The Defiance bar (also called a break bar) is a very important mechanic in fractals mainly due to its ability to let players do more damage to a mob for a certain amount of time after breaking it.
Usually elite or higher mobs will have a defiance bar in fractals, your goal should be to break this bar as fast as possible. To break a defiance bar, you need to use CC skills on the enemy whose break bar you want to break. The size of the bar varies from boss to boss and between mobs too, what matters is that you should break it.
Once you break an enemy's defiance bar they will gain an effect named Exposed, which means they take 10% more power damage and 20% more condition damage for 10 seconds (in most cases). They will also usually be Stun, which means they are unable to attack you or deal damage to you. The Stun will usually last for a shorter duration than Exposed.
What does CC mean?
CC is an acronym for Crowd Control. A Crowd Control skill is any skill that disables an enemy or even a group of enemies and therefore deals damage to a defiance bar, it can be split into soft CC or hard CC
Hard CC skills usually inflict the enemy with some kind of movement effect like Stun or Knockback. As they disable the enemy right now they deal defiance bar damage instantaneously. This is the most commonly used type of CC skill to break a defiance bar.
Soft CC skills are those which apply conditions, they inflict damage to the Defiance bar over time, depending upon the condition. Since you want to get the Exposed effect as soon as possible you can't rely on soft CC breaking a bar of 2000 as seen below it will take quite a while.
This guide aims to help you understand how your team should cooperate to break all the CC bars. Fractals demand CC contributions from every member of the party, even the DPS players! A list of CC skills along with their defiance bar damage can be found on each class's respective Build page.
In Tier 4 fractals (T4) a break bar usually does not exceed 800 units, nevertheless, it is everyone's responsibility to break bars as quickly as possible. In PuG (Pick up Group, players from the LFG system) runs, where you can rely on the fact that 4 out of 5 people did not read this page it is very much recommended to make up for their lack of CC with additional CC skills.
Using Crowd Control effectively is the key to success in almost all fractals! A fast break will decrease kill times by a large margin even if your party underperforms in every other aspect!
The following CC schedules are used in dT daily runs. They are set for consistency over the fastest possible kill and will over CC some bars to ensure quick breaks. Although these schedules are set up for triple Soulbeast, one can easily be swapped for a different class such as Weaver, Dragonhunter or Bladesworn with minimal changes to the schedule, since apart from Artsariiv all of these classes can cover a Soulbeast CC on the phases it is required (or the Renegade and Scrapper can do extra).
MAMA
At 1800 MAMA has a small defiance bar, but you need to break it multiple times during the fight. In combination with the Knights that have defiance bars of 800, each MAMA becomes the most CC-heavy fractal boss in the game.
This schedule is very agressive, relying on phasing P1 and Knight 1 fast enough for MAMA's CC bar to not regenerate. This is only worth doing if you have enough damage to phase in P2 during the Stun to prevent a bubble, otherwise you should break MAMA in P1. It may be beneficial to break Knight 1 with in slower kills. Additionally for groups that don't want to precast traps, can be used to break Knight 2. If the kill is fast, MAMA will not get a CC bar in P3, hence the large amount of CC required in P4. If the kill is slower you will get a CC bar in P3, which you ideally wouldn't break, but requires less CC then in P4.
At 2000 in the first phase, and ~2250 in the second and third phase, Ensolyss has sizable defiance bars. On phase 1 there is a narrow window that requires coordinated cc to instantly break the bar to prevent the bubble mechanic from happening. Once the stun is over, care should be taken to flank Ensolyss to prevent the slam attack allowing maximum benefit from exposed.
At 2200, Skorvald the Shattered has one of the largest defiance bars out of all the Challenge Mode fractal bosses, meaning that the whole group needs to contribute to break it quickly. In faster groups this CC bar is not worth breaking.
Due to doing most of the damage in phase 1 in the middle of the arena. the first CC bar can safely be skipped in no heal daily kills. On the first split, each Clone has a 600 defiance bar and on the second the defiance bar is 340 per clone.
At 1800, Arkk has a small defiance bar that appears after the bloom pushing phase at 80%, 50%, and 30%. Once again you have the Hypernova Launch working in your favor, providing a 232 damage CC. Everyone should use this to CC if breakbars are slow on Arkk, the Archdiviner and the Gladiator.
Classes such as Renegade get the buff by using CC after each bloom phase with either weapon skills or the Launch from Hypernova Launch.
At 3200, Ai has the largest defiance bar in fractals. Bear in mind the following values are the minimum you will want to CC with. Due to bar regen, you typically will have to use more CC skills depending on how fast you break it. Slow CC is a massive help here. This cc schedule should be adjusted to fit your group's DPS and to break as late as possible. Due to the variations on the comp we list the skills you should aim to use on each build instead of a strict comp and total CC.
This is not a set list and you may need to use more or less skills depending on the group. In addition, this is a highly agressive comp that aims to completely ignore both the 66 and 33% Sorrows. If you do not deal enough damage it is advised to adjust the comp to take a pistol on Specter, and bring alternative classes that can provide more CC.
Kanaxai initially has a 1200 defiance bar. However breaking it will give the boss a stack of Dread Defiance. Each stack increases the bars value and reduces the duration of Exposed by 20.5% multiplicatively up to 10 stacks, leading to the following values:
The defiance bar is vulnerable for 5 seconds at a time roughly every 10% hp until 50%, then every 5% (depending on DPS and other mechanics). If a bar is not broken in this time frame it doesnt regenerate. While there are no set skills to be used on each bar in dT runs we will get the following bars which we will either break or ignore: