I didn't Eat a Single Time Speedrunning with this Lifesteal Build...

Impressed by the balancing team's masterpiece of a Gunlance build in the AT Ark Challenge Quest, I decided to use a similar build to speedrun Freedom from Solitude, wiki style. I'm surprised with 2pc Ark's healing ability, as I genuinely never needed to heal. However, the redundant eating opportunities are used to pop might pills like candy, which didn't even make up the damage lost from having no agitator. In a speedrunning context, even 6 raw from 4 attack to 5 attack Artian is significant. No amount of element scaling or flayer procs can come close to 20 raw 15 affinity from agitator and 25 raw from binding counter in the standard AT Ark Gunlance build. However, surprisingly, this build is viable though, even if it traded all the "core" Gunlance armor dps skills for the meme skills. **Afterword on the build: It's a nice build especially if you want lifesteal. Keep 1 level of flayer and swap the remaining deco slots for agitator for an actually good build. A side note--I still prebuff for this run since it's a meme run, but I'll follow the TA wiki rules for buffing for further AT Ark wiki updates. It's such a trivial compromise that it feels silly to not do. I was considering titling future runs as "weapon only" with the special icon, but because half of the AT Ark runs involve turf wars and the thunderbug, it makes me cringe to label them like that... For future runs, I'll prebuff and label weapon only depending on locale and practicality. I mainly follow the spirit of TA wiki and could not care less about the specific rules, since technically the thunderbug is illegal, luring to the corridor is illegal, and 99% of wiki runners use QoL mods (I do as well) which is a perma ban according to the official wiki rules (lol). #monsterhunter #gunlance #speedrun