Guild Wars 2

So I play elementalist more than any other class and I’m just here in hopes that ArenaNet will see my post and consider it, as well as receive reaffirmations from other players!

Okay, so I’ve been trying every amulet, trait combo to attempt to create something viable, but none of it’s working. I pretty much played either Fresh Air scepter/focus, or dagger/focus celestial before HoT, so naturally I attempted to create a zerker/marauder/sinister/viper build using tempest. All I can say is that warhorn, for these , is just not going to happen. The cast times on defensive moves is to high to react before losing half of your hp, and the speed and damage of the offensive moves is not enough to strike an enemy down before they do you. (even overloads, as the charge time is too high) so I tried swapping in focus, in hopes that obsidian flesh would give me the time i needed to charge up air overload and do some damage, which works..! kinda… once the 4 seconds is up you have a remaining one second on overload, and then the actual cast time. This is where i have a problem, because for the overload to do good damage, i need to have a defensive measure to not die while casting it. which means I must either run blocks, or have a good armor rating. neither of which is possible while maintaining good damage stats. :/ anyway I eventually got an OKAY build going where I would run arcane (mid mid low), air (mid low mid), and tempest with runes of surging to try to create a jerker version of auramancer, seeing as auras provide defensive measures. (shocking, magnetic, and almost perma-protection from arcane and armor of earth) Nope, still not enough. i have 15 seconds of magnetic aura and 12 seconds of shocking aura, but there’s too much stability on the enemy team to make shocking aura do anything at all, so i still die channeling overload air… not every time, just very frequently. its just sub-par.

The next decent build i worked up out of this was a, quite frankly, burn exploiting settler amulet build. you all know the drill for this build I’m sure, balthazar runes, smoldering sigils, burn duration traits, and lots of burn application skills to overwhelm enemy cleansing. it’s lame as hell, but it works. with this, even with the low health pool, I could heal up so quickly it didn’t really matter. Thing is, though, that the mobility and cooldowns of the defensive warhorn skills are far below the effectiveness of the existing focus ones again.

NOW MY MOST IMPORTANT POINT> the trait line opportunity cost. (if you will)
The pre-existing celementalist trait combo is incredible. It works together perfectly. I play water (top top top), earth (top top top), arcane (mid mid top) and the traits work so well together, especially the grandmasters, that removing any one of them makes no sense at all. Because the current meta game involves an INSANE AMOUNT OF CONDITIONS AND CROWD CONTROL, and for some ungodly reason Anet keeps introducing more forms of cc without removing any. running diamond skin is so incredibly advantageous in PvP, and when coupled with the water trait line, if you’re good at timing heals, which i like to believe I am, the second you fall below 90% when fighting a condition based enemy, you can heal back up to prevent more condition pressure. A second armor of earth then aids me against overwhelming enemy cc (which is very much the meta these days), as well as cantrips cleansing condis, makes me almost immune to condis 1v1, and makes 2 or 3 v 1’s possible when the enemy is heavily condition based. So I’ve established i cannot replace either of these with tempest. The arcane trait line also aids in survivability then in giving me mobility and dodge capacity, as well as addition heals and damage. I have swapped out the arcane traitline for tempest, in an attempt to run auramancer, like many have said is good, but it is still not NEARLY as good as normal celementalist.

Long story short, there is a dramatic loss in running tempest (mostly in survivability) as it forces you to replace a perfectly balanced trait combo, or forces you to wait for an overload to achieve dps, making yourself vulnerable for a good 9-10 seconds (a huge time) waiting for the skill, and its channel. (which of course limits your dps as while because you’ve been using bs skills for 5 seconds waiting for an overload)

I know I’ve missed a lot of points, but to cover every scenario would take pages of text. Discuss with me! I’m very set in my way at this point but maybe I’ve been missing something key!?

Thank You!
-Scott

Tempests definitely deserve a look at, especially improvements to overload and easier access to stability, not to mention warhorn is terrible atm… however many of your problems also stem from the fact that you’re not really using tempest to its full potential.

Most tempests run either air/earth/tempest or air/water/tempest because those give some of the best synergies of an auramancer.

I’ll leave some example builds here, but note that they are by no means the defining builds, most things can be interchanged depending on the playstyle you want, the most notable choice being harmonious conduit vs invigorating torrents.

Earth tempest:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAodn0XC9XiNYCWYCcYilHAzdymZ/sDngMQHUIAcA2gA-TJRFwAAeAAE3fQxJA4ZZAA

This build has higher defense vs direct damage builds.

Water tempest:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAoYn0XC9XiNYCWYCcYilHAzdyeZ/sEDhXwOQIAcA2gA-T5QFABYv/AAPAgnKDAA

Look at the all the things you obtain with a single aura, and as a tempest you can spam them. Not only that, your shouts are aoe effects, so you can share the boons you get from auras to your whole team.

Again, there are actually quite a few possibilities out there, so keep working with the strengths and you’ll find a build that works.

Part of the reason I’m shelving tempest in pvp for now is because I was really hyped for warhorn, only for it to be a terrible weapon. If they address that I’d try to play it seriously again. Overloads are interesting and I like all the heals. It just felt a bit boring in the end, despite being far more interesting than DD ele ever was.

Other than that, only lucid singularity and stab on overload as a minor really need to be considered. It’s very well balanced in that it provides good positional healing and support and has clear strengths and weaknesses, and it lets elementalists fit into the teamfight meta more easily.

You want even more stability for such a high mobile class than you have now? oô
Today I duelled against a guildy who had a teamfight-oriented spec and he did fine in all the 1on1’s.

If you want to get tempest buffed until he is an even better 1on1 class then d/d ele.. well.. I hope you won’t get your wish.

Tempest has the ability to share auras and provide aoe protection with a 100% uptime. And on top of that 40% protection to self.

WuGzaGenius.5684:

Tempest has the ability to share auras and provide aoe protection with a 100% uptime. And on top of that 40% protection to self.

With what build?

I agree with warhorn needing improvements but defenitely not the overloads. You peeps is crazy.

Hammerguard.9834:

I agree with warhorn needing improvements but defenitely not the overloads. You peeps is crazy.

Fire does poor damage and is easy to avoid and I don’t think water heals particularly well.

Starfall.6425:

You want even more stability for such a high mobile class than you have now? oô
Today I duelled against a guildy who had a teamfight-oriented spec and he did fine in all the 1on1’s.

If you want to get tempest buffed until he is an even better 1on1 class then d/d ele.. well.. I hope you won’t get your wish.

What is this mobility you speak of? We sacrificed ALL mobility to be team fight spec. And of course he will do fine in 1v1s, you wont be able to exploit his weakness to cc in 1v1 unless you spec for it.

Btw d/d ele is now obsolete so..

The mobility was my bad, you are right. But still a teamfight build that shares all auras, gives perma protection to the team and give the tempest regular stability is quite strong in my book. Go4gw2 ran a bunsh of tempest, but I could see it lacking in a solo game were you don’t have much communication/coordination with your team.

Starfall.6425:

The mobility was my bad, you are right. But still a teamfight build that shares all auras, gives perma protection to the team and give the tempest regular stability is quite strong in my book. Go4gw2 ran a bunsh of tempest, but I could see it lacking in a solo game were you don’t have much communication/coordination with your team.

Protection is nowhere near 100% uptime unless we run water/tempest with aura share. Then, we won’t have any damage. Stability is only a stack, with overloads. We have 0 stability otherwise.

The way i see it, if you focus us down with cc and what not, we’re kittened.

Well stab never was a ele thing and it worked out, or? now you get one every overload. My guildy ran water then, he defenitely had perma protection and his damage came from attrition.

But I will better leave the discussion, ele is one class I have really no clue about. I just came by and wanted to tell you the recent experience when trying stuff with a friend and it looked strong (for what it is intended).

PS: Aren’t most classes kittened when focused down? exept rev, scapper and druid xD

Starfall.6425:

Well stab never was a ele thing and it worked out, or? now you get one every overload. My guildy ran water then, he defenitely had perma protection and his damage came from attrition.

But I will better leave the discussion, ele is one class I have really no clue about. I just came by and wanted to tell you the recent experience when trying stuff with a friend and it looked strong (for what it is intended).

PS: Aren’t most classes kittened when focused down? exept rev, scapper and druid xD

If he ran water and he could kill you 1v1 then.. you know what im saying. Water/tempest should NEVER be able to kill anyone (unless they took damage ammy but then their heal output will be kitten).

Btw since when was stab never an ele thing? We had 10 stacks on a 48s cd which also gave regen and vigor. Now we have 1 stack on 25s (excluding earth overload, which gives more stacks but it isnt worth using). Plus that stab has to be traited which means we give up vigor and regen for the pathetic stab.

It probably seemed strong to you because you had no idea what you were going up against.

P.S. nope, classes with mobility can disengage.

L2p issue nothing to see here.

A Tempest with Water? That killed you?
What the kitten :O

And then in order to get perma protection from that, he has to get Earth too. So an Earth/Water/Tempest killed you? :O. He doesn’t even have fresh air lol lol.

Gosh, sorry I can’t stop laughing xD.

Just to clear up the record, every tempest build has some things it SERIOUSLY lacks:

- Basically every tempest build lacks mobility significantly. Yes, it can get a lot of swiftness, but thanks to power-creep perma-swiftness if basically baseline nowadays.

- Most tempest builds lack the ability to fight against cc. 90% take 2 shouts, leaving the last utility for either armor of earth every 75s or lightning flash (not even a real stunbreak) every 40s. Yes, overloads can stunbreak, but the percentage of time an overload is up when you get hit with a crucial stun is slim.

- Earth/air/tempest is lacking in condi cleanse. You cleanse 3 with earth 4, and maybe 3 more every 30s if you take rune of the trooper.

- Earth/water/tempest is lacking any kind of damage, and stunbreaks. If they are taking water, they probably trait for auras to give regen/vigor (for extra condi cleanse), meaning that they don’t even get stability on overloads, so overloads are almost unusable. If they are dumb enough to take powerful aura, then they still lack condi cleanse (like earth/air/tempest).

-Water/Arcana/Tempest: lacks basically any semblance of damage, can’t even stack might as well as a base fire ele. Basically the same thing as a water/arcana/earth d/d ele.

So here is your rule of thumb:

-Are their air swaps proccing lightning strikes (meaning they don’t have water): condi them and laugh

- Are their water swap splashing little bits of water: /dance on point and laugh while they tickle you

- Did they just swap elements: cc-time, they got nothin.

Tempests are fine, there are some unkillable builds out there.

Warhorn is entirely underwhelming in everything it does. Besides buffing that, my biggest pet peeve is that swapping attunements while overloading cancels the overload. I can cast Churning Earth while swapping attunements; I should be able to overload while doing so.

yeah i think tempest needs some buffs …….

Imo, tempest could use some buffs, but as long as some things are shaved. For example, air overload and the shocking aura uptime is a bit too high if you ask me. I really don’t wanna see d/d ele 2.0. which can do everything in one build. Due to the fact there is still no burst spec viable, it should shift a bit more to the support. However, I don’t think it needs to have the amount of condicleanse of old d/d. I want Reapers to stay viable, too.

Edit: Diamond skin still needs a rework. Kthx.

Nubu.6148:

yeah i think tempest needs some buffs …….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouMatOXG1qo

1.) Thats wvw and should never be looked at when considering balance

2.) The players he fights are for the most part very bad, its easy to make any class look like its in a good spot when fighting average players.

BlackBeard.2873:

So here is your rule of thumb:

-Are their air swaps proccing lightning strikes (meaning they don’t have water): condi them and laugh

- Are their water swap splashing little bits of water: /dance on point and laugh while they tickle you

- Did they just swap elements: cc-time, they got nothin.

I can’t speak for other builds, but I main an air/earth/tempest ele…I run diamond skin and conditions really don’t give me a problem lol. Diamond skin makes things like condi based necros and reapers hilariously easy, and makes the more limited condition clear of a tempest a lot more workable.

Edit: Deleted because of salt.

Grimreaper.5370:

Nubu.6148:

yeah i think tempest needs some buffs …….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouMatOXG1qo

1.) Thats wvw and should never be looked at when considering balance

2.) The players he fights are for the most part very bad, its easy to make any class look like its in a good spot when fighting average players.

Sure ….. , you can visit us in our arena , but if and only if this tempst beats ur kitten up u ve to come here and complain for a tempest nerf xD .

Some peole are rly funny .

The main problem most eles have is , that they are no faceroll anymore.

Get skill or die trying …

Tempest needs no buffs

-Overloads are fine and players need to L2P

-Warhorn got its niche use, feel free to change weapon, nobody forces you to play the same weapon everywhere

-Lack of stability is perfectly fine, it’s part of the risk of playing tempest,no we don’t need an easy way to use overload, least we see another 4 ele comp win a tournie or another double ele meta, people must learn the meaning of “map awareness”..otherwise keep enjoying being interrupted at every turn.

-The old fire d/d was an auto-play build , anybody could play that build without really learning to play ele at all as the build was like 90% passive dmg ( fire aura on attunement swap when over 90% of these “eles” were not even able to chain M.grasp over a fire field)

-If you want dmg on tempest: don’t play celestial!
1) dagger marauder is bad, use scepter, if not don’t go marauder in the first place!
2) Nobody should be a one man army, marauder tempest doesn’t lose 1vs1 all the times but you shouldn’t expect to hold points with it, play as burst no bruiser!

Long story short, there is a dramatic loss in running tempest (mostly in survivability) as it forces you to replace a perfectly balanced trait combo, or forces you to wait for an overload to achieve dps, making yourself vulnerable for a good 9-10 seconds (a huge time) waiting for the skill, and its channel. (which of course limits your dps as while because you’ve been using bs skills for 5 seconds waiting for an overload)

No! an extremely bunkery build that dish burst dmg is never a balanced trait set up[In PvP]; if you want to play a viable bunker then cele tempest does that well; if you want dmg play marauder tempest.

Main reason why previous meta was possible it’s because trait set up like the ones used by the @OP, were still viable.

So Dear Anet here’s the deal : Tempest is perfectly fine, it has clear weaknesses and strengths, very fun and useful to play, competitive gameplay, ele doesn’t need another FOTM phase like it was with fire d/d

So @Karl if you’re reading this..for the love of god don’t overbuff Tempest

Agree @Karl you already overbuff DH please dun do it again for tempest they are fine. You already destroy pvp please dun make it worst.

Tempest is for the most part balanced. The new weapon, the warhorn however is totally rubbish, both in PvP and PvE. The overloads have their uses, you get 1 stack of stability while overloading with a trait during the 4 sec cast time, enough counterplay since it is ridiculously easy to interrupt in a duel, let alone a team fight with cc flying everywhere. The overloads all have their uses, although water overload is just plain bad and hardly ever worth using in combat due to its cost investment and weak heal. The elite skill ‘rebound’ is still crappy, it is basically a conditional aura based on your current attunement that you receive 5 sec later, on a 75 seconds cooldown. It can also serve as an extra 2k heal if you happen to receive a deathblow, in most cases you die right away since it doesn’t really buy you time as you are less than an autoattack away from death.

Classic celestial D/D still have better sustain, mobility and can deal with conditions better. Tempest are in general better in team fights if used properly since their auras scale better the more allies around and because they decent access to AoE and have a team mate provide the extra stability to reliably get off overloads.

In general, tempest are fine, they just need some adjustments to a few of the more useless abilities they have access to.

I like tempest but some warhorn skills have dumb targeting, especially many #5 skills.

Other thing is that elementalists in general have very limited amulet choices because it’s difficult to focus on just one or two things but you need like all of them, or at least more than 2. I personally would like to see something like power/condi/vitality/healing power with different primary options, especially more amulets with 4 stats and healing power or whatsoever.

tempests are not the problem, celestial is! Remove celestial armor and amulets and theres a balance.

Asherah.7651:

BlackBeard.2873:

So here is your rule of thumb:

-Are their air swaps proccing lightning strikes (meaning they don’t have water): condi them and laugh

- Are their water swap splashing little bits of water: /dance on point and laugh while they tickle you

- Did they just swap elements: cc-time, they got nothin.

I can’t speak for other builds, but I main an air/earth/tempest ele…I run diamond skin and conditions really don’t give me a problem lol. Diamond skin makes things like condi based necros and reapers hilariously easy, and makes the more limited condition clear of a tempest a lot more workable.

Gee. A trait that gives immunity to conditions works well against condi builds…who would have thought. /s

I use diamond skin as well, but it should get a rework to make it less "all or nothing’. Right now against any decent power/hybrid build it’s like you’re playing with one less trait.

Nubu.6148:

Grimreaper.5370:

Nubu.6148:

yeah i think tempest needs some buffs …….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouMatOXG1qo

1.) Thats wvw and should never be looked at when considering balance

2.) The players he fights are for the most part very bad, its easy to make any class look like its in a good spot when fighting average players.

Sure ….. , you can visit us in our arena , but if and only if this tempst beats ur kitten up u ve to come here and complain for a tempest nerf xD .

Some peole are rly funny .

The main problem most eles have is , that they are no faceroll anymore.

Get skill or die trying …

LOL. People like you should remember that game is NOT balanced around 1v1. Duels are pointless in balancing.

Tempest has one of the 5 builds that are considered meta on Metabattle. I dont think they need buffs.

Tempest is fine

Pizz.3698:

Tempest has one of the 5 builds that are considered meta on Metabattle. I dont think they need buffs.

You do know what is the difference between meta, test and draft right? Not because you see build diversity there does not mean they are OP and do not need buffs.

People who do not play WH tempest will not understand it.

PS: two of the builds there are pve/wvw. This is the PvP forum if you need a reminder. smh.

Tempest is Fine as it is, i run Earth,Air and Tempest and for me it works really nicely in PvP