Speedrun Strats

Advanced techniques that require special thought toward certain areas of the fight and involve more than your basic level of skill.

Late Start Strat

Profit Taker walks forwards constantly until you destroy all four legs in the first armor phase. You can take advantage of this to get a better angle at the rear legs by leaving the elevator just a second to a second after PT spawns (a bit after 8s on the ingame timer). This makes leg phase overall more consistent for fast runners, and minimizes the effect of the animation bug.

On Call Strats

On Call Crew is an extremely powerful tool for covering elements that essentially lets you have three weapons attacking shields at a time. This removes the need to switch weapons, and opens up the primary weapon slot for pure pylon damage.

On Call Crew requires you to run Total Eclipse (unless it's using a Kuva Chakkhurr), so they can profit from the damage buff as their damage without said buff is noticeably weak.

Ideally, Crewmate should be thrown straight at the ground while landing. This removes the need to wait for them to teleport, allowing them to start clearing shields immediately.

The ideal stat distribution for On Call is 00555 (5 Repair, 5 Combat, 5 Endurance). However this is extremely rare, so certain stats can be prioritized. The combat stat gives the Crewmate a base damage buff, making it top priority. Repair and endurance are for health regeneration and additional health, respectively. If you have problems with your crewmate dying prematurely during your runs, prioritize investing in the repair stat. Only elite Crewmates, unlocked at rank 10 Command Intrinsic, can reach this, as they start with 2 more base stats than normal Crewmates.

If you have an elite Crewmate, you ideally want one with the 150% primary critical chance (or 150% secondary if using Catabolyst) bonus, as it opens up a mod slot on the build. An elite Crewmate isn’t necessary, however.

The modern weapon of choice is Opticor Vandal, as it can oneshot shield elements and adds while having multiple damage instances, allowing your crewmate to clear most of a shield in one hit, if shield RNG allows. Other options are:

Kuva Chakkhurr, Torid, Amprex, Synoid Gammacor, Catabolyst.

Fast Pogris Pylons: Double Shot + Void Strike

by Vaeli

Current meta for fast pylons is the following (assumes Riven usage):

• First pylon phase - double shoot pylons to 1 tick
• Second pylon phase - use Void Strike (madurai school) to 1 tick

Things to consider before running this strat:

• No matter the Damage roll on your riven, eclipse buff and progenitor percentage you can’t 1 tick with two shots unless you use either Vigorous Swap or Arcane Rise
• Second pylon phase requires you to run the Madurai focus school which means you’ll be more prone to getting knockdowns unless you run Prime Sure Footed or Sure Footed + Fortitude since running Unairu for Poise is not an option

First pylon phase

The “Reload while in archwing” route is a bit tricky since you effectively lose time because you are reloading meaning you’ll have to spot the right pylons faster.

The alternative approach to this can be used if you have a dmg+ms+mag riven and can have 8 shots in your magazine.

This approach sacrifices the additional pylon damage (from a dmg ms 2+1- riven) or additional projectile speed (dmg ms pfs riven) for having to do less.

Second pylon phase

Void Strike

• Casting Void Strike can be done on the ground or in the air.
• Casting it on the ground will leave you prone to knockdowns that follow right after casting animation ends or enemies that might block your archwing when you return into your warframe.
• Casting in the air whether you void sling, bullet jump, or enter then leave archwing will make knockdown attacks less annoying since they won't reach you. (!! Beware if you void sling! Void Strike damage buff scales with energy usage so don't use too much)

Pylons

After casting Void Strike you go into archwing with roughly 6 seconds left on the buff, in this remaining time we must land all our shots. Void Strike also gives ammo efficiency which makes your magazine effectively bigger letting you to shoot more spots if unsure where the pylons are going to land

Flight Shots

Flight Shots are a way to speed up the first phase's shield phase, by simply dealing damage to Profit Taker sooner than you would on normal landings. So far, the most ideal weapon for this strategy that has been discovered is Sicarus Prime Incarnoff due to it being hitscan, having high damage, fire rate and having a decent IPS split, lending itself well to speedrunning Profit Taker in comparison to other weapon choices.

Video (click to play/pause):

For a more advanced variant of Flight Shots, a Contagion throw is incorporated into flight shots. This is a slight timesave from not having to possibly throw Contagion twice after landing or having to wait for a Contagion DOT to tick. It also eliminates most of the RNG required for fast first shields.

Video (click to play/pause):

Push Strat

When landing from first pylons, an issue a lot of people run into is that they get bounced while doing legs. As Profit-Taker’s attacks are dependent on Warframe distance, the way to avoid the bounce is to land out of bounce range (~30 m away from PT) and use Transference to get into Mech.

Video (click to play/pause):

As you can see, I get walls instead of bounce as my Warframe is far enough away.

Using Necramechs

Placing and swapping to mech

There are two ways to enter mech, proximity, and aim. You want to always use proximity as it is the fastest and most reliable. Proximity also does not require you to look at the mech, which both saves time and allows you to aim at the legs faster. To do this, summon your mech in the proper place while or before placing shields.

Placing mech can and should be done during landing to avoid a time loss. See the following videos (click to play/pause):

See the speed difference?

You want to place mech to one side of the shields such that your camera will be behind the shields so you don’t have to worry about having to reorient yourself when it comes time for Armor Phase.

Field of View

In theory, the higher your field of view the more Pylons you can see at once, and the more Pylons you can see the easier it is to get good Pylon time.

You can only get to 90 FOV in the game settings, but if you use Windowed mode you can use a wider resolution.

For the most extreme version of this, if you set your resolution to 32:9 (like in the picture below), you can get a maximized horizontal field of view. This makes it easier to get good Pylon time if you can still aim at them with the reduced vertical height.

The only way to do so is by dragging your window until it fits 32:9 resolution.

However, many people dislike this extreme for several reasons: It wastes a lot of your screen, It can be hard to see the Pylons on a small screen, and it doesn’t do much 21:9 doesn’t do.

21:9 is a more reasonable resolution.

Ultimately this is just a personal thing, mess around with various resolutions and see what works best for you.

Operator Element

Note: this will invalidate a run for the purpose of posting on the speedrun.com leaderboards.

Frames other than Volt or Saryn sometimes find themselves missing an element when they're not running Shock Trooper, requiring a secondary, slower way of clearing said element outside of the normal weapon spam. However, damage instances dealing void damage will not change the shield element unless the 5s cooldown is over.

It is possible to take advantage of this by using a good amp with the Virtuos Surge arcane and Madurai’s void strike ability, letting you delete the rest of a shield phase once you see electricity, minimizing an otherwise unavoidable timeloss.

Ideally, this happens in the first or second shield element, as while the shield element will be changed unless the 5s cooldown is in effect, a good amp can easily remove all of Profit-Taker’s shield.

More info can be found in the Speedrun Builds Operator section

Unscoped Zenith

Quickly Shooting Pylons with Zenith is a challenging thing to do. If you aim for too long, the icons of other Pylons disappear, which means you need to unscope and look for the Pylons.

But, by using the unscoped Zenith strat, which is simply not aiming while shooting Pylons, you’ll have an advantage on how fast you can react to each Pylon, and you’ll be able to see more Pylons due to a wider field of view.

This is a high skill strat because without zooming in the margin of error is extremely small. Some people find this strat uncomfortable, and the weapon spread is wider, so your mileage may vary.  Using both Reflex Draw and Twitch is essential, as they almost eliminate all spread and recoil, greatly increasing the viability of this strategy. You can mod for more fire rate to make this strat more forgiving of missed shots.

Note: -recoil is needed if you want to shoot accurately with this strat.

Video (click to play/pause):

Weapon Swaps (no On Call)

This strat is now defunct due to power creep. You can still go to the old versions of this guide that contain it here.

Ass Meta

This meta is now defunct due to Animation Bug and new modding options. You can still go to the old versions of this guide that contain mention of it in the section here.

Learning by Example

By far the best way to get good at Profit-Taker outside of doing it yourself with the right builds is to go to the speedrun leaderboards and watch other people’s runs. There are things this guide cannot teach that you’d never imagine, but if you watch them do it, you just have to learn how to do it yourself.

Nearly all Profit-Taker runners mainly learned how to do PT quickly by watching runs and talking with people in the community.