Editing Strike (section)

== The History of Strike Speedrunning ==
Strike has been a category for Horizon Forbidden West ever since the leaderboards opened on March 5th, 2022. The first Strike run ever submitted to the leaderboards was a 1:06:07 on PS5 by TheCalmBerserker on April 2nd, 2022. DorianSnowball would submit a PS5 run of 1:23:08 4 days later. Although Dorian’s run was slower than Berserker’s, it contained a groundbreaking strategy that would massively impact the future of Strike strats. Rather than using exclusively the Fireclaw and Slaughterspine Strike pieces like TheCalmBerserker did, Dorian discovered a new set that revolutionized Strike. In his run, he introduced a strategy that used a Stormbird and a Leaplasher, which was far more powerful than the sets that preceded it. Berserker would submit the first run that was under one hour on April 14th, which as of now is his last run. Inspired by Dorian’s discoveries, huntks would submit the first PS4 run of 56:11 on April 23rd. His run featured a combination of the Stormbird-Leaplasher strategy as well as some of the Fireclaw and Slaughterspine pieces. Once hunt got a taste of Strike speedrunning, he began to work on a guide for speedrunning Machine Strike. On May 28th, the first run using the Guide was submitted to the leaderboards, a PS4 time of 53:00 by huntks. Along with his run, hunt would publish the first version of the Strike Guide that same day. The Strike Guide featured more of the Stormbird and less of the other two pieces, which was much quicker than the previous strategies. With the Guide in hand, hunt would improve his time twice in the next two days, lowering the time all the way to 47:54 on PS4. After this run, hunt would go on a month long break, during which WolfSquish would also enter the PS4 scene on June 8th with a time of 59:33. WolfSquish’s time would improve 3 more times in little over a week, ending with a 53:49 on June 17th. On July 9th, huntks would return with a 46:22, which was achieved with an updated version of the Strike Guide that would completely phase the Fireclaw and Slaughterspine out of the run. The first, and currently only, sub-45 was achieved on July 14th, with a PS4 time of 44:14. Though several updates to the Strike Guide have been released since hunt’s last run, he has yet to do another run since his 44:14. Though huntks has not yet returned to the Strike scene, several new runs have been completed on PS5. GreedyOldKa completed several runs, the most recent of which was a 45:08 on August 6th, which is the current PS5 world record. CasualRen also completed a run on October 2nd as a reward that was part of a charity event, logging a time of 51:12. On December 9th, a runner named WooDio also completed a run as a punishment for losing a bet he made with huntks.