This build won the GWG costume code contest

I was looking through my archive of Guild Wars screenshots and found this one, figure I might as well share it. The contest is many months old, and has special terms, listed here.

In a nutshell it is:

1. You can only use 6 heroes. The last slot is for a moderator that suicides immediately after entering the mission. He monitors your progress.
2. Clear Tahnnakai Temple HM as fast as possible.
3. No consumables of any kind.

I did multiple practice runs trying many different things out before winding up with this:



It's been several months since the contest, so my memory of it is less than clear, but I remember I learned a lot from it, and developed specific aggro techniques for each mob. Random factors were really annoying, depending on how a mob aggro'ed it could be cleared really fast or relatively slowly. I remember trying 2x Mesmers vs. 2x Eles before deciding (for some reason I don't remember) that the Eles were faster. Mantra of Flame was a relatively late addition after the Temple Guardians wiped my party a few too many times for comfort, while the Res Sigs took the place of hard resses because of the constant morale boosts.

I remember trying to squeeze as much power as possible out of all the bars, but they all stayed rather static. In fact the entire teambuild stayed rather static. The builds in the screenshot are instantly recognizable as a variant of the 7H bars I usually run, minus the second healer (compensated for in this case by Mhenlo). If there is something better out there, I didn't find it. Finally I also remember that 10:12 is a very fast time, my practice runs were in the range 10:45 - 11:15.

Just sharing the build for anyone that might want to see it, if you were 2nd or 3rd in the contest I'd be interested in seeing what you used as well

Most of the more speedy builds people brought were offset by the fact that many of the players had no idea how to not explode. Most of the mission attempts were failures.

I am surprised you ran Mantra of Flame instead of Ward vs Elements on Souske. Something we considered while writing this contest was the amount of time running from room to room, or waiting for doors to open. In my test run (testing how difficult this was with a party of 7, as other missions were considered), I ran hardly any energy management because I found my heroes were generally near full energy by the time we engaged in the next room.

I am convinced that builds played a very minor part of the contest, and that good tactics were responsible for the speedy runs. Congratulations again on getting first!

I went into that contest with the opposite mentality. I didn't care about getting the fastest time. I just wanted to get into the top three because I thought both costumes were cool-looking and was fine with either one (until I got the Ministry one and found out the mask couldn't be dyed ). So, I basically asked myself how would I would achieve top three and came up with these fun facts.

1. Speed builds will probably sacrifice defense for offense.
2. If there are that many people complaining that SF tank and spank and discord should be banned, then there are probably that many bad players entering (their heroes probably suck for hard mode/lack creativity/probably just aggro everything).
3. If 1 and 2 are true, they will die often.
4. Dying often means you waste more time by ressing or risk having a complete wipe.

So what I did was make a team build that wouldn't die often or at all. I think I ended up with a n/rt healer, SoS healer, SoGM rit, panic mes, AotL MM, and me as a spear chucking ranger with enraged lunge. I think I might have been even more defensive by having the last hero be a ST rit, but I can't really remember. Either that or just an illusion mes. It basically ended up as the meta hero team on wiki with some modifications.

Clearly the build is shit at killing things quickly so I had to find a way to reduce the time of completion somehow. It turns out that most of the time, you can just run past some mobs and go straight for the boss group (you can avoid the right group in the necro room, everything in the ele room minus the boss group of course, and etc). The rules never said anything about having to kill everything in a room, you only have to kill those you aggro. So after maybe six runs I got my average time to be around 13-14 minutes which I think should be good enough for top three and decided to call a mod to just get it done and over with. Of course everything had to go completely wrong during the actual run and all the mobs that I could have avoided decided to say "hey lets go attack him so he can't get a costume". This basically gave me a shitty time of 15:21. But...

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