Guild Wars 2

Edit: I posted some more analysis along with gameplay recording a bit later on in the thread.

Preface: It seems like a lot of people are having problems with tier 4 dailies. This guide will let you face roll any tier 4 level stress free. I have killed 100 Mai Trin in less than 10 minutes with this team comp and clear every day’s 3 dailies in under 20 minutes. This will work and I highly suggest everyone to drop their berserkers only mentality and give this a try.

The group composition:
1. Viper horrors necro
2. Random condi class
3. Random condi class/Random person
4. Druid
5. 1 Random person

Why stack conditions?
At tier 4, stuff just dies slower because of more HP and armor, therefore fights last a lot longer. With fights lasting longer and you can get 1 shotted easier meaning you can’t just stand around and attack. For this reason alone, condi damage will dramatically beat power based damage; like the competition isn’t even close in terms of daily clear times if you compare a condi stack team vs a power stack team. Before HoT release, people figured out that if a fight lasts longer than 10-15 seconds, condi will straight out demolish power builds. For this reason alone, you want to stack condi classes. Another way of thinking about this is that condi damage does not drop off with higher HP and armor scaling, where power builds will drop off quite dramatically.

Why necros?
If you have any experience in raid wing 2, you already know they are OP and probably expected this meta to exist already. A lot of people say 2016 is the year of the necro for a reason. In terms of damage, they are extremely good. In addition to that, they have epidemic which gives everything in a big area all the big juicy condition stacks. Another big boon is that necros make condition management a trivial thing with plague signet and transfers. So you have a class that outputs massive area damage and makes your party immune to conditions what else do you want? Actually there is….scepter boon strips nuff said.

What the 1 other condi class could be…
You have a lot of options actually. Engi, venom share thief, even warrior will work. They all offer a lot of benefits too, and you can pick whatever fits your needs. From my experiences, venomshare works wonders. There’s always the option of taking 1 extra necro for maximum entertainment as well. There is the option for replacing this role with another utility role as well if you decide you need more utility. Candidates include but not limited to PS warrior, chrono, DH.

Why druid?
It’s mainly for maximum face roll. The sustain makes a lot of encounters a trivial thing such as snowblind where you can just regroup and heal up very easily. Grace of the land is not something to be underestimated as well. It provides a massive DPS increase and a good druid can upkeep that quite well.

What the 1 random person could be….
Again you have many options. DH, PS warrior, chrono, and many other things. They all offer a good utility buff to the team and again take whatever you think will benefit the most.

Afterthought
I’ve used this team comp everyday after the April update and pretty much face rolled every day’s dailies in under 20 minutes. Even 100 Mai Trin was done in like less than 10 minutes. It does work and I can post some recordings of tomorrow’s dailies if people want to see the massive damage and face roll playstyle of this team comp (already finished today’s dailies and didn’t record).

Also I sort of want them to buff the difficulty of fractals because stacking condi classes just makes things die too fast and it’s not even a challenge….

Disclaimer: To be honest this team setup is not the most well optimized and min maxed. However…Is it easy to play and allows you to face roll through everything you see in tier 4 in very fast time? Yes! That’s why I made this guide.

Dinosaurs.8674:

I’m really surprised at all the people saying that OP’s comp is bad. I would agree that it’s not the mega optimal fractal clearing comp, but it really is very effective. My group has run something similar and I can say with confidence that you really can faceroll the t4 scales with very little effort with condi spam and epidemic.

I think people need to keep in mind that he made this post to help people that were having trouble with t4 scales to begin with. So yeah it’s missing out on some stuff that would typically be used if you were putting together a “best” comp for clearing fractals with players who are experienced with high level fotm. But plenty of people are probably still in withdrawal from their daily mossman trains and have trouble dealing with the damage that high scale mobs can do, and I can say from experience that this kind of comp will perform as advertised.

If condies would be better at anything above 15 sec then why isn’t anyone stacking condies in raids?
Toughness scaling was removed, only thing bosses in high levels have is too much hp.
If your eles are bad then yea, stacking condies is better.
Too many eles play wrong builds in wrong places with terrible rotations, so obviously easier classes will net most people better results.

Rip EA, Rip Banners, Rip Quickness, Rip Might, Rip everything.

Necro’s are pretty much the worst option you can chose for your DPS Slot in Fotm/Dungeons and theyre not OP, playable at best.

Amicable Pugs.4503:

Toughness scaling was removed

No, it wasn’t removed, just reduced
high scale mobs have about 30% more armor than low scale mobs

Amicable Pugs.4503:

If condies would be better at anything above 15 sec then why isn’t anyone stacking condies in raids?
Toughness scaling was removed, only thing bosses in high levels have is too much hp.
If your eles are bad then yea, stacking condies is better.
Too many eles play wrong builds in wrong places with terrible rotations, so obviously easier classes will net most people better results.

It’s still in the game from my knowledge. The armor scaling is still there and this is why I’m advocating condi stack. To your question of why don’t you just run 10 condi stack in raids, it’s just a question of roles. Different roles need to be filled such as might giver, boon/quick slave, boon duration slave. Actually to answer your question, necro stack is legit now on Sab because the bug with minions is fixed. It’s actually really disgusting how fast sab dies with necro stack.

In terms of good players it doesn’t matter what classes you bring, it’s only a matter of time then. I tend to Moa’s opinion, it depends on the players who are playing the fractals. I beat all tier 4, sometimes only the highest of the high fractals, with different classes and compositions. Too many players out there don’t know how to handle their class properly and to make a fight much easier with little adjustments. It was the case pre-patch when you saw people dying since wisp running at swamps of the mist and now they all run around with the new backpack and shiny other stuff kissing every fricking yellow indicator at arch diviner. It always makes me cry to see that.
It’s not the content that’s hard on higer fracs, it’s the number of pugs you have to carry making it harder in your group.

Fennec.2961:

Rip EA, Rip Banners, Rip Quickness, Rip Might, Rip everything.

Necro’s are pretty much the worst option you can chose for your DPS Slot in Fotm/Dungeons and theyre not OP, playable at best.

necros just make it easy. rise minions allow you to facetank anything while still dealing good dps. and then epi bouncing gives huge spikes when you stack necros, which is great for all these fractals that are full of trash groups and multi target bossfights.

yes they have terrible team support. but you can do 80% of the dps with 2% of the skill. or whatever. its faceroll.

a druid is unnecessary, just slightly safer i guess. but he better be throwing out bonfires…

I hope we’re not going to see groups asking for specific builds and team configs for T4 fractals because of threads like this.

Honestly, T4 is not hard, with random pugs and team config I’ve beaten them all everyday without much stress or effort, it has a LOT to do with people’s ability to remain calm and not start blaming each other if it wipes, but T4 is definitely not worth becoming as elitist as raids. If anything, just get some potions, and it’s back to easy.

A lot of groups are already asking for specific classes such as druids or condi necros now actually. It’s catching up. I wouldn’t say necros have zero team support, I consider aoe mob control and group condition management good support. In terms of banners, EA, quickness, and all that stuff, I did say you can take a fifth to be whatever you want.

For example if the fractal gives you decent melee room, go ahead take a PS might slave to pump out the might and banners. It’s situational what the 1 random person can bring. Necro DPS is actually quite high with epidemic and transfers, and even without bounces and transfers the DPS is still quite good. Not to mention the condi DPS is not dropping off due to armor scaling.

insanemaniac.2456:

Fennec.2961:

Rip EA, Rip Banners, Rip Quickness, Rip Might, Rip everything.

Necro’s are pretty much the worst option you can chose for your DPS Slot in Fotm/Dungeons and theyre not OP, playable at best.

necros just make it easy. rise minions allow you to facetank anything while still dealing good dps. and then epi bouncing gives huge spikes when you stack necros, which is great for all these fractals that are full of trash groups and multi target bossfights.

yes they have terrible team support. but you can do 80% of the dps with 2% of the skill. or whatever. its faceroll.

a druid is unnecessary, just slightly safer i guess. but he better be throwing out bonfires…

While you’re correct it’s unnecessary it does help keep the minions alive which increases the necro dps.

Which is ironic because i recall a video of some dev saying they disliked the “mana-battery” system GW1 had. Druid does this exact thing, only since we have no true resource other than HP it’s now an HP battery.

Kinda silly. They should look into making minions unable to be healed/get boons from sources that aren’t the AI Owner. It would solve “some” of the problems.

Necro #1 Necro #1 Necro #1 Necro #1

reikken.4961:

Amicable Pugs.4503:

Toughness scaling was removed

No, it wasn’t removed, just reduced
high scale mobs have about 30% more armor than low scale mobs

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-December-15-2015
“From fractal scale 1 to 50, the toughness attribute of creatures will scale up with the fractal scale. Beyond fractal scale 50, the toughness stat of creatures will no longer increase with the scale of the fractal.”

This is a TERRIBLE team comp.

1. Toughness no longer increases after scale 50. There is no benefit to using condition over power.

2. necros provide no boons. A necro’s dps without and might/quickness/banners/etc is about 7k. with a proper team comp and full buffs it is around 22k. It is not a 20% increase it is closer to a 300% difference in damage

If you want to make an il informed post about the current state of necros please do so in the necro forums, this really isn’t the place and is terrible advice.

Amicable Pugs.4503:

reikken.4961:

Amicable Pugs.4503:

Toughness scaling was removed

No, it wasn’t removed, just reduced
high scale mobs have about 30% more armor than low scale mobs

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-December-15-2015
“From fractal scale 1 to 50, the toughness attribute of creatures will scale up with the fractal scale. Beyond fractal scale 50, the toughness stat of creatures will no longer increase with the scale of the fractal.”

By playing those higher scale fractals with a power build and comparing the damage you can easily see that it has not happened.

Eh, I still prefer bringing my tempest and revenant. Metric ton of boons for everybody, ele in zeker can pretty much heal the entire group just fine with his shouts and water attunement swap right back into fresh air DPS spam.

And to be honest, getting full viper stat ascended is far more work than just properly using your zerker classes like tempest and rev.

Zenith.7301:

Eh, I still prefer bringing my tempest and revenant. Metric ton of boons for everybody, ele in zeker can pretty much heal the entire group just fine with his shouts and water attunement swap right back into fresh air DPS spam.

And to be honest, getting full viper stat ascended is far more work than just properly using your zerker classes like tempest and rev.

it isnt more of a bother to acquire viper armor than zerker.

its the trinkets, and for those you can do just as well in rabid as viper. rabid are easy to get, sinister might be harder/easier depending on who you are, and viper are just plain ridiculous. dont get viper trinkets just for content that is this easy.

Yeah, but let’s be honest, getting rabid as a consolation prize is like getting knights trinkets instead of zerker.

Sinister trinkets for example are a pain in the kitten to get as a necromancer or guardian if you’re doing that labyrinth achievement, while it’s incredibly easy on a thief or PU mesmer or even engineer.

Condi builds are just plain more time consuming to gear up optimally compared to power specs, and that’s a gap that needs to be rectified.

It could be as simple as introducing sinister/viper trinkets for laurels/pristine fractal relics.

I’m really surprised at all the people saying that OP’s comp is bad. I would agree that it’s not the mega optimal fractal clearing comp, but it really is very effective. My group has run something similar and I can say with confidence that you really can faceroll the t4 scales with very little effort with condi spam and epidemic.

I think people need to keep in mind that he made this post to help people that were having trouble with t4 scales to begin with. So yeah it’s missing out on some stuff that would typically be used if you were putting together a “best” comp for clearing fractals with players who are experienced with high level fotm. But plenty of people are probably still in withdrawal from their daily mossman trains and have trouble dealing with the damage that high scale mobs can do, and I can say from experience that this kind of comp will perform as advertised.

I would add though that your “random person” slot should probably be a warrior because it turns out buffing up the necros is really good. I also think engineer is probably best in your “random condi class” slot because it gives good burns and blinds and can blast whatever you need.

insanemaniac.2456:

its the trinkets, and for those you can do just as well in rabid as viper. rabid are easy to get, sinister might be harder/easier depending on who you are, and viper are just plain ridiculous. dont get viper trinkets just for content that is this easy.

Well currently the only way to get full viper’s trinkets is through raids, so anyone who is running full viper’s necro is likely gearing it for raids, not fotm. So yeah it isn’t really for “content that is this easy”.

It’s impressive how one-sided the arguments in this thread are, even from people that should at least know where and for what necro is/might be good in fotm.

Two necros might be an overkill, but one necro alone completely disables the “Boon Thieves” instability, Archdiviner, the Legendary Imbued Shaman, Mai Trin and is really good for the Aetherblade Fractal.
Adding a druid gives you pretty decent dmg for almost every encounter.
It might not be the best/highest dmg for every fractal, but makes most of them even easier than they already are.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

This is a TERRIBLE team comp.

1. Toughness no longer increases after scale 50. There is no benefit to using condition over power.

2. necros provide no boons. A necro’s dps without and might/quickness/banners/etc is about 7k. with a proper team comp and full buffs it is around 22k. It is not a 20% increase it is closer to a 300% difference in damage

If you want to make an il informed post about the current state of necros please do so in the necro forums, this really isn’t the place and is terrible advice.

Is it fully min/maxed and will poop out the most DPS? Probably not? Is it easy to play and still be able to finish all 3 tier 4 dailies in 20 minutes or kill 100 Mai Trin in less than 10 minutes (If you take a PS warrior for the random person slot)? Hell yes. The point of it is pure face roll requiring as little skill as possible. I did mention that in the original post that you can take a PS warrior to be a buff bot. This bumps up the DPS a lot for fractals that gives ample amounts of melee headroom.

Dinosaurs.8674:

I’m really surprised at all the people saying that OP’s comp is bad. I would agree that it’s not the mega optimal fractal clearing comp, but it really is very effective. My group has run something similar and I can say with confidence that you really can faceroll the t4 scales with very little effort with condi spam and epidemic.

I think people need to keep in mind that he made this post to help people that were having trouble with t4 scales to begin with. So yeah it’s missing out on some stuff that would typically be used if you were putting together a “best” comp for clearing fractals with players who are experienced with high level fotm. But plenty of people are probably still in withdrawal from their daily mossman trains and have trouble dealing with the damage that high scale mobs can do, and I can say from experience that this kind of comp will perform as advertised.

Thank you for being able to see the point why I made this.

I don’t know. Being able to beat content is one thing, but high-level Fractals are easy enough that you should at least be thinking about teamwide buffs like EA/Might/Fury/Banners/etc. Necromancers aren’t bad, and Epidemic is widely usable against trash mobs and even some bosses, but stacking them in spite of teamwide buffs that both benefit damage and survivability isn’t really smart even for a stress free composition.

Also, to those saying that a Necromancer invalidates the boon stealing instability, you’re at least mostly incorrect. Firstly, the punishment of that instability isn’t really that enemies get your boons, it’s that you lose them. Secondly, a Chronomancer is far better than the Necromancer both for survivability and teamwide DPS boosting (Quickness/Alacrity/Distortion Share).

If you want something very stress free that’s going to put out far more damage with much more consistency than what the OP is suggesting, try the following:
- PS Warrior
- Power Tempest
- Hammer Dragonhunter
- Chronomancer
- Condition Druid

You’re basically indestructible, maintain permanent Quickness/Fury/Might/Vuln/Protection/etc. It’s night and day how much better (and even safer!) it is than stacking Necromancers.

Rising Dusk.2408:

If you want something very stress free that’s going to put out far more damage with much more consistency than what the OP is suggesting, try the following:
- PS Warrior
- Power Tempest
- Hammer Dragonhunter
- Chronomancer
- Condition Druid

You’re basically indestructible, maintain permanent Quickness/Fury/Might/Vuln/Protection/etc. It’s night and day how much better (and even safer!) it is than stacking Necromancers.

This is fine until boon thieves and bosses start having perma prot/25might/fury/quickness.
Then your average players start crumpling because things are not dying faster than anticipated.

TexZero.7910:

Rising Dusk.2408:

If you want something very stress free that’s going to put out far more damage with much more consistency than what the OP is suggesting, try the following:
- PS Warrior
- Power Tempest
- Hammer Dragonhunter
- Chronomancer
- Condition Druid

You’re basically indestructible, maintain permanent Quickness/Fury/Might/Vuln/Protection/etc. It’s night and day how much better (and even safer!) it is than stacking Necromancers.

This is fine until boon thieves and bosses start having perma prot/25might/fury/quickness.
Then your average players start crumpling because things are not dying faster than anticipated.

Don’t forget the often forgetful.. Retaliation boon.. This is normally what wipes a team.

TexZero.7910:

This is fine until boon thieves and bosses start having perma prot/25might/fury/quickness.
Then your average players start crumpling because things are not dying faster than anticipated.

The only ones that actually matter are giving Protection or Retaliation to the enemy, though, and that’s short-lived. Let’s also not forget that the Mesmer passively rips boons just by attacking, which keeps things very manageable. An enemy with 25 Might/Fury will maybe only get 1 or 2 attacks in before the boons wear off anyway. As to HardRider who was worried about Retaliation I’ll mention that outside of accidentally blasting light fields (which gives negligible Retaliation duration), the DH isn’t going to be applying Retaliation at all so it’s no problem.

I agree that your team comp is very well thought of and very min-maxed. It is a good team comp for experienced people actually and it will work wonders. However it’s not the easiest to play and has a lot of room for errors for a lot of people especially the people who have never touched a lot of harder content before. What I did was simply think of the simplest team build that requires very little coordination and still be able to faceroll. The thing is though condi spam just works a lot better in some fractals and you have to see the merit of stacking condi classes and spreading the ebola with epidemic for some levels. Volcanic and Aetherblade is like a joke and makes things really trivial. I really doubt you can cleave elementals as fast as condi epidemic spam on volcanic or kill the golems on aetherblade as fast.

The point of this is it simply is the easiest thing you can do and requires very little coordination and cohesion yet you can face roll every tier 4 fractal. Just like what Dinosaur said earlier, the build just works and you can face roll with almost zero effort and the most importantly, it’s blazing fast.

Amicable Pugs.4503:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-December-15-2015
“From fractal scale 1 to 50, the toughness attribute of creatures will scale up with the fractal scale. Beyond fractal scale 50, the toughness stat of creatures will no longer increase with the scale of the fractal.”

But the toughness still scales until 50. Based off numbers weth gave me after that patch, the toughness is around 27% loss to power based damage from the 2600 against most raids bosses or spreadsheet calcs.

SlyDevil.3952:

Amicable Pugs.4503:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-December-15-2015
“From fractal scale 1 to 50, the toughness attribute of creatures will scale up with the fractal scale. Beyond fractal scale 50, the toughness stat of creatures will no longer increase with the scale of the fractal.”

But the toughness still scales until 50. Based off numbers weth gave me after that patch, the toughness is around 27% loss to power based damage from the 2600 against most raids bosses or spreadsheet calcs.

The drop off is still pretty big and that’s why I’ve been saying just roll condi for higher tiers. I just think people have been forced into the berserker meta for too long. Based on what I’m seeing, people are still thinking condi is a gimick that you have to use for the sake of beating a few bosses in the raid wings as oppose to being a viable alternative to berserker builds. Condi by no means is something that’s just there for the sake of being there as a boss mechanic, it is completely viable outside of it.

There are situations where power builds will outperform condi and there are also times where condi builds will outperform power; even there are times where you need an equal balance of both (raids). I believe high tier fractals is one of those things where condi builds will outperform power builds.

Hmm i just log in n play the tier 4’s with my usual zerk chrono, tempest…it’s still easy but takes a bit more time. Agree with OP though condies work better, just too lazy to farm new asc gear n stuff.

Condition damage is extremely valuable in its current form, but the Necromancer does literally nothing outside of damage and stay alive. You might be able to faceroll, but you’re facerolling really slowly when you have minimal might generation and no damage buffs. Your composition might win and you might not even be advertising it as super optimal, but it’s not just suboptimal, it’s extremely suboptimal. You’re missing out on so many damage buffs that any damage you gain from condition over power due to toughness is completely lost.

In my composition, you could substitute a condition Engineer or even a VenomShare Thief over the Dragonhunter/Tempest and do generally great anyway (maybe even better!). The thing is that it still would retain the core damage buffs while also having great survivability. It doesn’t even require anyone be great players. With permanent protection, perpetual reflect uptime, Aegis, and a Druid’s heals you can basically AFK auto-attack through everything L76+.

Your comp might not even be bad if instead of “random condi person” you had a PS Warrior and your “random other person” were a Tempest or a Dragonhunter. You could even keep both Necromancers and do ‘fine’ with the damage buffs from the other classes.

Rising Dusk.2408:

TexZero.7910:

This is fine until boon thieves and bosses start having perma prot/25might/fury/quickness.
Then your average players start crumpling because things are not dying faster than anticipated.

The only ones that actually matter are giving Protection or Retaliation to the enemy, though, and that’s short-lived. Let’s also not forget that the Mesmer passively rips boons just by attacking, which keeps things very manageable. An enemy with 25 Might/Fury will maybe only get 1 or 2 attacks in before the boons wear off anyway. As to HardRider who was worried about Retaliation I’ll mention that outside of accidentally blasting light fields (which gives negligible Retaliation duration), the DH isn’t going to be applying Retaliation at all so it’s no problem.

Bosses and elite enemies can’t crit so fury does nothing (unless something was changed recently). Enemies also have a high power so might isn’t that effective.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Condition damage is extremely valuable in its current form, but the Necromancer does literally nothing outside of damage and stay alive. You might be able to faceroll, but you’re facerolling really slowly when you have minimal might generation and no damage buffs. Your composition might win and you might not even be advertising it as super optimal, but it’s not just suboptimal, it’s extremely suboptimal. You’re missing out on so many damage buffs that any damage you gain from condition over power due to toughness is completely lost.

In my composition, you could substitute a condition Engineer or even a VenomShare Thief over the Dragonhunter/Tempest and do generally great anyway (maybe even better!). The thing is that it still would retain the core damage buffs while also having great survivability. It doesn’t even require anyone be great players. With permanent protection, perpetual reflect uptime, Aegis, and a Druid’s heals you can basically AFK auto-attack through everything L76+.

Your comp might not even be bad if instead of “random condi person” you had a PS Warrior and your “random other person” were a Tempest or a Dragonhunter. You could even keep both Necromancers and do ‘fine’ with the damage buffs from the other classes.

I think you missed the point. I did say earlier you can take a PS warrior for banners, EA, and might for fractals that give ample amounts of melee space. Also I’ve ran this for a week now and every night I get all T4s done in about 25 minutes or less depending on the roll. It is pretty fast when we get fractal rolls that let us take a PS warrior. Even times where we don’t take a PS warrior because of terrible rolls, it’s still quite fast and we never spend more than 30 minutes ever. I updated the team setup a bit fixing that you can replace the 3rd condi with another utility if it’s suitable for the fractal rolls of the day. I do see your point in terms of taking a bit more utility and I was playing a bit too safe.

Also did you see the numbers? 27% damage loss due to toughness scaling is still pretty huge. You definitely will see drop offs and condi will start to overtake power damage.

I will also say Herald is stupidly good as well, he amplifies everything a chrono brings and he alone with the tempest can cover might and fury so you don’t even need the PS warrior (and the Herald has better DPS and bar-break utility on top of better survivability).

This thread is much rather an opinion than a guide.
And if it were a guide, it would be wrong, as previous posters have already mentioned correctly.

No experienced fotm-player is gonna buy the OP recommendation, but new players might.

And as a consequence, frustration is gonna rise and the threshold between new and veteran players is gonna increase.

Long story short: Bad advise, but it’s the thought that counts.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

This is a TERRIBLE team comp.

1. Toughness no longer increases after scale 50. There is no benefit to using condition over power.

2. necros provide no boons. A necro’s dps without and might/quickness/banners/etc is about 7k. with a proper team comp and full buffs it is around 22k. It is not a 20% increase it is closer to a 300% difference in damage

If you want to make an il informed post about the current state of necros please do so in the necro forums, this really isn’t the place and is terrible advice.

“necros provide no boons. A necro’s dps without and might/quickness/banners/etc is about 7k.”

So wrong it hurts. Necro can manage 10k dps easy with just vulnerability stacks. Also necro’s provide group protection from wells, and vampiric aura, which is awesome.

this thread certainly went places today while i was unable to log in to do a little testing.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

2. necros provide no boons. A necro’s dps without and might/quickness/banners/etc is about 7k. with a proper team comp and full buffs it is around 22k. It is not a 20% increase it is closer to a 300% difference in damage

so i went to the dps testing area and got 6.5-7k buffless, which was a real head scratcher for me. i looked at my traits to try to diagnose why my dps felt so low against the golem because it doesnt feel so low in fractals ever… well, vuln gives 50% crit, which not only feeds into miniscule power dps, but also generates 5 sec bleeds. simply adding 25 vuln to the golem bought my dps up to 9.5-10k. additionally, having rise hit 5 things doubles your hits/sec, which in turn should up your dps by another 1.5~2k ish, but isnt exactly testable in the testing arena.

and then you need to count epidemic. if you have a burn based condi class, and no buffs, it will add ~20k dps spikes every 13 sec for maybe 3-4 secs, tapering off to like 3k dps for the rest of the time. so something like 7k dps overall. no buffs.

so lets see… lets say your comp is engi, druid, 3 necros. the engi will do like 15k dps and give vuln, 2 necros will do like 17k dps, the 3rd necro will do like 10k dps. overall, around 60k dps + druid (idk how much condi druid does).

fully buffed/comped party: mes is like 10k, ps war is like 15k, ele is like 30k, dh is like 25k(?), which is 80k + druid.

so yes, actually, 80% is a decent estimation of how much dps a necro centric party brings compared to a fully comped group. 300% my kitten . lol.

the difference is the necros dont have to pay attention to surviving, they dont have to bring buffs, they dont have to do any complex rotations besides faceroll every key not on cd, and the reward for not tryharding and possibly not knowing their class is to finish the dailies 5 minutes slower than a fully comped (guild) group that youll never attain in a pug group. stress free is certainly the right label, and joining a pug with a necro or as a necro is currently the best way to ensure you have a smooth run with at least ok dps (anecdotal evidence from me about my last 4 months of experience pugging fractals, but its still true). it is certainly not bad advice to roll up reapers right now.

How about using a scepter condi elementalist in the OP’s initial comp? They stack might pretty well and provide some protection while dealing decent burn and bleed damage. Does anyone know if it is possible to build a burnzerker with PS and EA?

PS war, chrono, and at least one tempest are going to be base for anything remotely close to an ideal comp. There are a few things though that necro bring that ya’ll might be overlooking, which are especially useful in a pug setting -

-Condi transfer from plague sig -> minion -> mobs/boss. Particularly in the tiers where enemies apply random conditions this takes a load of pressure off your team and adds to the necro’s dps. It’s the same reason you might take a necro at mathias.
-Minions eat cleave. Classic minion masters with a mix of melee and ranged pets were a nightmare for boss aggro, but a 10+ minion wall of little melee kidney beans trivializes a huge amount of the content.

I honestly think necro competes pretty well for the guard’s spot – fotm bosses still hit like a wet noodle and for a lot of fractals I value mitigating condi pressure over prot. Guard and necro both have blind, projectile hate and good cc. Guard has the advantage in burst damage and aegis if used well. Necro has the advantage of being easier to play while still being extremely effective (not relevant for some groups but again with pugs/new players its a consideration).

Raven.1793:

How about using a scepter condi elementalist in the OP’s initial comp? They stack might pretty well and provide some protection while dealing decent burn and bleed damage. Does anyone know if it is possible to build a burnzerker with PS and EA?

Please don’t. Scepter is only equivalent to dagger under the scenario of perma alacrity.

Scepter has horrendous sustained DPS since the scepter autoattacks are among the worst in the game, so all your DPS comes from overloads and Dragon Tooth/Phoenix with Lightning Strike.

In any scenario scepter would shine over dagger, staff would do even better.

Scepter is a garbage weapon pretty much every class but necro.

insanemaniac.2456:

this thread certainly went places today while i was unable to log in to do a little testing.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

2. necros provide no boons. A necro’s dps without and might/quickness/banners/etc is about 7k. with a proper team comp and full buffs it is around 22k. It is not a 20% increase it is closer to a 300% difference in damage

so i went to the dps testing area and got 6.5-7k buffless, which was a real head scratcher for me. i looked at my traits to try to diagnose why my dps felt so low against the golem because it doesnt feel so low in fractals ever… well, vuln gives 50% crit, which not only feeds into miniscule power dps, but also generates 5 sec bleeds. simply adding 25 vuln to the golem bought my dps up to 9.5-10k. additionally, having rise hit 5 things doubles your hits/sec, which in turn should up your dps by another 1.5~2k ish, but isnt exactly testable in the testing arena.

and then you need to count epidemic. if you have a burn based condi class, and no buffs, it will add ~20k dps spikes every 13 sec for maybe 3-4 secs, tapering off to like 3k dps for the rest of the time. so something like 7k dps overall. no buffs.

so lets see… lets say your comp is engi, druid, 3 necros. the engi will do like 15k dps and give vuln, 2 necros will do like 17k dps, the 3rd necro will do like 10k dps. overall, around 60k dps + druid (idk how much condi druid does).

fully buffed/comped party: mes is like 10k, ps war is like 15k, ele is like 30k, dh is like 25k(?), which is 80k + druid.

so yes, actually, 80% is a decent estimation of how much dps a necro centric party brings compared to a fully comped group. 300% my kitten . lol.

the difference is the necros dont have to pay attention to surviving, they dont have to bring buffs, they dont have to do any complex rotations besides faceroll every key not on cd, and the reward for not tryharding and possibly not knowing their class is to finish the dailies 5 minutes slower than a fully comped (guild) group that youll never attain in a pug group. stress free is certainly the right label, and joining a pug with a necro or as a necro is currently the best way to ensure you have a smooth run with at least ok dps (anecdotal evidence from me about my last 4 months of experience pugging fractals, but its still true). it is certainly not bad advice to roll up reapers right now.

Tested at 100 Mai Trin (again) but we had 1 PS warrior and 1 pug chrono we grabbed because we gave up pugging for a condi class. So the comp we used as follows:

2 condi necro
1 PS warrior
1 chrono
1 druid

We ran our druid as magi as he’s only setup for raids and we ran 1 of those really iffy DPS meters. We got around 45-50k DPS and mind you this is Mai Trin so epidemic targets only show up at 25% and they die really quick to epidemic. I would say your test and assumptions are accurate. Also keep in mind we will see a 27% drop off in power damage due to toughness scaling if the post earlier that said this is correct about it. So you can turn down that 80k+ druid number down more, so it’s more like a 60k+druid number to be honest.

1 Thing though I forgot to mention for my test. The numbers we got is probably not reliable as most DPS meters, including the ones that read memory, can’t register condi ticks fast enough so a lot of numbers get missed. Also our pug chrono was not using the right stuff and probably ran full berserker/assassin or something instead of boonshare. The quickness and alacrity we got was pretty terrible and was near nonexistant. Anyways the DPS number could actually be higher.

So I went back and tested the toughness scaling. The difference between a UB1 and a UB57 was 25.5% dmg decrease from an armour/toughness change. Going up to a UB 85 was the same damage as the 57, so the toughness does indeed not scale after 50.
Dulfy was used as the test dummy.

A SO20 compared to SO80 was 23% damage decrease on the tentacles spawned after the first tentacle is killed. As there is no SO below 20, I can’t check their toughness below that.

Zenith.7301:

Raven.1793:

How about using a scepter condi elementalist in the OP’s initial comp? They stack might pretty well and provide some protection while dealing decent burn and bleed damage. Does anyone know if it is possible to build a burnzerker with PS and EA?

Please don’t. Scepter is only equivalent to dagger under the scenario of perma alacrity.

Scepter has horrendous sustained DPS since the scepter autoattacks are among the worst in the game, so all your DPS comes from overloads and Dragon Tooth/Phoenix with Lightning Strike.

In any scenario scepter would shine over dagger, staff would do even better.

Scepter is a garbage weapon pretty much every class but necro.

Scepter easily stacks and maintains 25 might and perma fury. Dagger and staff do not. S/W condi deals 19k dps fully buffed, 9k with no buffs. D/W power may be capable of 36k fully buffed but only manages 10k unbuffed. In a group without a PS warrior, it is generally a good idea to run S/W might stack over D/W fresh air.

BTW, the S/W numbers were obtained using sinister gear with balthazar runes. This build should perform much better using viper gear with berserker runes.

Raven.1793:

Zenith.7301:

Raven.1793:

How about using a scepter condi elementalist in the OP’s initial comp? They stack might pretty well and provide some protection while dealing decent burn and bleed damage. Does anyone know if it is possible to build a burnzerker with PS and EA?

Please don’t. Scepter is only equivalent to dagger under the scenario of perma alacrity.

Scepter has horrendous sustained DPS since the scepter autoattacks are among the worst in the game, so all your DPS comes from overloads and Dragon Tooth/Phoenix with Lightning Strike.

In any scenario scepter would shine over dagger, staff would do even better.

Scepter is a garbage weapon pretty much every class but necro.

Scepter easily stacks and maintains 25 might and perma fury. Dagger and staff do not. S/W condi deals 19k dps fully buffed, 9k with no buffs. D/W power may be capable of 36k fully buffed but only manages 10k unbuffed. In a group without a PS warrior, it is generally a good idea to run S/W might stack over D/W fresh air.

BTW, the S/W numbers were obtained using sinister gear with balthazar runes. This build should perform much better using viper gear with berserker runes.

Who cares about the ele might stacking? PS warrior and people blasting your lava font should keep full might stacks and fury stacks, and if you wanted to be optimizing anyways you would have a revenant in your group to maximize quickness uptime from the chrono, and that herald is providing a passive 12 might stacks and permafury himself.

Core dagger rotation leaves a fire field for might stacking as well.

If you as the ele need to run a kitten 19-22k DPS gimmick spec to give party might, you have greater problems to worry about with your group.

Scepter ele also has garbage sustained cleave compared to dagger or staff.

Zenith.7301:

Raven.1793:

Zenith.7301:

Raven.1793:

How about using a scepter condi elementalist in the OP’s initial comp? They stack might pretty well and provide some protection while dealing decent burn and bleed damage. Does anyone know if it is possible to build a burnzerker with PS and EA?

Please don’t. Scepter is only equivalent to dagger under the scenario of perma alacrity.

Scepter has horrendous sustained DPS since the scepter autoattacks are among the worst in the game, so all your DPS comes from overloads and Dragon Tooth/Phoenix with Lightning Strike.

In any scenario scepter would shine over dagger, staff would do even better.

Scepter is a garbage weapon pretty much every class but necro.

Scepter easily stacks and maintains 25 might and perma fury. Dagger and staff do not. S/W condi deals 19k dps fully buffed, 9k with no buffs. D/W power may be capable of 36k fully buffed but only manages 10k unbuffed. In a group without a PS warrior, it is generally a good idea to run S/W might stack over D/W fresh air.

BTW, the S/W numbers were obtained using sinister gear with balthazar runes. This build should perform much better using viper gear with berserker runes.

Who cares about the ele might stacking? PS warrior and people blasting your lava font should keep full might stacks and fury stacks, and if you wanted to be optimizing anyways you would have a revenant in your group to maximize quickness uptime from the chrono, and that herald is providing a passive 12 might stacks and permafury himself.

Core dagger rotation leaves a fire field for might stacking as well.

If you as the ele need to run a kitten 19-22k DPS gimmick spec to give party might, you have greater problems to worry about with your group.

Scepter ele also has garbage sustained cleave compared to dagger or staff.

I don’t see the need to immediately dismiss S/W ele just because meta builds do not work well with it. I know that everyone’s favorite comp is Chrono, PS, Druid, 2 DPS and that it is very powerful. I happily run D/W fresh air anytime I’m in a meta comp. However, the OP is attempting to do something different and from what he reports, condi appears to be promising for high level fractals. I’d like to help him find an alternative to the same old comp. He is trying to build a condi-oriented team and necros do not have enough blast finishers to max might on fire fields. The fact is that condi builds benefit a lot from might stacks and ele happens to have a might stacking condi build. This same build also brings along a good deal of protection, something that should not be overlooked given the title of this thread. Finally, 22k is about what you can expect from a PS warrior. Considering the toughness scaling, it is quite possible that a condi ele can out damage a PS warrior in the same role.

BTW, good job on the research Snapalope. I’m always glad to see people not only proposing different ways to play the game but also doing the legwork to demonstrate either its effectiveness or lack thereof.

If you guys want to see this in action for today and I actually remembered to record….

https://youtu.be/4WjrchNLmng
Turn your volume down a bit, I had my system volume a bit loud….New to recording.

3 Necro
1 PS
1 Auramancer (we wanted to play it a bit safe)

Using one of those legal DPS meters our measured number was around 50k DPS give or take (also 1 of our necros popped lich early so we lose out on like 5 jaggies at the start, so it could be higher than 50k if he didn’t pop lich early). Now considering a well balanced power based team comp which can do around 80k give or take if tested on the DPS golem (based on insanemaniac’s theorycrafting).

Please correct me if I misunderstood you SlyDevil, I think your post means that compared to the DPS golem’s output number, you are going to see roughly a 25% DPS drop due to toughness scaling compared to the tested number. That means the 20k out of 80k is gone, so that leaves us with 60k DPS. Now this number can go as low as 50k maybe due to the unpredictable things of actual fractals such as you have to dodge or cancel rotations and so on.

So the bottom line is that so let’s assume random things happen and an ideal power based team comp drops to like 50k DPS. Now compared to the DPS we did in the recording, it’s almost dead even as 50k vs 50k. Now look at how easy the necro condi based team comp is to play. It’s almost a complete face roll and requires like almost no effort. So ya I think I proved my point that this team comp will work, is fast, and pretty stress free/faceroll. Also keep in mind how fast we cleared everything as everything was dying almost together due to epidemic. This sort of AoE mob control makes a lot of fractals almost trivial such as volcano or aetherblade.

Things to consider:
1. Insanemaniac, your estimation of 80% is pretty darn accurate as 50k/60k is roughly 80%.
2. Condi DPS is always hard to measure using one of those legal DPS meters as it has issues keeping up with condi ticks. So in reality our number could be higher.
3. I still think epidemic splashed damage should be taken into consideration and those things are hard to measure and quantify effectively. This is why a necro’s true potential can never be measured. So ya…..
4. I was listening to the Dark Souls 3 soundtrack that came with my Steam copy.
5. Ele is definitely harder to play than necro at t4.

Raven.1793:

Zenith.7301:

Raven.1793:

Zenith.7301:

Raven.1793:

How about using a scepter condi elementalist in the OP’s initial comp? They stack might pretty well and provide some protection while dealing decent burn and bleed damage. Does anyone know if it is possible to build a burnzerker with PS and EA?

Please don’t. Scepter is only equivalent to dagger under the scenario of perma alacrity.

Scepter has horrendous sustained DPS since the scepter autoattacks are among the worst in the game, so all your DPS comes from overloads and Dragon Tooth/Phoenix with Lightning Strike.

In any scenario scepter would shine over dagger, staff would do even better.

Scepter is a garbage weapon pretty much every class but necro.

Scepter easily stacks and maintains 25 might and perma fury. Dagger and staff do not. S/W condi deals 19k dps fully buffed, 9k with no buffs. D/W power may be capable of 36k fully buffed but only manages 10k unbuffed. In a group without a PS warrior, it is generally a good idea to run S/W might stack over D/W fresh air.

BTW, the S/W numbers were obtained using sinister gear with balthazar runes. This build should perform much better using viper gear with berserker runes.

Who cares about the ele might stacking? PS warrior and people blasting your lava font should keep full might stacks and fury stacks, and if you wanted to be optimizing anyways you would have a revenant in your group to maximize quickness uptime from the chrono, and that herald is providing a passive 12 might stacks and permafury himself.

Core dagger rotation leaves a fire field for might stacking as well.

If you as the ele need to run a kitten 19-22k DPS gimmick spec to give party might, you have greater problems to worry about with your group.

Scepter ele also has garbage sustained cleave compared to dagger or staff.

I don’t see the need to immediately dismiss S/W ele just because meta builds do not work well with it. I know that everyone’s favorite comp is Chrono, PS, Druid, 2 DPS and that it is very powerful. I happily run D/W fresh air anytime I’m in a meta comp. However, the OP is attempting to do something different and from what he reports, condi appears to be promising for high level fractals. I’d like to help him find an alternative to the same old comp. He is trying to build a condi-oriented team and necros do not have enough blast finishers to max might on fire fields. The fact is that condi builds benefit a lot from might stacks and ele happens to have a might stacking condi build. This same build also brings along a good deal of protection, something that should not be overlooked given the title of this thread. Finally, 22k is about what you can expect from a PS warrior. Considering the toughness scaling, it is quite possible that a condi ele can out damage a PS warrior in the same role.

BTW, good job on the research Snapalope. I’m always glad to see people not only proposing different ways to play the game but also doing the legwork to demonstrate either its effectiveness or lack thereof.

The problem is, you post best case scenarios with S/W ele. The truth is, to get the optimal results from a scepter ele you need far more effort than rolling your face on the autoattack button and the occasional second button, and you need high alacrity uptimes.

I’ve had scepter eles in my group, I’ve mained ele, and trust me, god knows I’ve tried to find an excuse to dust up my meteorologicus (my first and favorite legendary), but you can tell straight away the deficiencies in the weapon and the real world damage differences that come with it when you step out of the theorycraft corner.

I don’t think an experimental might stacking scepter ele build has any room in a PuG, where people can’t even properly might stack on the premier might stack classes like PS warrior/rev!

2 things to note:

D/W builds drop a lightning field before every fire field, so blasting it, especially with quickness/alacrity can be next to impossible in combat.

When I tested the armour values, non-condi attacks were hitting for 25.5% less(on dulfy), in terms of actual armour values this is 2688 armour at scale 1 and 3609 at 50+. So while the damage drop from normal attacks would be ~27%(compared to the 2597 for tooltips), the builds dps loss might be closer to 25% because of things like passive condi ticks under the effect of banners/might.

Oh Snapalope.1378:

I agree that your team comp is very well thought of and very min-maxed. It is a good team comp for experienced people actually and it will work wonders. However it’s not the easiest to play and has a lot of room for errors for a lot of people especially the people who have never touched a lot of harder content before.

Bullkitten.

TS, I have a better idea.
Team composition:
PS Warrior
Mace/x Guardian
Chrono
Herald and Tempest or 2xTempest

Cons: You have to kick all these useless necromancers and druids.
Pros: Stress free t4 fotm with better heal, better utility and lot better dps. Also might, fury, quickness, protection, banners, stab and tons of reflect – I heard it helps.

I guess you missed the point of me showing the DPS is very competitive between a condi focused team and power focused team and I even showed it with gameplay. Guess which one is easier to faceroll? Obviously it’s the condi based team. Assuming T5 will be a thing, condi facroll will get even easier to play.

Ok so to explain in another different way. You say reflects, protection, quickness, alacrity is useful. Yes they are but the point of this cheese team is that you can just ignore everything and mash buttons on your keyboard. It’s just as fast, if not faster on some maps, yet requiring way less effort.
Also you can think about it this way. A necro condi spam team can go really competitive with a standard optimized team comp and this is with only might, banners and EA. We have no alacrity and quickness and many other buffs yet the damage remains competitive. I think this alone shows that a necro condi spam team’s damage potential is definitely there and necros are no means useless.

From my experience in average pug in T3/T4, it’s a relief not to see power elems and guards/DH in the party. With the rise in popularity for ranged DH, party support like reflects are becoming rare to see.

I don’t want to play my own power ele in parties like these, seriously my ele can’t facetank hits to pick up downed DH and others again and again.

So I made a viper necro, despite strongly disliking anything condi, I do appreciate the massive survivabilty boost, self buffing abilities + it’s easy to deal with some instabilities. It might be hard to believe for anyone promoting zerker only, lots of people have problems deal with condis on them. Just like they have problem pressing spacebar on molten duo and so on.

The scrubbiness in pugs is real and it’s misleading to tell people to go full zerker for stress free T4s.