https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zj_O0qhfPY
So, I’ll throw in some back story for this one. One day I was running around in circles outside of Arah like I always do, and my friend who I sell paths to asks me to run path 3 for him. Ok, so I go in, solo the Crushers, no sweat, and I get to Lupicus. For whatever reason, I decide to go for a speed kill even though I haven’t done any soloing in over a month.
For a while before this, one of my other friends and I had been throwing ideas back and forth about how to speed up thief Lupicus solos, and one thing that we had discussed was using 6/6/2/0/0 instead of the standard build. So, after getting Bloodlust stacks and killing Yissa, I decide to make the trait change and give it a go. Of course, taking Infusion of Shadow meant that I’d be doing Backstabs until 25% as opposed to 50% which I had done previously, which was new to me at the time. On top of that, my rotation would have to change, and I hadn’t solo’d in quite some time, so naturally, I played horribly. Despite getting hit by ungodly number of hits, having seven life drains in phase 3 (as opposed to 5 in my record) and having half of my Backstabs be Facestabs, I still managed to get a 5:43, only four seconds slower than my previous time. Was I on to something?
Coming that close with such poor execution and RNG made me think that running Infusion of Shadow helped improve my time, so I started doing a bunch of attempts using the new build. After a while, I eventually realized that running Infusion of Shadow was leading to more or less the same times to phase 1 and 2 as Thrill of the Crime was, so I figured that the big improvement was continuing Backstabs until 25%. Until this point, I was under the belief that starting Heartseekers at 50% was the fastest strategy simply because that was what I saw happen in the fastest times by Goku and Perry. I eventually swapped back to Thrill of the Crime, and throughout a week or so of attempts, I chipped away at my time, going through 5:38.9, 5:38.0, 5:37, and finally a 5:28. Despite the poor RNG, I’m quite happy with this run since I think my execution was pretty good(other than phase 1.... I hit a 1:08 during an attempt a bit before it Q.Q), and I managed to only get hit once throughout the entire fight.
I tried for a few days to maybe get some better RNG, but I haven’t had much success. The one time I managed to get a five Life Drain phase 3 I ended up with a time of 5:27, but my execution as awful to the point where I facepalm whenever I watch the video. So, I decided to upload this one instead. I’m not done trying to improve this though, but I’m taking a break from it for a bit while I practice some other dungeons.
TL;DR - So, in short, the moral of this story is to simply not blindly follow what people have done before you, but instead to take the time to try out new things. Who knows, maybe you’ll find some weird new strat to save a bit of time.
P.S. Unfortunately I somehow lost the clip of it, but did you know Lupicus’s weapon type is a hammer? If you Daggerstorm in place during the p1/2 transition and reflect a hit of his Frenzied Barrage, the reflected projectile will hit and kill the grub. On one of my attempts when I did this, I ended up progressing my "Hammer Master" achievement to 500/500.
