This guide will be explaining your general goals and build choices in speedruns as Tao in primarily Normal Difficulty. Some or most concepts will carry over to higher difficulties but not all decisions will or should be the same as the ones you would make in Normal difficulty.

#General Gameplan and Misc. Tips Tao's primary build for speedruns will be Blade of Bloom. Blade of Bloom has a very large AoE, can be applied through walls and has fantastic scaling damage through Tao's ascension tree which make it fantastic for runs. Given extremely good ascensions, BoB will become so strong that you won't even need a weapon to be killing bosses efficiently so there is less emphasis on building weapon damage when playing Tao. Additionally, Tao offers a range of useful talents and ascensions that make her extremely powerful in speedruns, allowing her to be the fastest character in the game for runs. Much of Tao's kit is through Talents and Ascensions, and thus she can be very consistent for speedruns by needing fewer Occult Scrolls than other characters to succeed.

• Fatal Bloom is a spherical AoE that's placed either on first contact from your crosshair to an object(be that an Enemy, Barrel, Wall etc.) or after travelling a maximum distance. This AoE isn't affected by collision and can be used to hit enemies through or around walls which you should try to abuse as much as possible to save time waiting for mobs to become visible. Understanding it's AoE and max distance is key to top-tier times on Tao.

• Having methods to consume ammo quickly can restore Blossoms very quickly without wasting time. Weapons like Scalpel and Concealed Ammo are fantastic for this purpose since they can dump ammo faster than most weapons, even if their own damage output is poor.

• Glowing Bloom and Mark Chaser are strong early-game options as they can clear mobs faster early on when Blooms will outright one-shot enemies. Scaling Bloom's damage for end-game is unrealistic, though, so no more than a point or two in either ascension is very worthwhile.

• Fish or Bear Paw is a superb option on Tao when building for Fatal Bloom procs since it is effectively reducing the hits/proc by half. Comboing this with a multi-projectile weapon can make for extremely high damage against single targets, ideally bosses.

• Tao's Warlike Blade is generally useful for increasing your weapon's DPS and is a good option when your weapon is making up a majority of your damage.

#Blade of Bloom Blade of Bloom is your bread and butter for Tao runs so we want to take it every time it's offered. In general, BoB Lv1 isn't sufficient to complete an entire run with and so we want to hard focus on getting Lv2 of BoB. From there, we want to stack as many damage bonuses as we can with Epic Swordcraft and Sword Enthusiast. Generally, we want to split levels across the two ascensions with a slight preference for Epic Swordcraft due to it increasing Base damage and thus making all other increases more potent.

• Blade of Bloom is your highest priority ascension as it is the foundation for your build and without it we cannot clear rooms as efficiently. You should also avoid casting Tao's Swords Out when using Blade of Bloom since the swords summoned by BoB are based on active Blade Heart stacks. Lv3 of BoB is less important than Lv2 but is still incredibly strong especially when combined with more levels of Sword Enthusiast. Lv3 of BoB also allows you to use Swords Out for extra damage and Enthusiast stacks since Lv3 of BoB will always cast based on your maximum Blade Heart stacks rather than your current stacks.

• Having said that, Sword Enthusiast can situationally be a better option than Epic Swordcraft if you already have Lv2 or 3 of BoB before being offered either. You should try to consider your total output of swords from BoB when weighing the two ascensions against each other.

• Epic Swordcraft is especially important in this build to keep our BoB scaling into the late and endgame enemies, especially in higher difficulties. The base damage increases will significantly boost our damage as we get other ascensions and skill damage scrolls, making it key to our build.

• Miscellaneous ascensions like Luminous Heart or Mark Chaser can be impactful to our build as last resort options. Amplified Sword also increases our damage but is relatively low impact and won't affect a run if it's your only damage-boosting ascension.

#Ammo Extractor, Warlike Blade and Rainbow An alternative build route that is less consistent but has higher potential for fast times at the highest tier of runs is Tao's Ammo Extractor, which automatically refills your magazine upon killing an enemy which allows us to turn almost any weapon we want into a no-reload setup. Even more importantly, this ascension pairs greatly with a Rainbow in specific situations which can allow us to create some of the fastest builds in the game. The Rainbow itself has special interactions that are difficult to detail, but put simply, after killing enemies and continuing to hold Left Click the Rainbow will start shooting at it's next target with massively increased RoF for a small time. Because of this special interaction, we want to scale our Rainbow's damage and RoF as high as we can as well as prevent reloading to chain kills with this increased RoF, as the bonus RoF will go away if the beam is actively dealing damage for too long or if we reload. This is why Ammo Extractor and Warlike Blade will massively increase the effectiveness of this build.

Something important to consider when attempting to use this build is that it's mostly incompatible with **Blade of Bloom** and building them simultaneously is often a bad idea, as BoB requires too many ascensions in areas where an Ammo Extractor build doesn't care about and vice versa. This build is also more difficult to get going than a BoB build so it will take many more attempts to see a strong setup, albeit with higher potential for a fast time once the build is actually online. 

• Ammo Extractor will effectively provide us an infinite mag if our damage is high enough to quickly chain kills and often a single point into the ascension is enough to make the build work. Its also very important for allowing us to abuse Wait for Good and give our Rainbow guaranteed Crits, detailed in a video by Pimmalage here. A small but important note is that Ammo Extractor has a negative interaction with Bloody Ammo, as you wont be able to maintain a 0 Magazine size, thus breaking a Deadly Counter and Bloody Ammo setup.

• Our other key ascension, Warlike Blade offers general improvements to our guns but most importantly offers more Rate of Fire to our weapons which is an incredible boon for the Rainbow. The special RoF Rainbow experiences also scales based on it's own RoF, so any increase to this stat will see massive gains to DPS.

• The Rainbow itself is very important to this build as well, of course. Unlike a Demonlore, the weapon level of our Rainbow is fairly important as the base damage to scale off of will matter much more than those cases. Additionally, inscriptions on our Rainbow that increase either Lucky Shot, Rate of Fire or Base Damage are incredibly powerful and make for a good Rainbow.

• Merciless Combo is arguably the best scroll to see in this build as it offers insane damage bonuses for Rate of Fire, something we're already doing in our build. This scroll combined with one point in Ammo Extractor, Warlike Blade and a decent Rainbow can be enough to have an incredibly fast build without anything else.

• Sword Enthusiast can be a moderately useful ascension for helping increase our damage mostly for free. Swords Out can be cast even while firing a weapon, so you can use it as a burst damage option against very tanky enemies that break our increase RoF or spammed off Cooldown to keep Enthusiast stacks high. Empathy with Sword is good when paired with Enthusiast for the same reason, it helps increase our general damage without interrupting our Rainbow.

• Ascensions like Luminous Heart, Sword Shadow, Epic Swordcraft or Furious Wave are all decent options if you're not offered anything better because it strengthens Swords Out and lets it synergize better with Sword Enthusiast. Likewise, one point in Blade of Bloom can be helpful in getting some early DPS if your build isnt quite complete and needs something to hold you over.

#Scrolls Most scrolls we care about are fairly self explanatory. Movement speed options are among the most important but it can fluctuate between Movement and Skill damage depending on what you're currently lacking at a given time. If your BoB damage is sufficient and will be to the end of the game, taking movement speed will always be valuable, however the extra speed will be redundant if you have to spend extra time killing enemies. Additionally, just like any character, No-Reload synergies are incredibly powerful and are among the best builds you can make in speedruns so prioritizing any scroll that can create that synergy is good.

• Skill damage options such as Brutal Gloves, Skill Bible, Enduring Caster, Surprise Bonus, Deadly Curse and more are all key scrolls you should take in all situations.

• Capacity Overdraft can easily hard-carry a run and completely forsake the need for any weapon damage if your BoB build is well fleshed out. An instant pick.

• Abundant Vitality is especially powerful on Tao thanks to her Resilient Shield talent allowing a high up-time, although it only applies to weapon damage and thus isn't always impactful. Because of this talent Silver Medal is useless on Tao and should be avoided.

• Merciless Combo will further synergize with Tao's Blooms and affinity for multi-projectile weapons and as a result is a fantastic choice for weapon-based damage.

• Untold Effort only increases the damage of Fatal Bloom itself and not Swords summoned through Blade of Bloom so avoid it in BoB based builds. That said, it affects each instance of Bloom and not just the application, so Untold can be extremely powerful in Bloom Proc builds.

#Weapons Tao can run all sorts of weapons but really has no preference beyond options that offer ammo consumption, high DPS or boss killing as BoB will be carrying most of the damage in runs. Some common setups include Demonlore Stacking, Wild Hunt Magshare gemini, Illusion with Glowing Bloom and more.

• As stated previously, High Consumption weapons like Scalpel with double-shot and Concealed Ammo's weapon skill are often just as valuable as traditional weapons by virtue of consuming ammo to restore BoB uses. Angelic Aura is also a good weapon for this purpose, among others.

• Shotguns or any weapon with multiple projectiles are often good generalist options on Tao because of Fatal Bloom. Illusion especially is a great boss killing weapon given good circumstances, although Pupil and Sunder can still be situationally strong.

• Rainbow is an extremely powerful option in the correct circumstances, although quite rare. It's ammo consumption is decent and in Normal difficulty it's damage is fine as an addition to BoB but often lacking impact in late-game unless it's forcing crits through Deadly Counter or Wait for Good. Without either of those, it's often better to use something with better ammo consumption or outright better damage.

• No Reload synergies are covered above but are obviously a cornerstone in speedruns if you're able to set them up.

#Extra Notes Anything written here is subject to change as we learn and discover more about the game over time. If you have questions that aren't answered in this guide you can find a lot of runners in the Speedrun-Disucssion channel of the official Gunfire discord. The discord is linked at the very top of the leaderboards or at https://discord.com/invite/gunfire-reborn

Please check out the category and game rules before doing any runs!

Good luck!