Guild Wars 2

After thinking about it some more, I feel that the Tempest traits are the weakest part of the elite specializtion and they offer the most room for improvement. My argument will consist of pointing out underwhelming traits and design choices and suggesting ways in which they can be merged with similar traits to make room for new traits, and to buff existing tempest traits to provide better overall design of the traitline.

1. There is a lack of damage modifier traits in Tempest, which makes the traitline undesirable for PvE and offensive PvP builds.

Solution-Merge traits together to provide room for a new trait. Elemental Bastion and harmonious conduits are a good candidate for a merge, as are Gale Song and Imbued Melodies.

Tempest Offense-Overloaded attunements (ie. when the attunement is on cooldown after an overload) will deal 20% more damage. The overload skills for each attunement deal 20% more damage as well.

This trait would make Tempest a better choice for PvE builds and more offensive PvP builds, such as fresh air.

2. Shouts are introduced but they are unable to wholly compete with cantrips because cantrips have a lot of trait synergy (burning fire, cleansing water, soothing disruption) while shouts do not.

Solution- Make Tempestuous Arias do more. A 20% cooldown reduction is the most important thing to add. Additionally, making the trait also give short (2 seconds) regeneration to allies would allow for synergy with cleansing water, while allowing it to give vigor, would give synergy to Latent Stamina. The might and weakness already granted by the trait are fine. To clarify the cooldown reduction is very necessary, while the regen and vigor would be nice for synergy, but not as vital as cooldown reduction.

3. There is a direct contradiction between the design philsophy of Tempest and the practicality of its tools. It is said to require precise positioning to get channels off, but since the channeled skills happen around you, you are totally wasting your ability to deal damage and support your allies by positioning yourself in an area that makes the overload channels safe to cast. In addition the Tempest already pays a hefty cost of increased attunement cooldown to use an overload. That cost is enough, and the precise positioning requirement makes it too costly. Yes, Tempest can cover channels with cantrips and arcane shield, but that is a bad design choice. Tempest should be able to cover its channels with the tools exclusive to its elite spec, but in its current state it cannot.

Solution- The tempest needs a way to get Stability through traits in the tempest line. There are several ways to do this.

Option 1-Make Tempestuous Aria grant Stability to the Tempest after using a shout (but not grant it to allies allies). Make it 2 stacks and have it last for 5 seconds. Make the trait grandmaster instead of imbued melodies to compensate.

Option 2-Lucid Singularity- Rework so that this trait gives a breakbar to every attunement overload, not just earth. Make earth no longer grant a breakbar without this trait. The -impairing condition durations% can be scrapped, as we can already get something more useful out of geomancer’s training in Earth. This change makes the trait kind of useless to something very useful.

Personally I think Option 2 is a better idea because my other idea already wishes to buff Tempestuous Arias in other ways, and Option 1 combined with the other changes would be too much.

Another nitpicky suggestion is to make latent stamina give 25% endurance to allies instead of 10%. 10% is far too weak, even for an adept tier trait.

I beleive that these solutions will fix the flaws in the Tempest traitline by promoting better synergy with practical gameplay mechanics, and will make the elite specialization more appealing to players in each game mode.

so basicly your not ok with them being balanced ( you made a few ok points ) but you want them completely overpowered

“Make Tempestuous Arias do more. A 20% cooldown reduction is the most important thing to add. Making the trait also give short regeneration to allies would allow for synergy with cleansing water, while allowing it to give vigor, would give synergy to Latent Stamina. The might and weakness already granted by the trait are fine.”

so you want a 20% cooldown reduction, regeneration, vigor, might, and weakness, on shout use, LOL overpowered

also did you forget the devs want this to be SUPPORT spec, not a damage, your point is invalid

Arobain.8274:

so basicly your not ok with them being balanced ( you made a few ok points ) but you want them completely overpowered

“Make Tempestuous Arias do more. A 20% cooldown reduction is the most important thing to add. Making the trait also give short regeneration to allies would allow for synergy with cleansing water, while allowing it to give vigor, would give synergy to Latent Stamina. The might and weakness already granted by the trait are fine.”

so you want a 20% cooldown reduction, regeneration, vigor, might, and weakness, on shout use, LOL overpowered

also did you forget the devs want this to be SUPPORT spec, not a damage, your point is invalid

Water is a support traitline, but it still has damage modifiers in aquamancer’s training and piercing shards, so YOUR point is invalid.

To clarify, I suggest that Tempestuous Arias is given a 20% cooldown reduction at a minimum to be competitive. The regeneration and vigor were merely other suggestions, and seeing that soothing disruptions does the same exact thing for cantrips (although not for allies), I fail to see how that would be overpowered.

Traits are on similar level as the rest of the spec – miserable level.

rotten.9753:

Traits are on similar level as the rest of the spec – miserable level.

I feel like the warhorn skills are mostly fine apart from a few minor tweaks that could be done.

I feel like the shouts in themselves are good utilities, but the tempest design manages to somehow make cantrips even more necessary for tempest’s mechanics to work out well, which I think is poor design. Thats why changing some traits could easily fix that problem and make shouts just as attractive as cantrips.

Honestly, they are completely lost. Latent stamina, earthen proxy, and elemental bastion belong in water, earth, and water lines, respectively. They have absolutely NOTHING to do with the tempest theme.

It is like they are trying to make auras a tempest thing, after already making auras their own thing. The aura theme just seems forced and tacked on, and I don’t think it really works. Isn’t it sad that they have about 2 “aura” traits in basically every line, and still there isn’t a viable “auramancer” build?

Eye of the storm should give shocking aura, but that makes “Gale Song” just a bad version of tempest defense.

Unstable conduit makes NO sense. Auras are defensive, and defensive skills are important to have RIGHT NOW, when I need them, not 5s from now if you just let me finish this godawful long channel and haven’t killed me by then.

Harmonious conduit is worthless – nobody is going to WANT to overload anyway, so why is it important to reduce that CD? It really needs to do more to make overloads more attractive, or have a huge buff on overload power.

Lucid Singularity is the only overload ability I can see being useful, and that just means you are using an overload as a way to gtfo. To that end, speedy conduit could give 5s of super-speed, and overloads would still be “meh.” I guess they don’t want to do this b/c super-speed would make the movement-impairing immunity redundant besides immob.

As you said, some kind of stability would very much help, but I still think overloads would be worse than just continuing to swap through a rotation.

Thanks for your support blackbeard. I think tempest has a lot of potential, but right now the current traitline design completely squanders that potential.

Karl’s traits are just horrible. That water vigour one alone should have gotten him fired.