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Teamcomp 101

  • August 28, 2023
Guide
What is necessary to clear fractals efficiently?
It boils down to five important concepts that need to be fulfilled permanently while in combat. Failing one of these will decelerate the speed and smoothness of the run:
  1. Boons: 25 stacks of Might, Fury, Quickness and Alacrity.
  2. Conditions: 25 stacks of Vulnerability, along with any unique condis that your class needs to gain damage modifiers.
  3. Breaking CC bars to gain the damage modifier from Exposed.
  4. High and fast group single target burst potential.
  5. Using strong damaging class skills such as
    or
It is vital to understand that these concepts in conjunction create massive amounts of burst causing phases to only last a few seconds (even with condi classes). This is also due to the fact that the Exposed modifier stacks multiplicative with many other damage modifiers.
The gameplay is therefore much more fast paced compared to raids and requires different thinking and rotations that are tailored around the Exposed window.
For T4s there are several other important concepts:
  1. Projectile reflects and Stability.
  2. High cleave damage.
  3. Fast movement using leaps, blinks and teleports to perform skips for the team.
  4. Stealth to skip trash mobs.
What and how do I play in PuGs?
PuGs rarely play optimally as a group, causing people to generally deal lower damage and perform worse overall due to lack of synergy. If you are one of those that seek to improve we highly encourage you to find a static via our #looking-for-static channel on Discord or apply to Discretize. We encourage the fractal community to strive for self-improvement and help in any possible way on our Discord server or in-game.
For people without the time to do this, we recommend quite an open comp when using the in-game lfg. Whilst every class in the game has multiple strong builds for fractals, it is still important to build your party around certain boons to help have a somewhat efficient clear.
By building your party around the following concepts you will find an in-game lfg run in most cases is much faster and smoother than just taking any old build. You first want to look at covering the important boons: Might, Fury, Quickness and Alacrity. Also you want to aim as a group to be able to maintain Vulnerability on your targets. Finally builds that can bring high CC and damage mitigation such as reflects, Aegis and Stability are much more beneficial to run than pure damage dealers.
PuG Comp
Alacrity sourceHeal Mechanist provides 100% Alacrity and has access to every boon in the game except from Quickness. Along with huge amounts of Barrier generation and great utility it makes it currently the strongest heal build in fractals.
Condi Alac Renegade provides 100% Alacrity uptime, and around 13 stacks of Might, strong utilities in terms of heavy crowd control, damage mitigation and decent DPS on its own. Due to its self sustain and higher damage over time we recommend this build for Renegade in most PuG groups.
Power Renegade provides 100% Alacrity uptime, and around 10 stacks of Might, strong utilities in terms of heavy crowd control and damage mitigation. In the right hands it can deal good damage but in most PuG groups Condi Alac Renegade will be higher damage.
Condi Specter provides 100% Alacrity uptime, 5 stacks of Might and around 75% Fury uptime. Alongside this, Specter provides a large amount of Barrier and healing to your party and it can also boonstrip Mistlock Instability: No Pain No Gain. Although Might and Fury are lacking, if this is covered by other party members, Specter can be a strong choice.
Power Mechanist provides 100% Alacrity, Fury and 25 Might. It also provides some Protection, Barrier, 1 stack of Stability and a single Aegis. It is a very simple build to play making it ideal for new players with an easy rotation dealing solid damage and easy boon generation. However, it lacks CC and defensive support compared to Renegade.
There are also other Alacrity providers such as Alacrity Untamed or Heal Alac Tempest that can be played, we do not currently have pages for them on the site. This does not mean that they are bad, but may be situationally strong, or require the group to compensate for support or damage with other roles.
Quickness sourceHeal Firebrand provides 100% Quickness uptime, 25 stacks of Might, utilities in terms of crowd control, reflects and shared Aegis. It can even provide Resistance for a short time with tomes. If your party is new and tank lots of damage, this is a strong build to play.
Celestial Firebrand provides 100% Quickness uptime, 25 stacks of Might, utilities in terms of crowd control, reflects, shared Aegis and medium DPS. It can even provide Resistance for a short time with tomes. This makes fractals effortless by providing all the important boons a Heal Firebrand can, a decent amount of passive and on demand healing, whilst dealing some damage.
Condi Firebrand provides 100% Quickness uptime, utilities in terms of crowd control, reflects, shared Aegis and medium DPS. It can even provide Resistance for a short time with tomes. This build deals high dps while bringing massive support. It can also share Quickness with a second Firebrand allowing for even more support utilities to be run.
Power Scrapper provides 100% Quickness uptime, around 13 stacks of Might, and a large amount of Vulnerability. It is an offensive damage build that has lots of CC and deals competetive damage, but lacks party support.
Power Herald provides 100% Quickness uptime, around 13 stacks of Might, 100% Fury uptime, and 100% Protection uptime . It is a great build for pugs with acess to lots of party support through Stability, Boon extension and projectile blocks.


Pick any of the damage dealer builds
Remember to consider what you can bring to the party with boons (e.g. Might), conditions (e.g. Vulnerability), damage mitigation (e.g. Stability) and class skills (e.g.
,
).

Pick any of the damage dealer builds
Remember to consider what you can bring to the party with boons (e.g. Might), conditions (e.g. Vulnerability), damage mitigation (e.g. Stability) and class skills (e.g.
,
).


Pick any of the damage dealer builds
Remember to consider what you can bring to the party with boons (e.g. Might), conditions (e.g. Vulnerability), damage mitigation (e.g. Stability) and class skills (e.g.
,
).
What are the differences between the organized groups and how PuGs play?
One of the biggest differences is, that they don't always understand how their actions translate into the game. Learning to do the mechanics correctly, flawlessly, and reliably is - in the beginning - the most important task. PuGs assume the worst usually, so one player in the party is a healer instead.
Another difference is that PuGs often claim, that CC is solely the job of the Renegade. That is not true since Renegade can only knock out about half of the bars. CC is a group effort involving all party members, EVEN IN CONDI COMPS!
Many PuGs like to play Firebrand or Scourge. That is just fine as you don't know what to expect of your fellow PuG mates and you prefer to be self-sufficient. But please don't be afraid to run more supportive skills such as
or
! It is more worth it than the +500 DPS you gain from having a minor dps utility instead.
Trouble finding groups?
[LS]
[LS]
Low Standards [LS] is a community discord server, that is operating as a second, more restricted LFG for no heal daily runs.
Thanks to different pingable roles and class-emojis, members are able to organize their run without the commitment of a static or any need of LFG waiting times.
In order to guarantee a high level of play, everyone needs to be capable of executing strategies inside of a no-heal environment with at least one of the meta-classes. For evaluation, we are going to ask new applicants for arcdps logs as a requirement.
All information is available on their Discord.
What are strong comps for organised groups?
It is important to note, that each challenge mote encounter has a different effective composition, which is often different to the proposed compositions below. Discretize focuses on clearing daily fractals efficiently, and the proposed compositions brings enough utility to deal with all situations that are occurring in fractals without needing to relog to another character for every boss or fractal. To see examples of these check out the dT Daily Comps.