Caverns Criss-Cross Advanced: Gold

This advanced gold is imho the hardest out of all the advanced gold races. You absolutely must have all the dragonriding skills, and even then it's going to be tight. I suggest getting used to the fact that you're gonna be anywhere between .5 to 2.0 seconds low run. My fastest time before I finally beat it was 70.003, and at a certain point no matter what I tried I couldn't break 71 after I got to my fastest.

Now that the bad news is out of the way here's my tips.

Make good use of Skyward Ascent, in my fastest runs I used it 4 times. The key to this is that you're using it while you still have good speed boost from Surge Forward. Right off the start I do two Surge's to get to the first ring, make my turn, surge again, by this point your Thrill of the Skies should have generated another vigor. I surge once more collect the ring and free vigor, and immediately use Skyward. Collect the next ring/vigor and Skyward again into the next ring. From here keep up your speed but don't waste Surge, it's a tough call to make and after you run it 30 times you still won't feel like you're making the right call. Skyward a third time to get up to the next ring, and then it's all making smart use of Surge. Again, this is all a trial and error thing, and the pain in the ass part is you will make one pass that feels perfect and you feel you kept speed up, and thrill going perfectly, and it'll be like a 72.4. Then you'll turn around and feel slow during this section, and you'll get like a 70.8. It's maddening.

After you make it through the trees, and dip over the small falls use surges as you get them. If you flew well and kept thrill up during the forest section, you should reach the 3rd from last ring with two vigor. Use one to get to the 2nd to last ring, then Skyward for the 4th time to the last ring, and surge to the finish. If you did everything perfectly, and there was no lag then congratulations you ran a 70.045.

Or maybe you got lucky and got it done, which you get a huge applause from me. What I ended up doing was used a small bump to finish it. Before you begin your race, use the Bronze Timelock ability right where the race ends. Proceed through the race, using surges/skywards as I wrote out. As soon as you collect the last right, activate the Timelock and it will port you to the finish saving you a few valuable microseconds. It's sad to say that after nearly 100 attempts this is what it took for me to finally topple this race and finish the dragonriding achievement. Even then my final time was 69.676.

So good luck and happy flying.

Definitely one of the hardest. Absolutely put a Bronze Timelock where it ends. I'd suggest doing it once not bothering about your speed at all, so you can place the Timelock right at the exact finish point, so you can use it the moment you get the 2nd to last ring.

Along with using a couple of Skyward Ascent, you'll also need to get off a Whirling Surge or two likely. Surge Forward has to be almost outright spammed and you'll need to hit just about every green orb.

43.954 seconds, timing is super rough.