Thread: Stacking Fate to Raid

I was hoping to tap into the greater knowledge that is the Minstrel Forum to settle an ongoing debate in the kinship. I don't play a Minstrel but I have a reasonably good idea of the mechanics of the class as my wife plays one.

So the ongoing argument is whether in a T2 raiding environment a Minstrel should stack Fate at the expense of either Will or survivability traits. Both of our main minstrels trait Wisdom (+42 Will) and Idealism (+42 Fate) as well as other unusual choices with jewellery and relics such as Extraordinary Setting of Beginnings. They are sitting at 520 and 570 Fate unbuffed with Will at about 2k.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate ICPR can be useful in certain solo circumstances (although there aren't many solo fights that last more that 30 seconds, maybe in skirmishes?) but surely in a raid environment with 2 cappies spamming power and 2 LM's topping up when necessary there is no need?

It would be good to hear some other thoughts on this.

Fate will help with the magnitude of the crits as well as icpr, but I wouldn't trait for it myself. How much does that +42 Fate and Will really help? Untrait those virtues and see the impact on Tact Mastery, Crit and ICPR and you'll find it's pretty minimal with an end game geared character.

I'd go with some mitigation traits myself. However, it all comes down to: are they succeeding at what they do, both individually and as a group? It's hard to argue with success. But if the success level isn't what people desire then it's time to look at something else, tho virtues are just one part of the puzzle.

I tend to agree with 2 cappies and an LM, you don't need much fate. It's nice for the crit, but straight crit rating is better for that.

My mini has 1980 Will and 1200 Vitality, I can swap some gear from my vault and get 2250 Will but I find the high Vitality to be more useful. I never have a power problem. Anthem of Composure keeps at 75% power or higher even in the nastiest of heal situations. My Fate sits around 400 and I don't plan on ever getting it any higher.

To each his own, but I feel that high Will and Mitigatins get me through more sticky situations than a high grit heal.

Back in the SoA to Moria days I had a debate on fate vs will. This was before crit was a big part of Fate it was actually attached to will, and before outgoing healing was attached to will. With these attachments, the argument is almost silly looking back on it. I was pro fate, my friend was pro will, we are both minis.

In any fight 2 minutes or less (Acid T2, trash pulls) Will wins out every time. A massive power pool to spam heals from is a huge asset in quick, heal intense fights. In any fight longer than 3 minutes Fate starts to pull away in efficiency. Now throw crits and +healing into the mix and Will wins out over fate 100 times out of 100, until you hit the 27k tac healing cap.

As of now I focus on Will, Vitality, Tac Mastery, if items with high amounts of those stats have ICPR, Fate, and Tac Crit, great.

With Anthem of Composure + Coda power regen is not a problem anymore. The only time I have found myself with power problems have been near the end of Sarumon final wave when I did not have time to coda, then re-rank back up with ballads. Good thing my wife is a LM

I don't stack fate, its not something i go out of my way for at all, imo more will the better, crit rating is easy to get, and with the life singer trait and captain buff its a non issue in the crit department. my icpr sits around 1200 iirc and thats perfectly fine, with a huge power pool, power pots, captains with the PoT, the PoT from the coda and lm power dump if need be that shouldn't be an issue at all.

Just say no to stacking fate for raids. Just, no.

Thanks to everyone for their replies. It reinforces what we assumed was correct. Now we just have to convince the Minstrels to change

Fate is good for 2 things: crit rating and incombat regens, the crit rating you receive from fate is marginal at best and has been stated that stacking pure crit is better, which is true. Also what i feel you should know is that i've stacked fate pretty high (1200 fate i believe) and then slowly brought myself down to 700 fate (my raiding build fate) and then 400 fate (my DPS build fate) in order to measure Fate's diminishing return; what i found is that if you go beyond 850 fate or so you incombat regens get severely punished and it becomes basically pointless to go beyond that point (i believe it was .89 point of incombat regen gain for every point of fate as opposed to around 500 fate i was getting 1.16 regen gain for every point of fate :/

Hope this helps, Skeev

What about the tactical critical multiplier? Anybody figured out how fate affects it?

Originally Posted by Oridoc

What about the tactical critical multiplier? Anybody figured out how fate affects it?

It increases it?

Fate is largely worthless, don't worry about it.

Well as for will vs fate for ICPR reasons, I would say stack will. However, I'm kind of under the belief that ICPR is somewhat useless (yes, slag me all you like) but stick a LM in your group and composure time from time and there's your power. However, will vs crit rating is a different matter in my opinion. I personally have saved my tank more times than I would've liked due to a crit heal, hence, I see the importance of a high crit rating, however, not letting your Will/tact mastery suffer.

I've got standards for my mini which are hit the 50% healing cap and 6k morale. After that, i've just stacked fate/crit. He currently sits at 2.2k will 1.1k fate and around 10.5k crit rating with a cappy buff. alongside hope he reaches about 8k morale during raid times.

Stacking the Fate stat itself is in the end pretty unproductive and I'll explain why.

For my Minstrel in raids, my build goals are the following: Improve the amount I can heal for while using the least amount of power in doing so, Improve my survivability so I won't die due to run away taskmasters, critters or nasty Troll AoEs (etc), and Improve my ability to improve the overall group's performance through either increasing their resiliance, or their outgoing damage or both.

Unfortunately those three things are at odds with each other, if you stack one you harm the other. So your goal needs to become to answer the question how can you work towards those three items without hurting another too much. From my experience when it comes to stacking Fate, you almost always will have better other options available to you.

Lets look at the type of stat sets available in armor/jewelry out there. You almost always have a primary stat (WIL/FAT/VIT) at somewhere between 92 - 122 and then some kind of secondary stat (WIL/FAT/VIT) at 32-67 or so. You then end up often having a third or maybe even fourth stat such as ICPR/Crit/Tactical Mastery/Tactical Mitigation of some value on the item. The only one of those four (ICPR/Crit/Tact Mastery/Tact Mit) that seems worthwhile to build up via its primary stat is Tactical Mastery through Will. That is simply because of the return rate of 1 Will = 10 Tactical Mastery. It is very very common to find armor/jewelry with 100+ Will on it, but not very common at all to find pieces of gear with over 1000 Mastery on it as a replacement. So Will stacking while feeling pretty natural for Minstrels is also pretty productive (up to a point where you reach the outgoing healing cap of 50%).

The other three ICPR/Crit and tactical Mitigation are not quite as easy to build through stats. Addressing Mitigation first, vitality stacking helps in multiple regards, not only does it provide you mitigation at 4 to 1 , but also provides Morale at 3 to 1. So, having a good amount of Vitality to build upon will help a decent bit, and I often then choose my Will pieces of gear to also have Vitality on them as well in many cases. Still there are so many good pieces of gear that have so much tactical mitigation on it, that it is hard to overlook them. Talking in excess of 1000 mitigation, would require 250 Vitality on the same piece to have the same equivalent result. That said, in my build I only really focus on two specific pieces just for the tactical mitigation: Iulin (neck piece) which has 32 VIT, 63 Fate, 672 Tactical Mastery and 1513 tactical Mitigation, and the Illuminated Great river pocket of defense (pocket item) which has 95 Vitality, 681 Tactical Mitigation and 672 Crit.

After building most of my build around Will stacking and then Vit/Mitigation secondarily I usually easily cap both outgoing healing at 50% and have morale over 7200-7500 unbuffed, Physical mitigation for common damage capped at 40% and pretty close to cap on tactical mitigation, where captain/fellowship buffs/food would cap me as needed in groups. So that leaves the question at how to improve my performance from there, and that is to increase the number of critical heals that I give out and reduce my power consumption or increase power return. So looking at Critical/ICPR to add to my build it seems logical at that point I would want to add Fate, but it simply never gives back a return to make it worth doing so....

ICPR works off of a square root function, and once you get to a certain point of Fate, adding more fate just for ICPR sake is very unproductive. Due to it being a square root function, exactly how much icpr you get back for each point of fate changes the higher you go, but just based off of my gear, even before I start stacking fate, I am getting less than .7 worth of icpr per point of fate. So if I throw away all of my will and vitality and mastery, morale and mitigations and go for a fate heavy piece of gear that has as much as say 122 Fate on it, I still end up with less than 90 ICPR from that in return. By comparison, there are so many pieces of gear from shields, to bracelets to armor that have 100+ ICPR on them as a third or fourth stat, it seems very unproductive to do fate stacking just for the ICPR. (examples: Aelechor, Diamond-flecked wristlet, Seregechor, Great river bracelet of power, etc as bracelets. Fornost healer's shield as a shield, plus plenty of rings/armor set pieces with 50-70 ICPR on them).

Crit rating is easier to measure. 1 point of Fate = 2 Crit. So that same piece of gear with 122 Fate can give you 244 Crit rating based on the Fate all alone. Which seems great right? Well not so much when you consider how many pieces of gear have at least 350+ crit as a third or fourth stat on it, or some that have as much as 600-700 or more. One other thing to keep in mind with crit, is as you add more crit rating, the number goes up higher at the same rate, but the actual percentage chance for a crit has diminishing returns. The higher you build it the more you are pumping into it for less effectiveness.

There simply are so many pieces of gear with less or no fate on them but having large amounts of crit/icpr that simply makes stacking fate pretty uneffecient. Taking two comparible items, if you had two items with 92 Fate on them, you would end up with far less stats than if you had two items with 0 fate, but large amounts of Will/Vit but also having 300-700 Crit and 50-100 ICPR on them as well.

Summary: Look to add Crit/ICPR directly via Armor/Jewelry instead of doing so through fate itself.

I am one of the minstrels this thread started about I have 519 fate 2022 will with no buffs my tactical mastery is capped at 50% I do not think I am stacking fate at 519 however this started because I said fate is important to a minstrel not that i was stacking it also none of my virtues have fate in them I am quite happy with my build i am always looking to improve it as all classes are so I will change it how i feal fit

Originally Posted by koblos

I am one of the minstrels this thread started about I have 519 fate 2022 will with no buffs my tactical mastery is capped at 50% I do not think I am stacking fate at 519 however this started because I said fate is important to a minstrel not that i was stacking it also none of my virtues have fate in them I am quite happy with my build i am always looking to improve it as all classes are so I will change it how i feal fit

Yeah, I wouldn't call 519 as stacking fate. I am pretty sure I have close to that myself just with passive Fate for my character and random amounts of 30-60 fat on various items along the way.

Originally Posted by Turlos

Stacking the Fate stat itself is in the end pretty unproductive and I'll explain why.
Summary: Look to add Crit/ICPR directly via Armor/Jewelry instead of doing so through fate itself.

+Rep, Saved my fingers so much work, very thorough explanation. I run ~250 fate from a few secondary stats here and there, mainly LLG jewelery sets.