Guild Wars 2

Quatro fromaggi (4x cheeses) pizza with extra druid!

Thats pretty much how most t4 runs are done atm

I’m going to take this lovely image as an opportunity to chat about the most common pub compositions for Fractals.

I don’t think this really says anything about Necromancers or Druids per se, but rather says a lot about the way every fractal is constructed, including the bosses even. Honestly, I think the Druid is completely unnecessary in the comp because it’s basically impossible to die as a remotely competent Necromancer in T4 Fractals.

• There are always a number of targets present, so Epidemic is always relevant.
• There are no DPS checks or enrage mechanics, so taking a bit longer but being much safer is very valuable for runs with players you don’t know anything about.
• Most enemies aren’t remotely threatening to competent players, but are noob-killers that prey on players who don’t know how to handle their classes or the fractal’s mechanics.
• Toughness scaling at high levels strongly encourages condition damage builds and not power builds.
• Many encounters outright encourage range with more melee-punishing mechanics than range-punishing mechanics (ie. Imbued Shaman / Archdiviner / Molten Duo / Mai Trin)

Even if they nerfed Necromancers to oblivion, it would just become 4 condi Engineers and a Druid, or whatever. The lack of build diversity is entirely due to the fractals’ mechanics and the overarching toughness mechanics.

Rising Dusk.2408:

I’m going to take this lovely image as an opportunity to chat about the most common pub compositions for Fractals.

I don’t think this really says anything about Necromancers or Druids per se, but rather says a lot about the way every fractal is constructed, including the bosses even. Honestly, I think the Druid is completely unnecessary in the comp because it’s basically impossible to die as a remotely competent Necromancer in T4 Fractals.

• There are always a number of targets present, so Epidemic is always relevant.
• There are no DPS checks or enrage mechanics, so taking a bit longer but being much safer is very valuable for runs with players you don’t know anything about.
• Most enemies aren’t remotely threatening to competent players, but are noob-killers that prey on players who don’t know how to handle their classes or the fractal’s mechanics.
• Toughness scaling at high levels strongly encourages condition damage builds and not power builds.
• Many encounters outright encourage range with more melee-punishing mechanics than range-punishing mechanics (ie. Imbued Shaman / Archdiviner / Molten Duo / Mai Trin)

Even if they nerfed Necromancers to oblivion, it would just become 4 condi Engineers and a Druid, or whatever. The lack of build diversity is entirely due to the fractals’ mechanics and the overarching toughness mechanics.

Yup, You’re right except the druid part. Druid is only used for small DPS modification (sun spirit), and more importantly: healing the minions, minions have no cap on them so you can get as many out as you want, but they die over time as they lose HP, if you heal them, they don’t die, if they don’t die, you have an army of bleed applying minions that carry the necro DPS by a ton.

A condition PS Warrior would contribute more to team DPS than a Druid even if the Druid kept the Jagged Horrors alive forever. The entire purpose of the team composition is to care as little as possible and faceroll through everything at the cost of being incredibly suboptimal. It’s for this reason that I’ve always felt the Druid is a little out of character.

Maybe if it’s a Magi’s Druid just so players don’t have to dodge any more it would be OK.

peeterske.9134:

Rising Dusk.2408:

I’m going to take this lovely image as an opportunity to chat about the most common pub compositions for Fractals.

I don’t think this really says anything about Necromancers or Druids per se, but rather says a lot about the way every fractal is constructed, including the bosses even. Honestly, I think the Druid is completely unnecessary in the comp because it’s basically impossible to die as a remotely competent Necromancer in T4 Fractals.

• There are always a number of targets present, so Epidemic is always relevant.
• There are no DPS checks or enrage mechanics, so taking a bit longer but being much safer is very valuable for runs with players you don’t know anything about.
• Most enemies aren’t remotely threatening to competent players, but are noob-killers that prey on players who don’t know how to handle their classes or the fractal’s mechanics.
• Toughness scaling at high levels strongly encourages condition damage builds and not power builds.
• Many encounters outright encourage range with more melee-punishing mechanics than range-punishing mechanics (ie. Imbued Shaman / Archdiviner / Molten Duo / Mai Trin)

Even if they nerfed Necromancers to oblivion, it would just become 4 condi Engineers and a Druid, or whatever. The lack of build diversity is entirely due to the fractals’ mechanics and the overarching toughness mechanics.

Yup, You’re right except the druid part. Druid is only used for small DPS modification (sun spirit), and more importantly: healing the minions, minions have no cap on them so you can get as many out as you want, but they die over time as they lose HP, if you heal them, they don’t die, if they don’t die, you have an army of bleed applying minions that carry the necro DPS by a ton.

You missed GotL. That’s 15% extra condition and power based damage that cannot be stripped by boon thieves. Also the 15% damage increase is very very noticeable and it’s a huge bump in dasmage. Yes minion healing is nice too. GotL is the main reason and the fact that spirits exist too.

Oh Snapalope.1378:

You missed GotL. That’s 15% extra condition and power based damage that cannot be stripped by boon thieves. Also the 15% damage increase is very very noticeable and it’s a huge bump in dasmage. Yes minion healing is nice too. GotL is the main reason and the fact that spirits exist too.

This is all true, but 99% of pubs don’t stack close enough to get those stacks. If we want to talk about the actual optimal composition, it’s 1 Condi PS Warr, 1 Condi Druid, 2 Condi Necros, and 1 Chronomancer. Played well this will result in massively improved clear times of every T4 fractal.

The important thing to remember about ~4 Necro is that it’s faceroll by design. It’s intended to require low effort, no stacking, no buffing, and enables you to just yolo everything. If a Druid honestly runs around trying to give people GotL stacks in this comp, it’s going to be pretty fruitless. At best Sun Spirit is useful and you can heal people here and there if they’re being particularly bad. This is why when I get a 5 Necro comp in T4 Fractals the clear times are even faster than you’d get with a Druid just because of the fifth Epidemic and the fact that the Druid is underutilized.

That sounds about right. The PS is situational as some fractals it gets dangerous giving away free might.

Nice picture and RD perfectly describes the reasons for this state of fractals. I’d love to see some accurate statistics about class prevalence in T4 fractals. Less for seeing that necros are massively over-represented (a certainty anyway), but more for the other classes.

Following the history of FGS, icebow, LF, and so on, I can suspect how the next nerfs will look like.

First, Epidemic is changed to only transfer max 5 stacks. This will kill any use of it, while some will pretend that its a viable skill. Others will call it an exploit that a single skill can cause that much damage and that it is a reasonable nerf (quote from the previous ele discussions).

Second, Parasitic Contagion is reduced to 6%. This will mostly not kill it, but it will make the trait feel less impact full.

When that doesn’t kill the necro meta (remember, it took a lot to force people away from elementalists), 6 months later the the scepter auto attack will be reduced by 33% thus triggering the next 4 characters of class X and 1 druid meta.

I think we should let the neco have this one thing after being shafted in the dungeon meta for over 3 years. Tried to do dungeons on my necromancer today and they’re still terrible with all the condi resistant stuff.

The state of fractals..

A couple of weeks ago I complained to my guild that some PuG had no idea about cliffsides hammer and how it worked. I complained how it was lvl 30 something and by now they should of known better. A guild member taken back alittle by this joking said “that’s me aswell XD” and that made me think.

I looked up how many times you do cliffside before hitting lvl30 and it was twice. If your just going through the lvls you get to experience cliffside twice.. That was embarrassing for me to find and and to think I just raged about it to anyone . I really miss the old style as you are forced to do them over and over and it gets the machics more stuck in peoples heads.

This is true for other things also, people are failing at the wisps at the start of swamp and even some reset if it’s just the back ones. That to me blows my mind how somone at T4 can’t get them although they haven’t run them to see the comon easy paths we take.

That and other examples of it is what I see for the state of fractals

Edit: spelling (getting better)

Rising Dusk.2408:

I’m going to take this lovely image as an opportunity to chat about the most common pub compositions for Fractals.

I don’t think this really says anything about Necromancers or Druids per se, but rather says a lot about the way every fractal is constructed, including the bosses even. Honestly, I think the Druid is completely unnecessary in the comp because it’s basically impossible to die as a remotely competent Necromancer in T4 Fractals.

• There are always a number of targets present, so Epidemic is always relevant.
• There are no DPS checks or enrage mechanics, so taking a bit longer but being much safer is very valuable for runs with players you don’t know anything about.
• Most enemies aren’t remotely threatening to competent players, but are noob-killers that prey on players who don’t know how to handle their classes or the fractal’s mechanics.
• Toughness scaling at high levels strongly encourages condition damage builds and not power builds.
• Many encounters outright encourage range with more melee-punishing mechanics than range-punishing mechanics (ie. Imbued Shaman / Archdiviner / Molten Duo / Mai Trin)

Even if they nerfed Necromancers to oblivion, it would just become 4 condi Engineers and a Druid, or whatever. The lack of build diversity is entirely due to the fractals’ mechanics and the overarching toughness mechanics.

I play zerker thief in t4s daily and doing more than fine, never understood whole necro stacking thing – we kill bosses there just as fast with random groups consisting of anything really. Yes, having necro for boon thief is nice, but 1 is more than sufficient, imo.

I also melee most bosses so idk what you are talking about. Especially bosses you named – they are easiest to melee in fact (mai is cone – stabby stabby her in the back, shaman has obvious animations to dodge – drop dat smoke screen in his face, arch – just poke him in the back 24/7). Only bosses i range is like molten duo when my entire team is dead and i have to solo the boss or chaos fractal because boss needs to be kited 24/7.

Cynz.9437:

I play zerker thief in t4s daily and doing more than fine, never understood whole necro stacking thing – we kill bosses there just as fast with random groups consisting of anything really. Yes, having necro for boon thief is nice, but 1 is more than sufficient, imo.

I also melee most bosses so idk what you are talking about. Especially bosses you named – they are easiest to melee in fact (mai is cone – stabby stabby her in the back, shaman has obvious animations to dodge – drop dat smoke screen in his face, arch – just poke him in the back 24/7). Only bosses i range is like molten duo when my entire team is dead and i have to solo the boss or chaos fractal because boss needs to be kited 24/7.

Oh funny story! As a theif you can steal the invulnerable whiskey from the chaos boss. So while hes channeling his big aoe doom spin and pull ( he does this at 50% then every 18sec) you can drink whiskey right infront of him and laugh as you take nothing.

Rising Dusk.2408:

I don’t think this really says anything about Necromancers or Druids per se, but rather says a lot about the way every fractal is constructed, including the bosses even.

I’d go even further here. It says a lot not about the classes themselves, and not even about the fractals, but primarily about the people running those fractals. Specifically, that most players do not care about challenge and would rather go for a safer run than a faster one.

You might change the classes, you might change the fractals, but you won’t change the people.

Rising Dusk.2408:

• There are no DPS checks or enrage mechanics, so taking a bit longer but being much safer is very valuable for runs with players you don’t know anything about.

And then we have people asking why there are enrage mechanics in Raids.

The worst part about these “all meta” people is the same as with every such “easy mode” meta, it turns players into really bad players. They “expect” encounters to go smoothly in their ideal composition and when that doesn’t happen they put the blame on everyone other than themselves.

Cynz.9437:

I play zerker thief in t4s daily and doing more than fine, never understood whole necro stacking thing – we kill bosses there just as fast with random groups consisting of anything really. Yes, having necro for boon thief is nice, but 1 is more than sufficient, imo.

I also melee most bosses so idk what you are talking about. Especially bosses you named – they are easiest to melee in fact (mai is cone – stabby stabby her in the back, shaman has obvious animations to dodge – drop dat smoke screen in his face, arch – just poke him in the back 24/7). Only bosses i range is like molten duo when my entire team is dead and i have to solo the boss or chaos fractal because boss needs to be kited 24/7.

Because in 99% pug necro will be better than pug thief, due to survivability and afk mode damage alone. I’ve seen too much pug thieves going p/p, or never switching from staff and then complaining about hard-hitting trash.

Astralporing.1957:

I’d go even further here. It says a lot not about the classes themselves, and not even about the fractals, but primarily about the people running those fractals. Specifically, that most players do not care about challenge and would rather go for a safer run than a faster one.

You might change the classes, you might change the fractals, but you won’t change the people.

Oh my, this is so, so true. Nice wording, it really makes you think and it’s scary..

Astralporing.1957:

Specifically, that most players do not care about challenge and would rather go for a safer run than a faster one.

This is very true; people want safe runs because it’s not fun wiping repeatedly with people you know nothing about just to get something done that you do literally every day. That said, if boons weren’t so risky and condition damage weren’t so much stronger than power damage you’d see a lot of other much safer compositions show up in T4 with things like Chrono/Herald protection sharing or even DH Hammer protection spam making a comeback.

The Fractals team itself recognizes the problems I’m talking about here, so I’m fairly confident they’re taking actions to fix it up in a coming release.

I’d love t5 fractals, scale back the toughness boost, get rid of boon thieves, make things hit like a truck again. Something that isn’t made for easy daily pugging but actually challenging 5man content.

Sarahfull.4930:

Cynz.9437:

I play zerker thief in t4s daily and doing more than fine, never understood whole necro stacking thing – we kill bosses there just as fast with random groups consisting of anything really. Yes, having necro for boon thief is nice, but 1 is more than sufficient, imo.

I also melee most bosses so idk what you are talking about. Especially bosses you named – they are easiest to melee in fact (mai is cone – stabby stabby her in the back, shaman has obvious animations to dodge – drop dat smoke screen in his face, arch – just poke him in the back 24/7). Only bosses i range is like molten duo when my entire team is dead and i have to solo the boss or chaos fractal because boss needs to be kited 24/7.

Oh funny story! As a theif you can steal the invulnerable whiskey from the chaos boss. So while hes channeling his big aoe doom spin and pull ( he does this at 50% then every 18sec) you can drink whiskey right infront of him and laugh as you take nothing.

Or you just do your job as thief and cc this attack..

Jerus.4350:

I’d love t5 fractals, scale back the toughness boost, get rid of boon thieves, make things hit like a truck again. Something that isn’t made for easy daily pugging but actually challenging 5man content.

Well nowadays the trashmobs hit like a truck xD

otome.2673:

Sarahfull.4930:

Cynz.9437:

I play zerker thief in t4s daily and doing more than fine, never understood whole necro stacking thing – we kill bosses there just as fast with random groups consisting of anything really. Yes, having necro for boon thief is nice, but 1 is more than sufficient, imo.

I also melee most bosses so idk what you are talking about. Especially bosses you named – they are easiest to melee in fact (mai is cone – stabby stabby her in the back, shaman has obvious animations to dodge – drop dat smoke screen in his face, arch – just poke him in the back 24/7). Only bosses i range is like molten duo when my entire team is dead and i have to solo the boss or chaos fractal because boss needs to be kited 24/7.

Oh funny story! As a theif you can steal the invulnerable whiskey from the chaos boss. So while hes channeling his big aoe doom spin and pull ( he does this at 50% then every 18sec) you can drink whiskey right infront of him and laugh as you take nothing.

Or you just do your job as thief and cc this attack..

Yup! That too, let everyone know before hand you’ll call out the breakbar move (copy and paste it) then at 52% hp call that it’s incoming then again after counting to 18 untill hes dead

Sarahfull.4930:

otome.2673:

Sarahfull.4930:

Cynz.9437:

I play zerker thief in t4s daily and doing more than fine, never understood whole necro stacking thing – we kill bosses there just as fast with random groups consisting of anything really. Yes, having necro for boon thief is nice, but 1 is more than sufficient, imo.

I also melee most bosses so idk what you are talking about. Especially bosses you named – they are easiest to melee in fact (mai is cone – stabby stabby her in the back, shaman has obvious animations to dodge – drop dat smoke screen in his face, arch – just poke him in the back 24/7). Only bosses i range is like molten duo when my entire team is dead and i have to solo the boss or chaos fractal because boss needs to be kited 24/7.

Oh funny story! As a theif you can steal the invulnerable whiskey from the chaos boss. So while hes channeling his big aoe doom spin and pull ( he does this at 50% then every 18sec) you can drink whiskey right infront of him and laugh as you take nothing.

Or you just do your job as thief and cc this attack..

Yup! That too, let everyone know before hand you’ll call out the breakbar move (copy and paste it) then at 52% hp call that it’s incoming then again after counting to 18 untill hes dead

If you have warrior in party he can ping headbutt when it runs off cd aince it has same cd

Sarahfull.4930:

otome.2673:

Sarahfull.4930:

Cynz.9437:

I play zerker thief in t4s daily and doing more than fine, never understood whole necro stacking thing – we kill bosses there just as fast with random groups consisting of anything really. Yes, having necro for boon thief is nice, but 1 is more than sufficient, imo.

I also melee most bosses so idk what you are talking about. Especially bosses you named – they are easiest to melee in fact (mai is cone – stabby stabby her in the back, shaman has obvious animations to dodge – drop dat smoke screen in his face, arch – just poke him in the back 24/7). Only bosses i range is like molten duo when my entire team is dead and i have to solo the boss or chaos fractal because boss needs to be kited 24/7.

Oh funny story! As a theif you can steal the invulnerable whiskey from the chaos boss. So while hes channeling his big aoe doom spin and pull ( he does this at 50% then every 18sec) you can drink whiskey right infront of him and laugh as you take nothing.

Or you just do your job as thief and cc this attack..

Yup! That too, let everyone know before hand you’ll call out the breakbar move (copy and paste it) then at 52% hp call that it’s incoming then again after counting to 18 untill hes dead

we had to explain our thief in HoTW yesterday what to do after his comment “thieves are bad at cc”. he wasn’t a new player, some 5k+ ap