The T16 Sprinter Project (many builds + videos)

TinneOnnMuin-1187 · February 19, 2022, 6:40pm

After completing Sprinter early this season with Firebird’s, it occurred to me that Firebird’s would probably be able to do it on T16 too. Sounds fun, why not? Then I got thinking … how many more builds could I do T16 Sprinter with?

As it turns out - all of them!

Over the past week, I’ve cleared Sprinter on T16 with all 12 sets I pushed with this season. Then, as the icing on top, I also did it at 600 paragon with no Soul Shards so no one could say “but Tinne, you have 3k paragon and soul shards are overpowered, ThAt’S tOo EaSy!”

I set a few rules for myself:

no gear swap (to make it more of a challenge)
all builds should use a different primary dps skill (e.g. can’t reuse Frozen Orb for Tal’s + DMO + LoD)

That led to some pretty fun combinations!

I have been having some stutter/microlag in the evenings this week so that did slow a few of the runs down, but I got it done anyway!

Some Highlights

no failed runs (one glitched run that forced a restart, but no runs failed because of time)
2 primals!
6 Splintered Oars
Tal’s Meteor Shower, say what?
Look Ma, no Danetta’s!
Shadow Impale with a bow instead of a melee weapon?!?
Inna’s wins, as it always does.

Miscellaneous notes on builds

Gear/skills are shown right at the end of all the videos (with timestamps). Here’s some d3planner links as well, aren’t my exact builds but should be basically the same as what I ran:

Wizard: https://d3.maxroll.gg/d3planner/923375293
DH: https://d3.maxroll.gg/d3planner/434060624
Monk: https://d3.maxroll.gg/d3planner/937428059

The wizard builds all relied on the Aether Walker + Cosmic Strand + Calamity rune + Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac combination (except Firebird’s which didn’t need Aether Walker).

GoD and Nat’s used Strafe and relied on the GoD 4p bonus for movement speed.

UE, Marauder’s, and Shadow relied on big RCR (Yang’s + Crimson + Pride’s Fall) and Focused Mind to sustain discipline for vaulting.

Inna’s used the Inna6/Raiment4 combination for infinite dash.

Marauder’s I probably should have used Danetta’s for, I think I could have run Danetta’s w/ Rucksack in the cube and still had more than enough damage even without Manticore, and Danetta’s would have have made it a bit easier.

For Shadow I considered just relying on Chain of Shadows instead of RCR + Focused Mind, but after how poorly the UE run went I didn’t think I’d have enough time for that. Assuming it’s at least a half hour of run time (not exactly sure how long run time vs. killing/standing still but 30+ min running seems like a conservative estimate) needing to throw an Impale every 2-3 seconds, napkin math suggests the extra Impale animations to keep vault free would end up adding ~5 minutes of time (20 Impale per minute * ~30 frames per Impale * 30 minutes of running time = 300 seconds of Impale animations), so that seemed like a non-starter. Impale damage with Yang’s and no Shadow 2p bonus was good enough so I just went with that.

There’s been so much power creep you can drop multipliers to pick up more movement speed/utility and still have plenty of damage for T16.

Meteorblade-2266 · February 19, 2022, 7:59pm

I can’t even…

Impressed doesn’t even start to cover it.

MicroRNA-1507 · February 19, 2022, 8:58pm

Wow, just wow, did I saw wow already

Shivan-11800 · February 20, 2022, 2:21am

Good gawd, you’ve taken the crown I’m pretty sure!

Absolutely amazing!

Alexismad-1310 · February 20, 2022, 4:22am

New Achievement unlocked by Tinne : The Overachiever Award.

Shivan-11800 · February 20, 2022, 4:43am

I’ll second that one!

Also OP wins the award for obvious more energy than I.

Indian-2161 · February 20, 2022, 6:15am

WTF dude that’s admirable. You must have a lot of time on hands too. Way to go, this inspired me to try it my self, whit your video guides.

Rage-13139 · February 20, 2022, 3:52pm

Haha, amazing Tinne!

What’s next, running sprinter with all white items!?

Oblivion-1520 · February 20, 2022, 4:13pm

Give it time. It may just happen.

Damocles-2557 · February 20, 2022, 9:23pm

Gobsmacked… /10chars

Cascade-21735 · February 20, 2022, 10:22pm

Knew it was you when I saw the title in the sidebar!

Well done and neat post!

Happy to see Typhon clear second fastest after inna, even beating GoD. This would be an indication of bounty speed of the builds right? Rather than keys, that’s a bit more about killing quickly rather than just mobility?

BehindTimes-1460 · February 20, 2022, 10:25pm

Really, I just personally feel he did this, so some of the conquests could be updated, like they use to be. For example, Divinity use to be reaching Greater Rift 35.

Curses could now be killing 600+ monsters. Divinity reaching GR150. Avarice collecting 250+ million gold. Sprinter now doing a 45 min T16 campaign. And one of the conquests could be renamed to “Thanks Tinne! >(” to immortalize him forever in Diablo 3!

Anyway, congrats on your runs. It’s nice to see some realistic approaches to Sprinter/Speed Racer that don’t require playing on normal.

Alexismad-1310 · February 20, 2022, 11:56pm

It would be nice if they added some conquests that didn’t get completely filled up 2 days after the season started. They could keep the 10 easy ones per season, so players wouldn’t blow a gasket about not being able to get the stash tab or do the journey, then add 10 more to give the rest of us a challenge for the season.

p.s. Some new ones thrown in here and there would be greatly appreciated.

TinneOnnMuin-1187 · February 21, 2022, 1:26am

Yep, exactly.

Firebird’s has to juggle Disintegrate to sustain the teleport cooldown so that adds a few minutes per run.

Vyr’s has poor boss DPS when you aren’t stopping to kill stuff along the way. Delsere’s has to drop bubbles, Tal’s has to juggle stacks.

Then in terms of skills, Orb needs Triumvirate stacks and has travel time, Twisters need a couple casts to ramp DPS with Twisted Sword, Meteor Shower has the cast delay.

Basically all the other wizard builds have some sort of mechanic that means you can’t deal instant damage. Hydras deal near-instant damage.

You might think 1-2 seconds here and there doesn’t make a huge difference, but it adds up. It’s particularly noticeable with the corrupt growths in Gardens of Hope, e.g. with DMO twisters it takes me a couple seconds per growth to drop a bubble and cast a couple twisters before they die. You usually end up killing close to 20 of them (depending on how early you find the right one), so taking a few seconds per growth instead of half a second can add 45 seconds or something to a run. Factor in a few other spots where you need to kill enemies and all of a sudden those cast delays and extra skill casts add up to an extra 2-3 minutes over a full Sprinter run.

I’d say Typhon’s has a good 2+ minute Sprinter advantage over the other wizard builds because it can achieve very high mobility while still maintaining high DPS that gets dealt nearly instantly.

This changes a bit on Normal where dps is less of a factor and you can kill enemies by sneezing in their general direction. Vyr’s wins on Normal because the Archon Teleport animation is faster (assuming you can keep the rubberbanding under control). But on T16 when it’s a combination of teleport speed and kill speed, Typhon’s wins.

The times aren’t exactly comparable because there’s some variance in terms of map luck, maybe some poor map reads that cost me some time. My Typhon’s run was a particularly good run in that regard, so it had a bit of advantage there. But it does still give a pretty good hint which builds are faster.

Sprinter does tend to favor pure speed and single target damage over AoE though, there’s not a ton of time to be gained on Sprinter from AoE. A few spots, but it’s not as big of a factor as it would be for bounties. In bounty runs for the kill 100/150 bounties AoE matters quite a bit more. UE doesn’t look all that great here but it’s actually a pretty solid bounty build, it rocks for the kill 100/150 bounties. What it loses in pure run speed it makes up for in AoE kill speed.

I’ve done 0 paragon with all yellows and then just an Aether Walker. All whites might be a bit much though! Might be possible assuming you could use the cube and a bunch of paragon, with enough paragon you might be able to still crank out enough DPS. Sounds pretty tough though.

Yeah.

They probably shouldn’t update Sprinter though, people are already way too scared of it. If you made it T16, there’d be even fewer people doing it.

I definitely would like to see the other ones updated though. Many of the other ones used to be a challenge, there was a time when it would actually take a couple days to get prepared, especially in Hardcore. Some of the early seasons I used to get legitimately scared doing Lionhearted. Now it’s a joke.

Same for Curses. sometimes I casually do Curses solo in a 4p T16 pub bounty game with my regular bounty build, not optimized for Curses (e.g. https://i.imgur.com/I8ls33t.png https://i.imgur.com/uIbpfuW.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Z5O5RQs.jpg). With the amount of power creep they could easily up it to T16 and it wouldn’t really be much harder. 4p T16 is 173x more HP than solo T10, and it’s still easily doable solo (at least on PC, anyway).

TGO-21374 · February 22, 2022, 7:21am

Amazing achievement!
I have never tried with any build myself due to feeling that I’d need to try too many times. But maybe some day…

About the other conquests: Those level etc related conquests definitely would need updating. Even something very simple would be better direction, like:

GR 120 solo
GR x without set items or LOD or LON (as they actually function same way as 6pcs sets)
Upgrade 3 gems to 120-130
300M (or more) gold streak
GR100 with 6 sets

Curses I’m not so sure. If finding the correct chest would be easier, I’d be totally happy with other requirements being higher like 375 / T16 or even more. But now the challenge is just finding the chest. I haven’t found it every season since that part seems too stupid.

BehindTimes-1460 · February 22, 2022, 8:40am

With Curses, rather than looking for the conquest, if you really want to find it, just do a quick loop around the waypoint. When it does spawn, fairly often it’s by the waypoint. (Not always, but it’s not worth searching the entire zone). By doing a simple loop, I typically can find Cursed Peat about once every half hour.

Now, in terms of updating that, the only reason not to would be the console version. But really, the console version should be patched to include higher density. The original reason for low density, was that Diablo 3 was ported to the Xbox 360 & PS3. And yeah, it makes sense to have a lower density there. But the Xbox One, PS4, and Switch should be able to handle a density increase. Even if it’s not 100% matching the PC, at least increase it by 10%, so that other classes other than a Demon Hunter and Crusader can pull it off.

Meteorblade-2266 · February 22, 2022, 11:52am

They should amend every cursed chest to have the same level of spawning that Cursed Peat! has, so that any chest you find will work for the conquest. The hard part should be managing to kill enough mobs in the time allotted, not making/leaving/remaking games until you find the one chest that provides enough mobs to qualify.

Kirottu-2131 · February 22, 2022, 12:10pm

I’d say those suggestions are a bit high. My suggestion would be more like:

GR100 Solo
GR50 no set nor LoD
3x gems to 90
100M gold streak
GR90 with 6 sets

Those would be more reasonable and still achievable for most people. For example bumping Divinity all the way up GR120 will make a lot of builds unable to reach it without at least some heavy fishing. While bumping only to GR100 may seem little, it still requires over 50x more damage than GR75 does.

Curses! is fine as it is, it just should be doable with basically any cursed chest. And it already is challenging on consoles.

TGO-21374 · February 22, 2022, 12:25pm

Yes, maybe lower targets would better fit to difficulty of other content. After all it’s nice if players are not forced to investigate + train most efficient builds for each conquest too much.
Higher limits would better match difficulty of sprinter (if we forget how easy TinneOnnMuin makes it look ). But maybe good all conquests are not that hard.

Rage-13139 · March 4, 2022, 2:24pm

Maybe you should start a “Sprintathon”… speedruns of the campaign, on T16, using every class set in the game, with the cumulative time being the final mark. Maybe there could also be a penalty assessed for every individual segment that isn’t completed in under an hour (3:00 extra minutes on the net time, or something like that).