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[SirNiko]

Yeah, elemental shields sound like they could really add some variety to the game! You might want to look at Sonic 3 / Sonic and Knuckles speedruns. They use elemental shields to gain movement advantages (fire shield allows for huge horizontal bursts, while the electric shield grants immunity to electrical hazards and improves mobility, and the water shield is used sparingly because its special ability kills horizontal momentum but is useful for quickly falling).

Ultimately there will always be one optimal sequence that is better than all the rest. Your goal isn't to make there be more than one optimal path, but to try and make it so that players can go back and forth between a handful of choices for a while before they find that path and settle into it. Just be wary not to make the shield too optimal - if the player can use the shield to walk through a powerful monster than normally would take them a minute to defeat, then it becomes obvious the shield is the best choice.

[Graham-]

As a tangent I prefer randomization in speed-runs. Maybe to watch non-random runs is pretty good too, but I definitely prefer to play the random ones.

One of the most important parts of a speed-run community, for me personally I mean, is the ability for a player to watch a run and get better at the game as a result. One of the things that makes something like Starcraft enjoyable to watch is that after having done so I can go play myself and do a lot of the things the pros do, or at least try to.

Glitches, pushing mechanics to the point where you don't need to be good at many of the things that the regular players need to be good at (in proportion to the fact you are better because you are a speed-runner)... all of this stuff separates normal play from speed-running. All of that is cool, to be sure. "Oh my god, he just skipped all that shit I had to do!" That statement is fun to exclaim. But I think a game that produces those kinds of runs are weaker for it.

I watched a shield-only run of Dark Souls. He avoided almost all of the monsters. And his tactics when fighting bosses was linear. Instead of learning to play the game by watching him I'm learning how to skip it. Speed-running would be more prevalent, a more critical part of a game community's eco-system, if speed-runners had to master core mechanics, not border cases of them, as is often the case.

You just need to make your game in such a way so that an excellent player can beat it blazingly fast without exploits.