Grondious's video: Cuphead - The Devil in 44 65s - Version 1 1 5 - Lobber Spread Route

Shoutouts to the legendary Sublime for coming up with this insane "Spider's Kiss" strat to kill Devil in phase 1 even in V1.1.5. I learned this strat and performed the kill in this video a good while ago but never got around to uploading it but here it is and I hope you enjoy! This kill unfortunately requires some exceptionally rare luck as of making this (0.01% kind of RNG) and is also very difficult and will soft lock your game if you barely miss it or get very slightly sub-optimal RNG during the spider attack. For context, as of now, you need exactly this RNG of Clap-Bubbles-Clap-Spider which is already a 1 in 42 odds (this doesn't give the full picture either because around 10% of the time the bubbles attack will either make you miss a parry or the entire sequence will be too rushed due to attack timing variance to get enough DPS/setup in), then you need 5 spider hops (the other options, 3 or 4 hops won't cut it), putting it into 1 in 126 odds, then as of now this kill has only been performed on one "spider off-set" which determines its positioning as it falls on Cuphead and since there are 20 different offsets that makes this a 1 in 2,520 odds. Although to be fair this part here is one piece of the puzzle that could be improved upon (although it's extremely hard), there is very likely a few other offsets that are possible if someone figures out and grinds the setup but for now this is the best we got. Then within each spider hop there is a random delay of 0.3-0.7 seconds, if you get too many short delays, or any of these things cause it to line up in a way that makes you lose damage during the sequence due to when the imp times in with the whole thing, then the attempt is dead. I would say 3 in 4 attempts just automatically fail due to unlucky spider delays. Combine this with the fact that you need to be able to read the spider offsets in the heat of the moment, which is very difficult to do while perfectly optimizing the sequence which you need to do since this kill is so tight, and also with the fact that if you get the roughly 1 in 10,000 RNG and decide to risk the soft lock Yolo style to try this kill, the smallest mistake on this means you will fall short on damage and The Devil will soft lock you before you can kill him. Also you have to consider how hard Cuphead is of a run at the level where this kill would matter and so if you choose to practice this kill constantly (which you would likely need to do to be able to clutch this out on a great pace with nerves, although even typing this I doubt if it's even something someone could be expected to perform), then it means you're spending your time on this 1 in 10,000 miracle RNG instead of practicing bosses where you can actually gain consistency or learn how to save time on more boss patterns, so I think this kill could serve as a bit of a bait time sink for full run purposes. I have been running Cuphead for around 5 years and V1.1.5 Any% has been my most run category. I don't believe I have even gotten a relevant run to The Devil 100 times in total because you need so much to go right to even reach this boss on a good pace, and comparing against my current World Record of 27:33, I have only had exactly that one run and maybe 1 other pace going into Devil where this kill would have helped me improve my time. So a 1 in 10,000 extremely hard pattern, that after over 2,000 hours in the game, I have had 2 chances of rolling this luck and it actually mattering at all even if I did roll it and performed it flawlessly (which I've never gotten this RNG in a run that I know of so it's purely hypothetical). So yeah, I wanted to break this down to a degree to maybe help some understand just how unlikely this is and how not worth it is to waste time on this unless your goal is just for the fun of it but I am speaking for optimal use of someone's time for a high-level grind or more reasonably your goal is to improve the setup and hope to figure out ways to make it work on more RNG so it's not so extremely rare because I think with the current debugger which has RNG control options, can make this insane kill seem way more viable than it actually is. This makes me believe at least in its current state that this strategy is simply more of an IL spectacle rather than something viable for full runs. That being said, because its difficulty is so high and the complexity of optimizing it combined with the extremely large amount of spider patterns does make me think someday Cuphead runners might find a way to make this actually somewhat viable. Definitely no guarantees when you just talk about the unknown like that but I do think there's potential in here, it's just a ton of work to attempt to seek out and I would love to see it happen as this would be a truly epic way to end a Cuphead Speedrun. Watch me live at - https://www.twitch.tv/grondious