Breakdown of ITF speed run

So I was sorta playing with the idea of an attempt at new fastest run for the ITF. Does anyone know the current recorded (by screenshot) fastest time?

So I was thinking first off a sort of brainstorm on what the team makeup would be. I have done(26:50):

4 corrs- therm,rad,kin,cold
1 spines scrap
2 defs - rad, son
1 fire/psy blaster

I have heard of some teams doing(not sure on that time):

3 corrs - 2 cold, 1 kin
3 scrap
2 blaster

What sort of improvments team wise would there be?

Also maybe start a breakdown of what each person would be doing throughout the TF per mission.

Any comments and questions are more then welcome

Pick of 18 minute time. I was not a part of this in any way.

Once you get under 20 minutes lag plays a huge roll.

The final mission's defeat 300 romans has an interesting conundrum. The more a team spreads out the faster they can defeat Romans. The more a team spreads out the more lag occurs. A fine line must be walked.

Sadly, server also plays a roll. I play on a lot of servers. Even at non-peak times some servers have longer loads than others do in their peak times. I have a video of a 25 minute ITF time where each mission took over 60 seconds for the server to load each map. I do not mean personal map loading time. The server needs to create the map and then you need to load onto the map. The first step (server needs to create map) varies by what server you are on and when you do the run.

Any idea what types of corrs were used for that 18 min run?

A possible solution to the lag could be doing it on test server (testing would have to be done on this to see if it would even be worth doing it on test server), though with a closed beta looming ahead that could prove to be problematic.

On the final mission, is that server lag or client lag when the teams spread out?

An ideal team would need no additional survivability. Corrs, unbuffed from outside sources, can survive hordes of Romans on their own merits when played intelligently. Lots of IOs and inspirations help too. See here for example. Resist and Defense buffs from Corruptors are irrelevant on a 100% ideal team.

I suspect that at least 1 Kinetics, probably 2, and maybe 3+ were involved. You want the whole team Fulcrum Shifted, all the time. If your team spreads out you can have Fulcrum Shifts in every direction. I suspect other Corrs brought debuffs. Radiation and Cold are the two I'd suspect most.

Don't speed runs ultimately hurt the Merit awards for any TF? I thought that was why KHTF is now only a few Merits, as is the Takikoss SF in Cap?

I can somewhat understand the bragging rights of having "the fastest time", but racing thru it too much would seem to hurt the rest of the crowd who can't do it that quickly.

That argument is for another thread. This would be for the fun/challenge of doing it fast and efficiently. Bragging rights is a side effect. See this site for more examples: http://speeddemosarchive.com/

Only if it happens frequently enough that it brings the average run time down that the devs determine through data mining. So what I'm saying is yes, you have a point, but you're not necessarily right.

Well the thing is, not just any team can speed an ITF in 20-odd minutes. ANY team can do katie in under a half hour, provided they get past the first mission. Because after that is three small missions: Defeat a boss, defeat all (in a small map), and a hostage escort who can FLY. Besides which fact is, with 10 Avs in a row, a Katie TF is your best chance at getting a purple drop.. and sicne it's the first misison, you can just repeat it over and over.

Anyway, speed runs are an outlier. Now if EVRYONE were speed-running and getting things done in under 20 minutes, then the devs would have to re-evaluate the rewards. However, a team with only SOs and few debuffers will have a much harder time speed runing than an all IO'd out team with lots of buffs and debuffs. And since the game is balanced around SOs, the devs aren't going to "punish" playes who only use SOs by reducing the rewards for tasks that were demolished by those using IOs.

That said? The ITF is played WAY too often, probably because the playerbase intrinsically knows what the deal is, even if they don't want to admit it: It gives too many merits for the time it takes to complete compared to other tasks. However, if the devs dropped it by even one merit, people would stop playing it all together as it would no longer even be worth a single random roll.

It happens. We posted in the same minute, I'm not sweating it. Happened because I was busy writing my other reply when he posted the errors.

I'm still proudest of the ITF that took us two days to complete. And I do mean, we (a teammate held it for us) were on the last mission map for two consecutive days.

The reason why that is talked about most on forums is because leveling ITFs and ITF drops dont really require much planning or coordination.