First 2021 Speedrun Competition

[The Mojo]

Hello, everyone. It's been far too long since we had any serious speedrun action in the community. So without further ado, let's kick off 2021 with something spicy, yeah?

 

WELCOME, TO THE 2021 SPRING TASK FORCE OLYMPICS!

 

The grand prize this season will be a total of 12 BILLION influence, split between the winning team. 

Second place will receive 6 billion.

Third place will receive 3 billion.

 

Rules, Regulations, & Process:

 

-No help is allowed from outside your team. That includes league incans, doorsitting kins, etc.

-No more than two of each AT is allowed per team.

-No powersets or ATs are banned. Go nuts.

-No using any exploits that are not available to all players. This includes GM commands that are not available to all players.

-These runs will be hosted on Homecoming, not the test servers. This is indisputable.

-Inspirations ARE allowed.

-Temporary powers ARE allowed.

 

-Each team will have six players.

-There will be no videos. This will be entirely analog.

-I'll be choosing four random task forces(all level 50/non-shadow shard) for the competition. I won't be posting which ones they are until a week before it begins.

-The average of all four task forces will be taken, and the teams with the lowest times at the end will be victorious.

-The runs will be hosted and run for an entire week. Team leaders/players will DM me their expected times to run, and I, or someone else I trust will show up to make sure there is no cheating. This is to ensure no one feels locked in for a specific day, and all teams can have an entire week, in order to free up schedules and make timing just a bit easier.

-There will be only one run of each task force, with breaks in between to allow cooldowns to refresh. There are NO reruns.

-Once you have started your runs, there is NO swapping characters. For one, it defeats the purpose of 2 ATs per team. There's an intention to this. But I digress, no character swapping between runs. What you have is what you're running with.

 

The competition will be hosted on the week of February 19th, ending on the 26th.

Winners will be announced Saturday, the 27th.

 

Anyone who'd like to sign up, or would like to know more, please either add me global or discord and send me a message.

CoH global: @Kid Mojo

Discord: Mojo#7236

 

 

(Edited for a QUICK update to rules.)

Edited January 20, 2021 by kidmojo97

[The Mojo]

I should've mentioned this in the post before, so I'll start the list in this one. 

If there is anyone who does not have a team, but is interested in participating, feel free to DM me or make a post here. If enough people speak up, we can set up a pick up team for you to compete.

[The Mojo]

I'm a bit late, but now announcing the roster of Task Forces!

I'm also extending the deadline for signing up, as I know a few teams have had some complications. So long as your runs are done before the end of the week of the 19th, sign up whenever is convenient. 

 

ROSTER:

 

Miss Liberty Task Force

Lady Grey Task Force

Barracuda Task Force

Imperious Task Force

 

Each task force was chosen with the knowledge that all of these runs typically have some form of gimmick or AT/Powerset specific trick or twist to make the runs faster(aside from ITF, which is just a raw speed test). The intention is to make your runs as interesting as possible, without every team using the same 6 ATs and powersets. This means everyone is going to pick powersets and ATs they believe will cut down their OVERALL time the most. Will cutting your MLTF time be most efficient, or maybe Barracuda's? Who knows!? Good luck to everyone competing, and if you're late don't be too shy to message me on the platforms mentioned above!

Edited February 14, 2021 by kidmojo97

[The Mojo]

Sorry for the wait, we had a team or two that had asked for a few days to get their runs done due to scheduling issues. So without further ado, announcing the winners of the Speedrun Olympics:

 

FIRST PLACE

From Torchbearer: 

@Xemnas||@Philtrum||@Timmy O'Toole||@Techno||@Tux||@Vea||

Barracuda: 16:51

Imperious Task Force: 8:05

Lady Grey Task Force: 10:20

Miss Liberty Task Force: 10:48

Accumulative Time: 46:04

 

SECOND PLACE

From Everlasting:

||@Black Heart||@Styx66||@Veracor||@Paish||@Blue Bile||@White Tiger Wasp||

Barracuda: 19:02

Imperious Task Force: 8:59

Lady Grey Task Force: 11:23

Miss Liberty Task Force: 13:16

Accumulative Time: 52:40

 

THIRD PLACE

From Everlasting:

@RavenMagus||@Ruaidhri||@SSR||@Elmyder||@Faultline||@Burk||

Barracuda: 19:28

Imperious Task Force: 10:29

Lady Grey Task Force: 11:11

Miss Liberty Task Force: 12:06

Accumulative Time: 53:14

 

Thank you to everyone that participated! There will be another competition(with likely new rules and runs) in the next few months for those that didn't place, or didn't get to participate. All prizes will be emailed to the proper global handles within the week. Please DM me or let me know if you don't receive yours by then.

For those that didn't place: Ask questions! Learn how you can improve! There's always something to improve times and make your runs smoother. Even for all three placing teams. See you all next time!

 

Edited March 1, 2021 by kidmojo97

[Handmixer]

 Insane times, well done all! 👏

 

Thanks again for the fun competition! Any chance we could see the ATs and powersets used by the winning teams as well?

[Veracor]

Thanks for hosting! This competition was a lot of fun to plan out and execute! (And anyone participating in the next one can breathe a sigh of relief as Cuda probably won't be in it)

 

If anyone is curious, the second place team ran with:

 

War Mace/Bio Scrapper

Fire/Fire Blaster

Demons/Cold Mastermind

Fire/Sonic Corrupter

Fire/Kinetics Corrupter

Fire/Fire Blaster

[Techno]

Thanks Mojo! Was great fun!

 

1st place team ran with

 

EM/Bio Scrapper

EM//Fire Scrapper

Fire/Fire Blaster

Fire/Fire Blaster

Cold/Fire Defender

Fire/Sonic Corruptor 

[The Mojo]

I felt genuinely bad for adding Barracuda, but I feel like it spiced things up and diversified the AT spread pretty well. The next one will likely be no holds barred, no AT restrictions. We will see!

[Vea]

I think barracuda was a good call, its rarely ran and a good challenge. 

 

I'm impressed with 2nd place use of an MM. 

 

All MM speed run task force olympics when? 

Edited March 1, 2021 by Vea

[Xemnas]

Thanks for running Mojo! Great fun! 🙂 

 

27 minutes ago, Vea said:

I think barracuda was a good call, its rarely ran and a good challenge. 

 

I'm impressed with 2nd place use of an MM. 

 

All MM speed run task force olympics when? 

Never you monster.

I agree, Barracuda was great fun have only run it about 3 times ever before this TF.

7 hours ago, Techno said:

Thanks Mojo! Was great fun!

 

1st place team ran with

 

EM/Bio Scrapper

EM//Fire Scrapper

Fire/Fire Blaster

Fire/Fire Blaster

Cold/Fire Defender

Fire/Sonic Corruptor 

All our secrets, how dare you.

 

So..........when do we get our golden titles? *cough* @Number Six *cough cough* 😉 😛 

[Elmyder]

5 hours ago, kidmojo97 said:

I felt genuinely bad for adding Barracuda, but I feel like it spiced things up and diversified the AT spread pretty well. The next one will likely be no holds barred, no AT restrictions. We will see!

Counter proposal: no blaster runs :)

 

 

And for reference, our team ran

2x fire/fire blaster
fire/cold corr
fire/kin corr
plant/fire dom
demons/sonic mm

We did originally plan to run a defender, but on account of some rl issues, we had some last minute team comp switch ups. (Huge thank you to Burk for filling in for us last minute!)

 

Thank you Mojo for all the work you put into the event!

[Sabrehawk]

Congratulations to all. It is fascinating to see the team compositions. 

 

Has there been any thought to a speed run of the 801 mission series? I would love to see what the pros can do with that.

[Tux]

Thanks for running Mojo!

 

I was wondering what was the thought process behind the Demon MMs? I understand if you don't want to share 😄

 

 

[Lunchmoney]

I'd love to see how itf is done in 8 minutes! 

[philtrum]

Thanks for organising. I love speed runs. It’s really the only reason I still play. The week of nightly practice runs was as much (if not more) fun than the ‘proper’ runs. And we got better times in a couple of TFs. 
 

Many thanks to my team mates who, without doubt, carried me to a degree. 
 

I don’t think I’d done a Barracuda since 2011 until the week before this competition. The first run was just over half an hour!

 

Very much looking forward to the next competition. 
 

SPEED MLTF/LRSF LF3M PST

[Tux]

6 hours ago, Lunchmoney said:

I'd love to see how itf is done in 8 minutes! 

Come along to Torchbearer and drop us a message!

[Lunchmoney]

26 minutes ago, Tux said:

Come along to Torchbearer and drop us a message!

I play on Reunion and only a few hours a week at best. And those hours are in the morning putting US servers in the middle of the night. Not likely to happen 😞

[Handmixer]

11 minutes ago, Lunchmoney said:

I play on Reunion and only a few hours a week at best. And those hours are in the morning putting US servers in the middle of the night. Not likely to happen 😞

Reunion here as well! Led the only Reunion team who participated in this competition and aside from us the speedrun community on Reunion is quite nonexistent.

 

Feel free to add me @Handmixer and we can run some speedy stuff if we're both around 🙂

[Vea]

Team 1 is primarily UK based as well 🙂

[Elmyder]

10 hours ago, Lunchmoney said:

I'd love to see how itf is done in 8 minutes! 

Old record, but pre video ban: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0FnrN69L10

[Elmyder]

11 hours ago, Tux said:

I was wondering what was the thought process behind the Demon MMs? I understand if you don't want to share 😄

For us, it was actually a last minute switch when someone couldn't make it, based on the available characters. Swapping the defender for a mm was better than dropping a fire/fire or one of the corruptors :P

 

But to do a bit of performance analysis: Mechanically, mms have the highest st dps ceiling in the game, the challenge is getting the pets to the right location in time and keeping them buffed (especially because external buffs are dropped on rezone). Therefore, in practice, I think they do well in tfs with lots of avs and incan chaining, like mltf. However, they work very poorly in tfs with lots of trash mobs and manual movement, like itf. If you do go mm, demons is nice because of 1. fire/cold damage and 2. extra -res. Finally, in the context of a competition with no reruns, it's worth mentioning that a mm has a bit of an edge at freeing patrons if they become inextricably stuck inside walls on cuda lol.

 

Upon reflection, I personally think the best comp under these AT restrictions would be something like 2x fire/fire, fire/kin corr, fire/cold corr, sonic/fire def, and some kind of bio scrapper. (The only reason for giving sonic to the defender is based on -res numbers, since sleet is standardized. It is a small difference.) The dom probably makes hami marginally faster, but it is easy enough to dps through the green shields, and char on the fire/fires would make it even faster.

Edited March 2, 2021 by Elmyder

[Veracor]

A Mastermind is a bit difficult to work in a speedrun, but they do have the highest ST dps in the game by a large margin once buffed, and can further apply their -res while most of their damage is being dealt.  As they are so reliant on Incan chains, taking a Mastermind over a Defender on this 6-man competition that contained a fair number of mob clearing/runthroughs was a big question during practice.

 

A Mastermind can do some interesting stuff:

• Is able to Sleet->Heat Loss->Burnout->Sleet->Heat Loss while dealing lots of damage and additional -res from pets to an AV during the activation times.
• Almost one-shots yellow Mitos with fully proc'd Lash (Demon Summoning).
• Can get patrons unstuck from the ground/walls/ceiling in Cuda mission 5 by resummoning pets on them.
• Herds traitors in ITF mission 3 for the Blasters to nuke and can leash-teleport pets onto the towers in ITF mission 4 to herd them all into a ball (aggro cap of 119).

We did have some major time losses on MLTF (Sonic Cage missing twice in a row on the LR fight and forcing us to kill towers was the biggest one) and that was supposed to be the best task force out of the four for having a Mastermind.

 

Actually running a Mastermind in a speedrun is a very busy process with claiming/using team inspirations, but not too many binds are actually needed.  Most of the work is memorizing beforehand where valid spots are in a task force for leashing pets so that you can use their follow command to teleport them to you when you jump onto an AV, and resummoning pets as you're clicking doors/elevators if they die to skip the activation times.  For actual combat you simply just bind petcomall attack to all of your own attacks so that pets don't target anything else.

 

Ultimately though a Defender was probably better to run for the competition, but I feel the Mastermind at least pulled its weight.

Edited March 3, 2021 by Veracor

[Vea]

Interesting to see both of your viewpoints on MMs. We were unaware that they can be used to force patrons out from being stuck - it happened twice during practice but still achieved sub 20 each time we practiced with the exception of our first practice run where we were hoping to out DPS Reichsmans phase.

 

Did the MM pets ever die from incans you rejected?

 

For us we didn't choose an MM because we felt like LGTF + ITF requires too much movement. Also not playing MM's all too much doesn't help either.

 

@Veracor - Those Sonic Cage's sound horrendous! Do you have a rough idea of how much that cost time wise?

Also do you guys have a record of your best times in practice? Both our MLTF and Barracuda runs in the competition were our best runs. We managed a 9:51 LGTF and a 7:33 ITF in practice. The only thing that stands out for me is we probably spent 20 seconds not fighting Reichsman in the final mission for barracuda lol. 

[Veracor]

43 minutes ago, Vea said:

Did the MM pets ever die from incans you rejected?

There were a few Incans that I was designated to reject, such as Cuda mission 1 my job was to teleport the team to Ms. Liberty after both objective updates, and our team had variable load times so someone else was to Incan to the glowie.  To do this, I leashed my pets (petcomall goto) to the air between the starting Flier and the tree/streetlight to the left of it, waited on the roof of City Hall until the prompt came up, used petcomall follow the moment it did to teleport them back to me after my pets took the Incan, then used my own Incan on Ms. Liberty when the objective updated.  This strategy was able to avoid pet deaths without wasting team insps, and also without having the Mastermind be a part of the inside team (they're pretty abysmal at mob clearing).

 

Most of the missions in the task forces I simply had my prompt off, though.

 

53 minutes ago, Vea said:

@Veracor - Those Sonic Cage's sound horrendous! Do you have a rough idea of how much that cost time wise?

We unfortunately didn't practice or even plan for this situation at all!  We blew all our -res debuffs on LR at the start with 2 extra Chemical Burns and miscommunicated what happened before we switched targets to the green tower; I don't know if our Sonic called it wrong or if they got talked over.  We probably lost about a minute, maybe more (my job after Burnout debuffing was to claim/spam team inspirations so I was a bit focused).  At least nobody died!

 

1 hour ago, Vea said:

Also do you guys have a record of your best times in practice? Both our MLTF and Barracuda runs in the competition were our best runs. We managed a 9:51 LGTF and a 7:33 ITF in practice. The only thing that stands out for me is we probably spent 20 seconds not fighting Reichsman in the final mission for barracuda lol. 

We didn't keep track of our times (Our motto was "Let's do our best and hopefully we beat Elmyder lol"), but in practice I think our best times were MLTF in the 11-12 range, LGTF a high 10, Cuda around 17, and ITF around 8:30.  We had very mixed skill levels and load times on the team and had to work around it, so all in all we did better than expected.  It's definitely made me want to do this sort of thing more often!

[TorrentYed]

Congrats to the winners! And stoked to take third amidst such solid competition!