Guild Wars 2

Pvp wise.

I’ve tried tempest with different traitlines over the beta weekends extensively. Unfortunately, eles are still locked in water/arcana/cantrips builds. There wasn’t a decent build for tempest.

Tempest/water/arcana is nowhere as good as other elite specs, and sacrificing water or arcana leads to gimmicky builds. Cantrips are still essential and there was no room for shouts. Hugely disappointing.

When is this ever going to be fixed?

You can afford to drop arcane for sure with tempest. One build streamed by phantaram even took earth/air/tempest with celestial stats, but had to rely on diamond skin to deal with condis.

I mean I understand part of the problem is that the new shouts don’t offer condition removal unless speced for with runes (which I hope is added to one of the shouts), but I’m actually pleasantly surprised with how fun tempest was and how intrisically satisfying it was to make a build that didn’t have arcane and strict attunement rotations in it. The playstyle clicked for me in a way that normal D/D water/arcane/X ele doesn’t satisfy me, and to me that means that tempest has the potential to be something great for sure.

I understand that there were certain builds that were streamed or tested that seemed acceptable. In this case, the phantaram build. However, these builds are usually lacking in something. In other words, sub par.

E.g. It isn’t realistic to stay above 90% hp in SPvP. To depend on diamond skin against conditions seem like a gimmick for me.

Edit: one of the main issues I’ve had with tempest apart from this is that there’s kitten cd upon switching to an attunement before we can overload it. It’s a pretty weird restriction to put in.

Personally I felt that trained ether renewal and stone heart felt overall better with powerful auras, although I’d do far less damage than he did without fresh air.

I encountered the same problems. Missing room on the toolbar for shouts.
Two reasons: First condi removal and second speed if not traited air. Since i am a scepter user and earth fan i did see a similar fresh air build phantaram used very fast but its condi defence is nowhere. When i meet a diamond skin player i tend to win because its no problem to shoot him below 90% with scepter, even in my condi setup.
Also the 5s wait on overloads did lead to never using water overload. So thats for a water camping healer build….
For my build i would wish baseline speed (or even 33% like driud got XD). Because this forces me to use air or traveler rune and leads to a gimik build (which i tend to play annyway …). But i can still dream of getting perm 33% speed instead of swiftness in speedy conduit. This would make me a tempest lover :-).

ReaperJr.5967:

Pvp wise.

I’ve tried tempest with different traitlines over the beta weekends extensively. Unfortunately, eles are still locked in water/arcana/cantrips builds. There wasn’t a decent build for tempest.

Tempest/water/arcana is nowhere as good as other elite specs, and sacrificing water or arcana leads to gimmicky builds. Cantrips are still essential and there was no room for shouts. Hugely disappointing.

When is this ever going to be fixed?

I think that you are mostly right, but I also feel that it has gotten a little bit better with tempest:

- Shouts+Soldier runes can be decent for survival/condi-cleanse. I’ve tried some hybrid-builds with 2 cantrips and 3 shouts and it kinda worked!
- Dropping water might also be a possibility, because with stuff like diamond skin, water overload, shouts+soldier runes, you can have pretty decent condi-cleanse and healing while not going into water.

Fire air tempest d/d fresh air build maybe a thing once its out in full. Water line for the most part is going away other then the high end support only builds. Durid going to cover a lot of condition removal that water use to cover. Cantrips are not as powerful as they use to be your mostly going to only run 1 or 2 depending on your build.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAoYncMAFOgdOA+XCcYiFCAzN1+artBFgAQQU4C0BihA-TFyHABKfCAESp3RKDSU9HnUC6meAR2fAgHAQAAEgdWnBwRP6RH6QHaDdoDdoDdolCgJhWA-w

I think this build is going to be a power house in wvw roaming.

PowerBottom.5796:

ReaperJr.5967:

Pvp wise.

I’ve tried tempest with different traitlines over the beta weekends extensively. Unfortunately, eles are still locked in water/arcana/cantrips builds. There wasn’t a decent build for tempest.

Tempest/water/arcana is nowhere as good as other elite specs, and sacrificing water or arcana leads to gimmicky builds. Cantrips are still essential and there was no room for shouts. Hugely disappointing.

When is this ever going to be fixed?

I think that you are mostly right, but I also feel that it has gotten a little bit better with tempest:

- Shouts+Soldier runes can be decent for survival/condi-cleanse. I’ve tried some hybrid-builds with 2 cantrips and 3 shouts and it kinda worked!
- Dropping water might also be a possibility, because with stuff like diamond skin, water overload, shouts+soldier runes, you can have pretty decent condi-cleanse and healing while not going into water.

Yeah, this actually works reasonably well if you run earth traits for elemental shielding and elemental bastion of course. I actually avoided shouts on my build because powerful auras not working with shouts feels really wasted, so finding the right synergy of trait balance is difficult. I ended up playing a build that used ether renewal and cleansing fire with powerful auras to spread auras when I overload to heal, but I’m starting to think that it’d be viable to drop water and not even bother with diamond skin at all if you went with shouts and trooper runes, but I still feel that one of the shouts should provide a cleanse of 3 conditions or so in the user to hold the playstyle together.

You also lose a ton of damage and mightsacks from not being able to run strength runes w/strength sigil, but I feel like thats a fair enough tradeoff to make.