I'm sorry but I've discussed and played with most of the elite record holders and I've seen their tactics - specifically, a large part of the warriors would moderately spam sam on banishable mob clusters and kelvin/george on bosses. Now I'm not going to argue if and how these methods are cheap because timed runs are not of any interest to me. However, this would also explain the uneven/abnormal time gaps when comparing pure with elixir runs in some maps.
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