I am a strong believer that time trials are a great way for people to improve in competitive Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and I have spent hundreds of hours practicing my lines in time trial mode. If a new player who is starting out is asking me for advice on what they can do to get better, I always tell them that improving your lines is a great way to get ahead of your competition.
So how do I improve my lines?
If I want to improve my skills on a certain track to benefit me in competitive play, I typically watch the world record for the track on mkwrs.com.
But there are three drawbacks to using this approach:
- The WR uses mushrooms and you want to know what strategies to use when you have no mushrooms
- The WR uses a different combination and has lines that are not possible to take with what you use online
- The WR uses techniques which are too inconsistent or risky to be used online
Shroomless Time Trials (NITA)
To address the first of these problems I created a leaderboard and discord server to keep track of the fastest shroomless times for each track. Shroomless time trials are very popular amongst the Japanese community and they commonly refer to them using the acronym "NITA" (No-Item Time Attack). All submissions to this leaderboard must have video proof, and so it is a great reference for people who want to study shroomless lines.
To take the most advantage of this, I would recommend creating a new profile on your switch which is used specifically for shroomless time trials with the combination you use online, that way you don't have to worry about deleting any ghosts you have which use shrooms or a different combination.
Shroomless Time Trials per Combination
To address the second of these problems, Jet, who is also an admin of the NITA leaderboard, created a leaderboard for shroomless time trials that uses Waluigi and Wild Wiggler. This is a very common combination for competitive play, and if you are someone who uses this combination I would recommend checking out the top times on this leaderboard if you want to improve your lines. But again, this still suffers from the last problem in which some of the strategies used by the top times are too risky to be used online. It also doesn't help if you don't use Waluigi Wiggler since I am not aware of any leaderboards for other combinations.
No Item Speedruns
To address all of these problems, I would recommend watching (and doing) no-item speedruns. This solves the third problem because if a strategy is too risky to be used online it is likely to be too risky for a speedrun. Speedruns for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe are tracked on speedrun.com and recently we have been seeing more competitive players trying out speedruns. Speedruns must be done in VS Race mode and you can either speedrun individual cups, 16 tracks, or all 48 tracks in one go. The more tracks in the speedrun, the less likely it is that the run will contain inconsistent or risky strategies, so I personally prefer the 48 tracks category for practice.
But speedruns have another drawback which makes them less popular, loading times. If you have the cartridge version of the game, you will lose over 1 second for each track in loading times compared to those who have a digital copy of the game. In addition, we have seen that some people will have large loading time differences even if they are both using digital, and large loading time differences between two runs on the same switch. This means that even if you played a track perfectly you may still lose time because your load took 300ms longer than your PB.
Recently the speedrun staff have been retiming the top runs for each category by excluding loading times, but it is a very manual process and takes too much time, and it doesn't help if you are trying to improve your own times since you are unlikely to do all the work of removing loading times from your own runs.
Shroomless Time Trial Speedruns
Over a year ago a new speedrun category called Time Trials was added. There are categories for shrooms and shroomless, but I would recommend doing the shroomless category if you want to improve your lines.
For this category you must use the same combination for every track, you must do the tracks in order, and you only have one attempt at each track. The time at the end is the sum of all the individual time trials. This takes all the benefits of speedruns and removes the drawback of loading times since they aren't included in the total time.
If you open the category rules on the speedrun.com page it has instructions for setting up LiveSplit to manually enter the TT times.
Unfortunately there is a drawback to time trial speedruns, and that is that barely anyone has done them. And with this blog post I hope it might be enough to convince people to give shroomless time trial speedruns a go.