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General Map Comp Tips and Builds

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null edited this page Mar 29, 2022 · 9 revisions

General Tips for Map Completion

More Tips To Come

  • Hero Points in WvW - This is the biggest single time save out of every tip here. If you're familiar with WvW then you'll probably have seen the Heroics Notary before. This NPC can sell you Notarized Scroll of Heroics for 1 Testimony of Heroic each, each one will unlock 1 Central Tyria hero point. You can therefore buy almost all of the hero points if you have enough Testimony of Heroics. Since you will need to do WvW for your Gift of Battle anyways, I highly recommend farming up testimonies so you can just buy hero points, while earning your gift of battle, even if you are only doing map comp casually. This will save you a huge amount of time. If you figure it takes ~1 min for every hero point, that's 189 minutes or roughly 3 hours of time saved.

  • Buyable Hearts - Head on over to the Trading Post Hearts Page. These hearts have items that you can buy off the trading post and turn in to instantly complete the heart. There are 13 of these hearts. If you assume hearts take ~2 minutes to do, that's a time save of 26 minutes!

  • Weapon Swap - This is another big time-saver. A lot of the interactables at hearts can be quick-canceled by swapping weapons, meaning you no longer have to stand in place while the action bar finishes. You often can't attack or anything else, but you can still use the time to move around and get to the next one. It might seem like a minimal time save but 3-4 seconds on every interactable in a heart adds up really fast.

  • Mount Usage - Since there seems to be some debate over the fastest mounts, I'll break this down by mount so you can be educated when you're mounting up:

    • Raptor - Most people's default land mount. It is king on relatively flat terrain that isn't long enough or straight enough for beetle. Also great for crossing big chasms, but that's very limited in core maps.
    • Jackal - King of uphills. Nothing gets up a hill faster than Jackal. Generally gets beaten out by Raptor or Beetle on flat terrain.
    • Beetle - Fastest land mount and king of long distances. It can be used in a lot of places but is heavily dependant on your drift skills. The more you can use it the faster you will be, but if you aren't confident in your skills you should stick with Raptor as you can just as easily lose time on beetle if you drift badly.
    • Skimmer - King of the water. Get the underwater mastery if you haven't already.
    • Griffon - Utility-knife of mounts. It has the speed if you can get a full dive off, it can cover a huge amount of ground very quickly, and it can be used to get up cliffs, sometimes faster than Springer.
    • Skyscale - Niche mount in speedrunning. We use it occasionally to get up to places we can't otherwise get to with Springer or Griffon, but it's typically the slowest of the three for ascending. It's only used in a handful of places for a minimal timesave.
    • Springer - Useful for two things. The first being that it's the fastest for ascending steep cliffs that have sufficient ledges. The second being that it can be used to quickly refill stamina, and then switch back to Beetle to boost faster than otherwise. Sometimes it's better to just use Raptor/Jackal instead though, so only do that if you have a long straightaway and lack endurance.

  • GW2 Radial - Related to mounts -- I highly recommend grabbing GW2 Radial and giving it a spin (heh) if you haven't already. It's amazing for swapping between mounts quickly with just one key. It may not have a tangible time save, but even just for the pure convenience of not needing to bind 7 different mount keys, it is worth it. I personally only have the normal mount key (set to griff for bunny tech) and use radial for the rest.

  • Grouping Mobs and Line of Sight - This is a much more niche tip and maybe is obvious to some of you but maybe not everyone, but you always want to be grouping mobs so you can burst them all down at the same time. To add on to this, you can use terrain to break line of sight of ranged enemies to force the AI to move closer to you in order to regain LoS, effectively grouping the ranged mobs as well. This is something you see a lot in instanced content but most people don't bother with it in the open world.

  • Tagging - This is a bit of a selfish tip so feel free to ignore it if it doesn't fit your playstyle. Heart participation for killing an enemy is given as long as you get exp from the mob, regardless of whether you stick around to finish it off or don't do significant damage. So if someone else is doing a heart, instead of grouping up to kill the same mob, it is almost always better to sneak in a couple attacks as you run by and then move on to other mobs. They'll finish the job for you and you'll already onto killing other mobs.

  • Party up! - Related to the tip above, running with another person can be very beneficial if you are coordinated. More people means you can grab aggro of more mobs and group them all together. It also means kill times will be faster. The only detriment to this is that you really need someone who can run at your same pace, otherwise one of you will end up being left behind. It also means you might be "fighting" over interactables on a few hearts. That's why it's best to stick to a duo.

  • Don't be afraid to skip - It's possible that you come up to a heart that is much easier to complete with an event is up, or sometimes an event blocks your progress (Taidha, I'm looking at you). If that's the case, don't be afraid to skip ahead on the path and come back to it later on!

  • Take breaks, Netflix, Good Music, Stay Sane - This may seem a bit silly but it's actually a serious tip. After you've been running for a long time, your speed tends to really start to take a hit. For most people, you aren't going to be hitting 11-12 hour map comps, and even if you are, doing that all the time is a really good way to burn yourself out on the game really fast (trust me, I've been there). So pace yourself, it's a marathon, not a sprint. Throw on a Netflix show on the other monitor or jam out to some good tunes. Do what you need to stay sane and if you feel yourself slipping, just come back at it another day. It's better to spend 1 hour at 100% than spend 4 at 25%.

The Profession Debate

The profession debate (what is the best choice?) is ongoing and pretty much will always be ongoing as long as people have their own preferences (forever). People will fight until they're blue in the face about how insert profession is the best or at least comparable to the best because of xyz. I'm here to tell you that no, your base necro build is not speedrunning material. Sorry to rain on your parade, but some classes are not meant to be used in a speedrun. We're looking for 5(ish) things for map comp:

  • Burst DPS (Preferably Power) - Open world is a lot of short fights, which is where burst shines and sustained dps is rarely needed
  • Good AoE/Cleave - You want to be grouping mobs so you can cleave/AoE them
  • Access to Stunbreaks - A good amount of open-world mobs have annoying CC, this helps negate that
  • Mobility - Specifically Shadowsteps or Blinks, preferably untargeted, used mainly to either move from mob to mob while in combat or break combat so you can mount
  • Stealth(*) - I put an asterisk here because it really only matters if you don't buy your hero points. If you don't, access to stealth can make commune HP significantly quicker.

If you're familiar with the professions you probably already have a good idea of the "ideal" specs, but I'll spare you any guessing and tell you it's Deadeye. You can make a case for a lot of other specs, Daredevil, Chrono, maybe some of the new specs, but they are going to underperform compared to Deadeye. That said, if you don't care about speed and aren't trying to set records or pb's, please just play whatever you feel like. It's better you play something you are comfortable with and enjoy playing than try to fit the "speedrunner" build.

tl;dr Meta = Deadeye; don't care about meta? play what keeps you sane

Builds

Currently the undisputed champion of Core Tyria map comp is Deadeye. I will provide two builds which are used together when running, the power build that is used 95% of the time, and the condi build that is used at condi stacking hearts, and briefly explain the mechanics and used of both

Power Deadeye

The idea of this build is very simple, you stack a lot of power, spec your deadeye's mark to hit like a truck, and nuke everything within 1500 range with a single skill, which resets it's cooldown and reduces the cooldown of your other skills by 20%. In core, mobs are so weak that very little will survive your mark. At higher levels, you finish things off with stolen skills, and for the extra beefy boys you encounter, pistol 3 spam is a surefire death sentence.

On top of this, you also carry Withdraw for a disengage + condi cleanse, Shadowstep and Infiltrators Signet for 2 1,200 range teleports (Infiltrators Signet must have a foe or ambient creature targetted), Assassin's Signet for even more burst, and Daggerstorm as a utility mob cleave/condi cleanse/panic evade. You can carry either a rifle for even more single target damage against high level mobs or a shortbow for even more mobility. I personally prefer shortbow in case shadowstep is off cooldown and I want to get out of combat, plus I can just use the condi one and it's one less piece of gear I have to remember.

Highly Recommend changing your steal key to something easier than F1, but that's because I like my hands not crippled.

Condi Deadeye

Because our main build is daredevil, we have to work with core or deadeye specs for condi. Unfortunately neither is very appealing, but fortunately it doesn't matter all that much. The goal is to keep power damage low to give us time to build up condi's on a target, that way when they die and go to reset, the condi's continue ticking, repeatedly killing them and giving us credit for it, instantly completing the heart. Trailblazer's helps us do that the best, but you could potentially use other low power stat sets such as Dire or Ritualist.

The main idea of the build is: Find mob(s) you are going to condi stack -> Prepare Thousand Needles -> Venoms -> Dodge to drop Caltrops -> Trigger Thousand Needles -> SB4 -> Swap Daggers to trigger sigils -> Dagger 3 with all the rest of your initiative -> Autoattack until they die

Sounds like a lot but it's really not hard once you get it down and should easily stack more than enough condi's to successfully condi stack the heart. Once done, switch back to your power build and you're on your merry way.

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