcuts to high level towns (Lang, level 25) and strong enemies (Skeleton Rangers). Especially helpful were the maps you can find online which show the whole map including all routes and distances available!

My main thoughts were the following:
- play as a combat mage with the proven spells from my previous runs
- run to Crystwind and get as quickly as possible to level 14 for Haste
- reach level 25 to be able to teleport to all early starting towns
- reach level 37 at the Dragon Queen for max damage of my combat spells
- reach level 46 in the Abandoned Ruins to be able to teleport back to Hiroth

Not all of that was doable for me... I estimated that it is faster to directly run to Lang instead of leveling to level 25, especially because I do not have Fire Ring at that moment. So I stopped at level 18 to be just strong enough for Meren. I also did not manage to reach level 37 and certainly not 46, for that there is just not enough XP on the way if you run past most of the enemies! Nevertheless, that allowed me to show the literal endlessness of the Endless Dunes by using the map overflow on my way back to get faster to the exit of the Mausoleum :-)

I also checked a very special route which unfortunately was just a tiny bit longer than the one I used in the video and which I had to discard because of that. It is the route from the Ancient Ruins directly to Grescal via Great Northern Forest, Eastern Island and Lost Pyramid of the Spirit. The idea was to teleport back to Elddim after getting the townstone and later run directly to Hiroth from the Dragon Queen. It would have been an interesting shortcut but I did not mind using the intended route (more or less) instead.

Regarding the run itself, there are only a few things to say. I used my glitchy potion drinking once again and especially on the way to the Dragon Queen it was desperately needed! Without that, my fragile mage would have died many times!

I also did some trickery with the game difficulty. I had to do it twice to increase the enemy damage because on easy, it is too low to reliably destroy the wooden wall in the Crystwind Mines or kill the Fallraen priest in the Furok Cave. The third time was to increase the values of the items dropped by the Skeleton Rangers. On very hard, some items like the Long-backed Bow are much more valueable on higher difficulties (72k) than on lower ones (1.5k)! The item properties are set in the moment the monsters spawn, so I dont have to fight them on very hard but just have to make sure to change the difficulty during the time they spawn. By selling those bows, I had enough gold to buy everything I had planned :-)

Finally, there is one little thing I noticed after rewatching my run: I think it should be possible to save 25s in the beginning by not going to the shop but relying on luck to get the health potion from a box on the way and Fireshot from the Krug Shaman on the lift. However, since it was already very unlikely to get the good drops in the Crystwind Mine while also managing to not get killed and reaching level 1 in the process, I decided to keep it like it is!

Thank you very much for reading, I hope you like the run :-)

Timestamps:
00:15 Journey to Crystwind
03:55 Leveling in Crystwind
08:14 Getting Elddim Townstone
11:47 Getting Lang Townstone
14:58 Getting Meren Townstone
17:39 Getting Fallraen Townstone
18:48 Getting Crystwind Townstone
18:51 Getting Quillrabe Townstone
26:35 Getting Grescal Townstone
31:52 Journey to Hiroth
37:49 Tenstone dropped

Maps:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfile...
http://vasserver.dyndns.org/vasdn/for...