HM Pongmei is fast (maybe one of the fastest) and can get some nice skins.
As a basic information: if you use Toolbox to open the chests you can safe even more time as you can skip the purple drops.
I usually finish a run in 3-3.5 mins with 3-5 chests. The chance on gold unids in HM is overall good.
You might wanna hit up the "chestrunners corner" of this forum. There's a bunch of different routes explained with drop tables and so on.
I can tell you from my experience that over the long term only running one route all the time gets reaaaaally boring.
If you're looking for the straight up fastest I'd assume that the one starting at borealis station (& only opening the first chest) might be your go to. But as Jodel said, pongmei has a much bigger potential for nice drops and is nearly as fast or similar.
When it comes to doing all 4 titles at once: I'd suggest hitting up HM for a while to work on chestrunners title, wisdom and unlucky (& slowly on lucky). Pongmei NM is great for lucky title and also gives you some stuff to ID but unfortunately the canthan chests don't count towards treasure hunter.
GL on your journey
Did an hour of chestrunning in Pogmei Valley (HM):
- 20 runs of 3 minutes
- average of just under 3 chests per run
- 37 gold items in total
The big pro of Pogmei is that it's easy, I do it while watching shows or a movie. The downside is that there are no really great drops (no Q8's).
Paragon Ninja Q8s just drop in NM and dont give treasure hunter title progress as the chests are not counting towards this. So your fact with the q8 is irrelevant as post creator wanted to combine 4 titles at the same time and running q8 chests does not progress treasure hunter title.
From my experience fast runs are Pongmei, Boreals, Bukdek (ally-shadowsteps!) and eternal grove.
As mentioned above Boreals does not drop OS, so the potential for high value drops is poor/non-existent.
Since you want to Max 4 titles including the chestrun title my suggestion is Pongmei (HM for CR title obviously), but also to add other runs to the rotation to not get bored too quickly. HM running will quicker max your unid and unluck title, for the luck title you need to grind more nm later on, if you want to avoid afking during events.
Pongmei offers the best mix of variety, good drop potential and speed if you ask me.
Paragon Ninja : I agree that the ultimative holy grail in Pongmei would be q8s with decent skins/stats. However also any perfect Bladed, GotH, Echovald, Amber Aegis, Jug, Paper Fan, Paper Lantern etc etc, pretty independent from req, can be extremely valuable. And not to forget any other perfect shield (think demon + ench) or wand/offhand (think 20/20s..) can be considered as "great". Chestrunning is always a luck-based thing independent from nm or hm. HM will grant a stable income to finance lockpicks with lot of elite tomes.
The good thing about Pongmei is that nearly all canthan skins can drop there as you have chests from jade sea, echovald and kaineng includig plagueborn.
The good thing about Pongmei is that nearly all canthan skins can drop there as you have chests from jade sea, echovald and kaineng includig plagueborn.
The vast majority of my 4.1k chests are pongmei and it is very easy and gives good drops.
I wanted to say I don’t think the jade sea drops include many of the good ones (no outcast stuff, naga bows, jellyfish wands, kappa shields) best you can hope is an emblazoned defender or a good jade wand. I started to skip those chests as I felt they were a bit of a drain on lockpicks, but that will slow you down a bit unless you start from tanglewood.
The vast majority of my 4.1k chests are pongmei and it is very easy and gives good drops.
I wanted to say I don’t think the jade sea drops include many of the good ones (no outcast stuff, naga bows, jellyfish wands, kappa shields) best you can hope is an emblazoned defender or a good jade wand. I started to skip those chests as I felt they were a bit of a drain on lockpicks, but that will slow you down a bit unless you start from tanglewood.
Starting from Tanglewood is a super bad idea as it will cut the number of possible echovald chests. If you want to skip the jade chests I would even more suggest to go from boreas.
But you are right, the jade chests are the ones you should expect the worst drops compared to the other chests in this area. But who knows. Just get a matching 20/20 jade wand or nice emblazoned and it was worth it.
Starting from Tanglewood is a super bad idea as it will cut the number of possible echovald chests. If you want to skip the jade chests I would even more suggest to go from boreas.
But you are right, the jade chests are the ones you should expect the worst drops compared to the other chests in this area. But who knows. Just get a matching 20/20 jade wand or nice emblazoned and it was worth it.
This is matter of preference, while i ran several tens of thousand chests pongmei and recorded drops starting from each town, jade chests give better swords and more swords than kurzick side, so while hunting mythical q8 sword drops, kurzick only give wicked+gothic basically, and luxon side drops dusk+shinobi+katana+broad+dadao and cores much more often 
i also prefer emblazoned defenders over overbotted kurzick skins.
Anyhow even with running HM i feel the best drops come from jade brotherhood and am fah chests, those are most important!
Starting from Tanglewood is a super bad idea as it will cut the number of possible echovald chests. If you want to skip the jade chests I would even more suggest to go from boreas.
Interesting! I didn’t know that less chests spawn close you the point you enter the map.
Interesting! I didn’t know that less chests spawn close you the point you enter the map.
I don't know the exact distance but from what I experienced in pongmei from starting at boreas it is about three to four compass ranges until the first possible chest spawn. Smaller maps may have a closer distance to the first possible chest. Even tho this game is over 16 years old, we still don't know everything. Just explore some threads here.
For example:
