Game:

Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara (1996)

Duration: 0:22

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8

Mage dash loop cancel is overpowered. Being able to cancel literally any action into a dash collision, which can freely be canceled into any action (like say, lightning bolt), gives him far and away the fastest lightning bolt critical I think.

Note the Rod of Fire. Lightning Bolt is strong enough to one-shot Synn with just raw Magic-U lv20 stats and the Staff of Wizardry. (Not that rods make much of a difference by this point, actually.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hcy2n88bFBY there's a couple videos from Asian speedrunner-tube with input display, the buffer input for the cancel is
1. Dash attack, or really any action
2. Tap 2x (forward + jump simultaneously)
3. Tap 1x and hold (forward) and then segue into your follow-up of choice
The third forward input is important to cancel the bounce-back from dash collision, and sometimes to give you free movement at all instead of glitching out in place with an attempt to resolve the simultaneous backstep and dash input. Note that this cancel can be used by any character whatsoever, as even Fighter/Elf/Cleric's hop will be canceled on the first frame before you leave the ground.
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Red Dragon lightning bolt critical:
Red Dragons have a flinch animation (most noticeable by their eyes closing) whenever you chain at least four hits in a row. This will completely cancel all movement and attacks that they might be doing, and can lead to an infinite combo with enough continuous hits. (One easy way to see this is to save up 5-9x Ice Storm on any Magic User and then just mash them out on a red dragon without pause.)

If you combo into a Lightning Bolt such that it activates the flinch animation, lightning will do damage per frame instead of just one hit during the spell animation. So, any at least three hits (including stuff like Continual Light that doesn't do damage but still hits) - combo into lightning. It's still situationally possible to hit the crit if there's 4 or more hits before the lightning, but since the flinch check resets whenever the dragon does a new action it's much harder to consistently get the crit if you go over 3 hits + lightning.

The flinch reset makes it generally hard to hit the lightning crit at all in RTA, due to Synn's extremely rapid and aggressive behavior, which is probably why every character speedrun route favors the LBO quick kill on Synn (pretty much 100% consistent setup as soon as she does meteor swarm, at that point it's down to execution).

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