groin

Have you fought the Throne bosses under a normal game and under the Company of Champions?

That is definitely not true. I've seen videos of the fight on normal game and the only fight of them in the Company of Champions was done by a dude that had a 100% block shield (I can't use any 100% shield), used butterfly poison, and forced them to fall off the stage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAdq_izznlA

If you've seen them killed legit while in the Company of Champions please link to that video. The fact that they ONLY have higher def and damage output is one of the issues. I can get stunlocked by the Watcher's combo and die. Defender can kill me in two hits. Both of them like to attack in unison and that forces me to waste all my stamina on dodging their attacks. The AI aggression boost is no joke as the videos I've seen on normal mode shows that they'll just let you wail on one Throne boss while the other is off smelling roses.

The fact that they are weak to fire can be the DPS boost I'll need. It's surprising that they're weak to poison, but that's a road I'm not willing to take. A few casts of Flame Swathe WILL NOT solve the problem as I tried that as a test. I tried nuking them with 4 and they were still kicking. They will block the cast. I managed to hit Defender with two shots of my Chaos Storm as he was reviving throne, but he barely survived and Watcher killed me as I was still in the animation.

The plan I've been going with is to have 1 Throne at half health (I don't want them to get the buff) while I focused on killing the other one. I tried blitzing Watcher when she was the only one left (I hit her around 12 times during that 15 second window), but I didn't have the DPS and stamina to finish her in time. Like I said, the Fire buff might be the DPS boost I was looking for. I'll see how that goes.

I think a lot of people are missing that he's doing this while in the Company of Champions.

Huh. I thought it was just a one time drop. I wonder what the time frame is on it re-spawning.

Yeah, don't bother Co-Op-ing the Ancient Dragon. It's not worth the time and hassle, as only one in twenty hosts will be successful.

One thing that annoys me is hosts that don't realize that you can heal them with spells, especially after you've already done it. I would save them so many flasks if they would just stand still for two seconds.

@groin: The speedrunners don't really have any categorical knowledge of what is difficult; it's against turbo nerd cred to say something is difficult and they basically never do; other than normal-ish people like Ela.

@groin: No bonfires and no deaths at the same time. The hard part of the 1.00 run is not screwing up the jumps; other than that it's spin to win/10 less bosses.

WR is like 1:30 right now; fastest way to do it is use 3 ascetics on Old Iron King; Naked Macing is the record but hexes could potentially be faster just due to general OPness. No deaths (on NG) is harder than a 1:45 run. No deaths/no bonfires (on NG) is much harder than any of the speed runs going right now.

@vinny_says: That's the 1.00 version so you can bypass the shrine of winter which negates around 30% of the run (and the hardest part); not quite as dumb as the lord soul skip in Dark Souls but along the same lines of stupidity. Just watching the first parts of it I could tell that Noobest wouldn't be proud of the run in a general context; if it can be improved by a lot that's not good enough for a speedrunner.