Raid Team Testing and Optimization

Mamoncrief's hijacking of the Tigrey thread made me realize we need a good thread for discussing optimal non-savage raid teams and comparing them. Here's my results so far.

Team: 7x Niobe, 2x Incin v1, Brodey

Results after 40+ battles: Average of 2.5m-3.5m with single mag attack.

Thoughts: Proc manipulation is absolute hell on this team. I should be getting on average 3.5 niobe procs per fight. My results are considerably worse. 90% of my battles are 1-2 Niobe procs, with the other 10% being 3-5 procs. I have not gotten a SINGLE battle where 6 or 7 of my niobes have buffed. Her 50% proc rate dictates there should be an equal number of 1-2 procs as 6-7 procs but this is obviously not true. On top of that, if the Incins don't proc this team's damage output is horrible.

Mamon, record your averge damage and lets see how your proposed teams compare.

I calculated up your team (made some guesses on the stats of your mercs) and got an average of 4.3m single mag and 25m full auto. I guess what I am interested in is to see if there actually is a correlation between the calculated and real life data. Hopefully, although at this stage it looks like the calculations come out on the high side, the calculated value is at least useful for comparing potential raid teams without having to actually build them.

I am still stuck fighting lvl30 bosses mostly at the moment, so I can't really evaluate mine on single mag just yet.

Team: 2 x Prophet L1, 2 X Primarch (pact E4), 1 X Incin, 1 X Niobe, 1 X Tigrey, 1 X Burnfrost, 1 X Oathbreaker, Brody

Is a hijack if its my own thread haha. I'll let you know how it goes here. So far atk team has one shot every boss I've found.

with
Prawn - Prim - Inci - Prim - T. Engi
Burnfrost - Oathbreaker - Brodley - Oathbreaker - F-9
I'm averaging at 2.5M, getting above 3M 30% of the time, and lowest being 1.45M highest 3.8M. Proc are normal.

Im Running....

Leader - Pact Primarch - Prawn v2 - Pack Primarch - Prawn v1
Prawn v1 - POPE Colossus - Prawn v2 - PE/50cc Colossus - Niobe

I am averaging around 2M, and it has been fairly consistent. My range is 2.3M to about 1.8M.

My Prawn v1s are almost fully leveled so I will sub in a savage or my Pack UM in one of their spots. As Legend said, Niobe seems waaaaaay less than 50% proc rate. I am probably going to sub her out soon too, cause even if she does proc she just hits the Primarchs anyway.

Also, I made a bad mistake when I did my free leader swap a long time ago. Knuckledriver was the first PE merc I ever made and I was so obsessed with her stun I swapped to Mac. Point is, I am sure if I had a better leader this setup would be much better.

I just hit a new single-mag max of 7.1m. Not too shabby. All-out max is still capped at 20m.

Although I've also hit a single-mag min of 750k soooo.... not very consistent, which is frustrating.

For what it's worth, I'm consistently averaging 1.8mil with a range of 1.3-2.5mil on 1mag

BF (15940) - Tig (POPE) - BF (15393) - F9 (POPE) - Mary
Prawn (PE) - Prim (Pact) - Prawn (PE) - Colossus v1 - Prawn (PE)

I have my first days data! Things pretty much shaked down exactly as I predicted. My atk team is hitting for significantly more damage (but the modifiers and everything are better so thats to be expected) than my wis team, but I have my r1 savage and if I pick up a few more I expect this team to shoo up in the damage ranks.

My atk team is 3 incin, golem, primarch, double gun, helio, prophet, savage, leader. It has been averaging about 3.5 mil on a single mag. Haven't tested any of them in AO because I have been conserving ammo as much as possible. I haven't had any huge single mag hits yet, but it has been VERY consistant between 3.5 and 4 mil.

My wis Team is 5 BF, Hellcat, 2 Tigrey, Savage, Leader. It has been averaging about 1.5 mil. Pretty pathetic damage out of this team honestly, I've been really disappointed. A 2 mil hit is high, and doesn't happen that often, and fights that barely crack 1 mil aren't that uncommon. The only hope for this team is picking up savages. I think the Tigreys are the weak links. I have had at least 4-5 battles where no buffs at all have proc'd. (compared to 0 with no atk buffs) I think they have tweaked % chance of wis buffs this raid.

Not really many alternatives as I have barely 10 mercs available so I run:
leader – Prim – Prawn – Prim – UM
levelspot – Prim – Omnimech – Razorfin – Televangelist

Averaging ~1.5 mil, mostly In between 1.3 and 1.8. Can't complain I guess. What I noticed (though I am sure you guys knew it) is that the Televangelist weaken amplifies poison damage to 199 999. Always thought it would overwrite poison before.

Is niobe proving more powerful than a primarch? Ive not leveled my 8 r1's yet so cant compare? My prims are 14k+

no she's not for raid, def being useless and it's difficult to get her to buff the right merc.

If you have the right mercs to make use of her she can be quite effective. I wish I had 2-3 more of her in my raid setup.

I think that her value might drop back down a bit as people discover that she is hard to use.

If you do make a niobe, please POPE the wis and the hp.

Ah cool, am undecided what to do with her, may just sell them to be honest, need the res and im quite content with prims for the time being!

Also the rare savage doesnt do what the json states, it says weaken for 1 turn, though it actually stuns if the proc applies the debuff.

Update: My Niobe team just maxed out a 32m boss going all-out. Very high damage potential, but very inconsistent. I'm getting an average of 11-12m on all outs with minimums around 7m and a few 20m+ when proc manipulation mechanics look the other way.

Well I finally decided what my best team set up is! I have been constantly tweaking all event, writing down damage ranges for each system and I have discovered that my damage is maximized by running:

Incin-Double Gun-Hellcat-Golem-Incin
Leader-Incin-Primarch-Helio-Savage (r2 you get for free since I haven't found any others)

This team ranges between 15-30 mil damage on AO, consistently hitting for around 20 mil. This team hit higher than any other combo of the above mercs, or any combo of my wisdom team. I found that the damage lost in the buff % by putting double gun next to hellcat instead of primarch was offset by adding an additional proc chance, and putting incin in the middle spot instead of hellcat was offset because of stupid formation requiring you to run 2 back rows. Any formation that has the middle spot in the front or middle forces the two end incins into the back row. So while a double buffed incin hit much much harder it was offset by incuring the 20% (or, from the front row +20%, a 40%) damage penalty for the two side incins. Running this way I could put the hellcat in back and not be hurt too badly, she still deals around 150k per auto attack double action so her damage double buffed is solid, and then allow the heavily buffed side incins to hit for +20% damage.

Anyway, just figured I would share where all my theorycrafting has landed me, along with the fact that it is still possible, albeit very expensive, to run a competitive raid team without any savages. I can mvp any boss on a single all out except for Super bosses, so with a decent team you can inexpensively farm normal bosses for huge points. I am currently ranked 71 and have been barely playing this event. I have also farmed 175 mags. I have no doubt that if I had been disciplined with my regen I could be 30-40 and with even more mags farmed.

Nice work, Mamoncrief. A team like that can put you in the top 10-15 if you have the ammo to make a run.

My Niobe team definitely got the shaft by Dakota after her metadata changes. While I have gotten a few insanely nice all-outs of 40m+, I get far more 7-8-9m all outs. I even got an 8.5m single-mag hit once: more than a number of my all-outs. The team is far too inconsistent for my liking, and is especially reliant on procs... and we all know how things like that turn out.

@legendslayer: What HP do your incinerates have?

I think if the HP thing worked out, running a front row of Incin-Prim-Incin-Prim-Incin and a back row of 4 Niobes and Brody would stabilise your damage a bit. That is if you are still thinking of trying to use Niobe.

My all out caps out at 25m but I am usually doing 10-12m. I very rarely go below 10m but quite frequently hit for around 20m.

I'm using two Incin v3 with 11.8k HP each. the problem with primarchs is they have even less HP than that, so they will steal the niobe buff. Perhaps a double gun or Golem would work nicely, but I don't have either of those unfortunately.

Hell, even an event savage or two would stabilize my damage and probably increase it, but I've burned over 1600+ event cells and not gotten a single rare savage. Freaking ridiculous.

My LVL 170 Brody has 10.7k HP and you said you were using him, so I assumed the incins had less HP than that otherwise the Niobes would be buffing Brody???

Brodey gets the 5x savage bonus, meaning his hp is 55k+ at buff time.

I also think a Niobe team would do better in a raid where they didn't release savages with 800% modifiers. The MOB BONUS for these super raid bosses is 80 players, and almost all of them are taken down in 10-20 players or less. So they just released savages that are way overpowered in relation to anything else. It's black bots all over again (except they didn't release a savage wis buffer to boot).

I completely forgot about it the bonus, however, a PE primarch has HP of 11222, so if you did POPE HP it, you would be at 11888 which I am assuming would still work?

I am regretting crystallising the HP on my 2 Kinetic Prophets as if I evo them and have primarchs, the primarchs get the Niobe buff.

It has been a very long time since I saw a mob bonus on an SRB.

It is kind of like the CXB bot situation again, except the savages won't be amazing after the raid. They will be useful as a cheap raid team which will give the prawn/Primarch team a run for it's money.

I have never played raid seriously and only use it to farm mags and make AC from selling the Rs. However, I can see that being pretty much forced into buying savages to be competitive would be really annoying. Time will tell I guess as to whether people keep buying savages and what they do with the rankings for the rewards in the future.