That’s not “fractals vs raids” comparison, that’s “pug vs organized group”. And actually in higher-tier fractals – and especially groups who’re aiming for 100 CM – usually groups are “organized”, meaning they LFG for the specific professions to provide the combat buffs and healing.
The difference in fractals is they are easier, so you can get away with suboptimal groups and builds. So if you’re not looking for doing tier 4 on a daily basis, you don’t really care what your group would look like in the end. If you do it daily, however, there’s s a reason to go for the raid meta. Because you minimize the chances to end up in a group wiping several times in a row on the arm seals in Cliffside. It’s not a big deal once. But over the span of months it translates to a lot less frustration and a lot more fun from playing the game.
I run 5 necros on cliffside and clearing that just fine. Face it, whatever group that happened to, was just bad.
Fractals has never been about the meta, it’s always been about knowing the fight. The only place where dps actually matters is 100 CM for saix, and my power reaper can solo clear one by auto attacking…..in shroud.
It’s faster if you use a meta party composition and not 4N1R.
For instance, I was doing between 20 and about 21K DPS on my Condition Ranger for instance, at T4 Grawl. The top DPS in my necro guildie’s party was 7k, and the others were doing… marginally, if not substantially worse DPS. Now obviously, as you can see playing the meta comp makes it much faster. Yes, I was actually trying a little to keep rotation and maximise my DPS, but while my teammates weren’t doing so hot DPS wise, they were doing enough that it was a substantial decrease in time spent being in combat compared to 4 Necro 1 Ranger groups. You can argue all you want that they didn’t maximise DPS on their classes, but if you’re going to try that hard on a class to get good at the DPS rotation you might as well just play a class that has more potential.
Admittedly condi ranger is basically busted in its current state, and following that logic so is condi druid, but let’s not pretend that Necromancer is anywhere near as good of a DPS class as other classes that you could be dedicating to DPS. Sure there was a 32k benchmark DPS video but it doesn’t hide the fact that Necromancer is still heavily reliant on combo fields to deal the bulk of its damage.
I acknowledge that it IS about knowing the fight, but if you truly know the fight why not just play the meta composition because it’ll make things faster, ESPECIALLY since you can use portal shenanigans and stealth amongst other things?
edit: TL;DR the whole point of the meta composition is quite simply that it makes things faster, it doesn’t necessarily make things safer. Yes, even experienced players will have runs where they pretty much just play like potatoes, but that one run is offset by all the other good runs.
