Guild Wars 2

Be prepared for the worst. In this case, that we don’t get any changes at launch.

But don’t stress because I’m sure they will do Balance patches once they figure out what to do with Tempests.

Just be prepared and I wouldn’t start spamming boards with sad QQ boards about it but wait until we get an official response what are they planning to do with us. And if official response is in the lines that they’re OK with the Tempest then start whining.

If it stays mostly unchanged from the last beta it may be to powerful. The QQ more about tempest not being the all in dmg spec or you know having an “sword” for main hand (something that dagger for the most part covers and most likely will never have other then an off hand sword spec one day). Simply put unless they add in a sword main hand or any type of main hand for ele spec / tempest your going to see QQ.

We can only hope… May the changes be forever in our favor! (^____^)

Jhoul.6923:

We can only hope… May the changes be forever in our favor! (^____^)

I’m excited too for Nov. 20th

I think for launch at the very least we can expect changes to earthen proxy and latent stamina, since Karl indicated he was working on them.

If there’s a heat sync or air overload nerf though, I’m afraid Ill even lose rational thought for the good of the tempest, since those are the two best things about the spec.

Nabuko Darayon.9645:

Be prepared for the worst. In this case, that we don’t get any changes at launch.

But don’t stress because I’m sure they will do Balance patches once they figure out what to do with Tempests.

Kind of how they have done a great job at making all kinds of ele traits and utilities viable after 3 years, leading to such build diversity!

What was that? You are telling me that eles have been pigeon-holed into the same build since launch (except when they nerfed that build and failed for over a year to make anything else even semi-viable, only to reinstate that build b/c they were at a loss on how to fix the class)? No it can’t be, Arenanet knows EXACTLY what they are doing with the class. Look at such recent changes that completely fixed such glaring issues, like adding 1 extra stack of vuln to shatterstone. With one simple stroke they took a skill that was completely useless and made it…still completely useless. And by golly, look at all those GREAT traits within every line, that see SO MUCH USE! They haven’t had to fix tempest because they are just SO ADEPT at not designing elementalist aspects that are complete dog-crap.

Honestly, don’t hold your breath. Just move onto another class (basically every other specialization brings very compelling value-proposition) that Anet has most of a grasp on how to develop for. They are completely lost when it comes to ele, and because tempest is built on that foundation, my prediction is that they will continue to bung it up.

BlackBeard.2873:

Nabuko Darayon.9645:

Be prepared for the worst. In this case, that we don’t get any changes at launch.

But don’t stress because I’m sure they will do Balance patches once they figure out what to do with Tempests.

Kind of how they have done a great job at making all kinds of ele traits and utilities viable after 3 years, leading to such build diversity!

What was that? You are telling me that eles have been pigeon-holed into the same build since launch (except when they nerfed that build and failed for over a year to make anything else even semi-viable, only to reinstate that build b/c they were at a loss on how to fix the class)? No it can’t be, Arenanet knows EXACTLY what they are doing with the class. Look at such recent changes that completely fixed such glaring issues, like adding 1 extra stack of vuln to shatterstone. With one simple stroke they took a skill that was completely useless and made it…still completely useless. And by golly, look at all those GREAT traits within every line, that see SO MUCH USE! They haven’t had to fix tempest because they are just SO ADEPT at not designing elementalist aspects that are complete dog-crap.

Honestly, don’t hold your breath. Just move onto another class (basically every other specialization brings very compelling value-proposition) that Anet has most of a grasp on how to develop for. They are completely lost when it comes to ele, and because tempest is built on that foundation, my prediction is that they will continue to bung it up.

I am having Serrated Stones, Inscription, Conjurer, and Elemental Surge in mind. Pretty much everything that is not related to cantrips.

Alekt.5803:

I am having Serrated Stones, Inscription, Conjurer, and Elemental Surge in mind. Pretty much everything that is not related to cantrips.

As far as bad traits:
Fire:
- Conjurer is 100% useless, fire aura is worthless
- One with fire – it gave less might than burning fire did pre-nerf, on a more restrictive condition. 2 might for 10s on gaining a Fire Aura? At optimal usage (D/D swapping to fire every 10s using only RoF and getting a fire aura from leap-finishing ring of fire) this trait is worth 4 might….
- Pyromancer’s Puissance – this is just straight worse than the other GM’s. Persisting flames gives more dps, and blinding ashes is decent defense (but still needs to be per-target), while this only caters to pve players who want to camp fire and not explore class mechanics like blast-finishers on fire fields (to make more might that is aoe and share fury). This should have its own theme.

Water:
- Piercing shards: this ONLY works with conjure builds, and only in PvE. On the whole, damage while in water is just pathetic, and even 20% is laughable. Doesn’t even synergize well with staff or scepter.
- Soothing power: This is just pathetic. Heal ele wasn’t really a thing before, and def. isn’t now with druids around. Plus, cleansing water gives more total benefit by mitigating more damage with cleanses than such a buff to a weak passive heal.
- Powerful aura: This would be a good trait, but it is not build-defining like other worthy GM’s, especially since the auras that can be shared with the trait are so limited.

Air:
- Inscription: Glyphs are just bad, and the trait doesn’t even give you much for them (esp. given their long CD’s). 3s of prot? 1 stack of might? You could take this in the past with the glyph heal to get perma-swiftness in a strange pve build, but being in air you could just run around in air with 25% movespeed now.
- Air GM’s – These aren’t bad, but they aren’t really all that different. Your options are: damage, damage, and damage. You just pick whichever one gives you the most of it.

Earth:
- Serrated stones: this is just pathetic. Give it a way to bleed outside earth, or apply another condi. Cond builds don’t take this b/c 20% duration on a condi we have only partial access to isn’t very good, and 5% damage is irrelevant on condi builds. DPS builds don’t maintain enough bleeding to care about 5% damage
- Rock solid: This wasn’t really taken much at Master-level when stability didn’t stack. 1 stack for 2s just isn’t enough. It should either be 5 stacks for 2s or 1 stack for 5. With 1 stack, you can’t even secure a stomp in a teamfight.
- Diamond skin: Not that this trait is unusable, but it is one of the best examples of terrible design. It either allows you to hard-counter condis, or is just 100% useless, which is neither fun to play nor fight against.

Arcana:
- Arcane Abatement: Useful in PvE, but they need to give it the same treatment as thief and apply some effect when you aren’t taking fall-damage.
- Arcane resurrection: Because I want an aura after I already exposed myself for 3-5s to res someone, during a time when I am trying to cover myself and recover. Think about how good protective reviver would be if it just knocked back and blocked projectiles AFTER a res, and didn’t give those boons to boot.
- Elemental surge: This gives so little for how limited arcanes are. Also, having arcanes give condis on-hit makes 0 sense, as they only work in crit builds. Logic fail
- Bountiful power: 2% damage per boon can’t even compete with the might you get from evasive arcana (as party-wide 3 might is more total damage), ignoring the other benefits of EA.

The underlying problem:
- Baseline survivability is terrible, weapon and utility defense are limited and on rediculous CD’s. 90% of survival comes from stacking sustain traits in water/arcana, making them required in every pvp build that is viable. This survival is 80% just healing and cleansing like crazy, meaning that little hard-mitigation is available. Combined, this means you can only make tank builds that stack heals from water/arcana.

Tempest does nothing to switch up this dichotomy. If you don’t take water/arcana you are going to be just as exposed to burst and condis as every other non water/arcana build. Sure, you could do decently on certain tempest builds during BWE3 against enemies who had no idea what you could do or how to counterplay it. Give it 1 week and people will just laugh when they see a tempest, and proceed to demolish you. You team will ask you to just play base ele b/c then you provide more support. Trying to build dps will be as succesful as staff or fresh-air marauder ele is (not successful at all)

I’m still hoping they sneaked in some overload animation changes. Less overused emotes, more AtlA style fire spin kicks and avalanche surfing. Hope dies last

Water and Arcana need a hard nerf.
Baseline sustain need a big buff. Every weapon needs an innate way to handle bursts from Thief, Nerco and Mesmer for a dozen of seconds without having to trait heavily into Arcana and Water.

And fix Signet/Glyph/Arcane/Shout/Conjure. What Ele needs is better baseline survivability and low cool down defensive utilities. Reduce the dependence on Water/Arcana will open up a lot of build diversity and make fewer people rage on bunker Ele.

Sunshine.5014:

Water and Arcana need a hard nerf.
Baseline sustain need a big buff. Every weapon needs an innate way to handle bursts from Thief, Nerco and Mesmer for a dozen of seconds without having to trait heavily into Arcana and Water.

And fix Signet/Glyph/Arcane/Shout/Conjure. What Ele needs is better baseline survivability and low cool down defensive utilities. Reduce the dependence on Water/Arcana will open up a lot of build diversity and make fewer people rage on bunker Ele.

Yeah. The elementalist would become a completely different class, and still strong like mages should always be.

Sunshine.5014:

Water and Arcana need a hard nerf.
Baseline sustain need a big buff. Every weapon needs an innate way to handle bursts from Thief, Nerco and Mesmer for a dozen of seconds without having to trait heavily into Arcana and Water.

And fix Signet/Glyph/Arcane/Shout/Conjure. What Ele needs is better baseline survivability and low cool down defensive utilities. Reduce the dependence on Water/Arcana will open up a lot of build diversity and make fewer people rage on bunker Ele.

This is exactly the problem ele has which i dont think devs realize. I said this awhile back but im starting to think its worthless even posting on this forum when devs never really check it out and give their feedback. Ele will continue to have low build diversity if it doesnt have more baseline damage mitigation

BlackBeard.2873:

Nabuko Darayon.9645:

Be prepared for the worst. In this case, that we don’t get any changes at launch.

But don’t stress because I’m sure they will do Balance patches once they figure out what to do with Tempests.

Kind of how they have done a great job at making all kinds of ele traits and utilities viable after 3 years, leading to such build diversity!

What was that? You are telling me that eles have been pigeon-holed into the same build since launch (except when they nerfed that build and failed for over a year to make anything else even semi-viable, only to reinstate that build b/c they were at a loss on how to fix the class)? No it can’t be, Arenanet knows EXACTLY what they are doing with the class. Look at such recent changes that completely fixed such glaring issues, like adding 1 extra stack of vuln to shatterstone. With one simple stroke they took a skill that was completely useless and made it…still completely useless. And by golly, look at all those GREAT traits within every line, that see SO MUCH USE! They haven’t had to fix tempest because they are just SO ADEPT at not designing elementalist aspects that are complete dog-crap.

Honestly, don’t hold your breath. Just move onto another class (basically every other specialization brings very compelling value-proposition) that Anet has most of a grasp on how to develop for. They are completely lost when it comes to ele, and because tempest is built on that foundation, my prediction is that they will continue to bung it up.

Just because you roll the meta zerker build that’s been forced upon us doesn’t mean everyone else sees Eles like that.

Nabuko Darayon.9645:

BlackBeard.2873:

Nabuko Darayon.9645:

Be prepared for the worst. In this case, that we don’t get any changes at launch.

But don’t stress because I’m sure they will do Balance patches once they figure out what to do with Tempests.

Kind of how they have done a great job at making all kinds of ele traits and utilities viable after 3 years, leading to such build diversity!

What was that? You are telling me that eles have been pigeon-holed into the same build since launch (except when they nerfed that build and failed for over a year to make anything else even semi-viable, only to reinstate that build b/c they were at a loss on how to fix the class)? No it can’t be, Arenanet knows EXACTLY what they are doing with the class. Look at such recent changes that completely fixed such glaring issues, like adding 1 extra stack of vuln to shatterstone. With one simple stroke they took a skill that was completely useless and made it…still completely useless. And by golly, look at all those GREAT traits within every line, that see SO MUCH USE! They haven’t had to fix tempest because they are just SO ADEPT at not designing elementalist aspects that are complete dog-crap.

Honestly, don’t hold your breath. Just move onto another class (basically every other specialization brings very compelling value-proposition) that Anet has most of a grasp on how to develop for. They are completely lost when it comes to ele, and because tempest is built on that foundation, my prediction is that they will continue to bung it up.

Just because you roll the meta zerker build that’s been forced upon us doesn’t mean everyone else sees Eles like that.

In pve or the zerker meta build i think staff tempest may out do staff ele by means of fresh air and air overloading. It becomes one more pAoE with added burst dmg for your team. If heat sink stay all boons too you will find tempest swap into WH to keep boons rolling (all though they have got to fix that for all boon sharing or pve is going to be a joke more so then it is now lol.)

BlackBeard.2873:

Air:
- Inscription: Glyphs are just bad, and the trait doesn’t even give you much for them (esp. given their long CD’s). 3s of prot? 1 stack of might? You could take this in the past with the glyph heal to get perma-swiftness in a strange pve build, but being in air you could just run around in air with 25% movespeed now.

Glyphs are underrated. In particular, Glyph of Storms is just fantastic and Glyph of Elementals is very versatile.

That said, I’d love it if Inscription gave something other than Swiftness for Air. As you point out, Swiftness is pretty much pointless if you already have the Air specialization and are in air. I wonder if Fury might be better? Or maybe Superspeed?

BlackBeard.2873:

- Serrated stones: this is just pathetic. Give it a way to bleed outside earth, or apply another condi. Cond builds don’t take this b/c 20% duration on a condi we have only partial access to isn’t very good, and 5% damage is irrelevant on condi builds. DPS builds don’t maintain enough bleeding to care about 5% damage

Bleeds outside of Earth would be fantastic.

BlackBeard.2873:

- Rock solid: This wasn’t really taken much at Master-level when stability didn’t stack. 1 stack for 2s just isn’t enough. It should either be 5 stacks for 2s or 1 stack for 5. With 1 stack, you can’t even secure a stomp in a teamfight.

I wonder if 1 AoE Stunbreak + 1 Stack of Stability for 2 seconds might be better.

BlackBeard.2873:

- Diamond skin: Not that this trait is unusable, but it is one of the best examples of terrible design. It either allows you to hard-counter condis, or is just 100% useless, which is neither fun to play nor fight against.

I kinda agree. It sounds really cool, and then you realize that Eles have the lowest health and HP pools and that almost all significant condi applications come with a direct-damage component as well, making it unsatisfying to use much of the time. Meanwhile, foes will be confused about their conditions not showing up when the effect is active.

Plus, it’s not like we lack for condi removal. Eles are actually spoiled for it, to the point where I get irritated when playing other professions that don’t have as much,

BlackBeard.2873:

- Arcane resurrection: Because I want an aura after I already exposed myself for 3-5s to res someone, during a time when I am trying to cover myself and recover. Think about how good protective reviver would be if it just knocked back and blocked projectiles AFTER a res, and didn’t give those boons to boot.

Yup: this should grant the auras as you start the revive, not when you end it.

BlackBeard.2873:

- Elemental surge: This gives so little for how limited arcanes are. Also, having arcanes give condis on-hit makes 0 sense, as they only work in crit builds. Logic fail

I agree that this should have a little something extra, but the condi application is actually fine, at least conceptually. Take a look at which conditions we get: Burning, Chill, Blind, and Immobilize, only one of which scales off Condition Damage (and Burning deals decent damage even when not condi speced).

BlackBeard.2873:

The underlying problem:
- Baseline survivability is terrible, weapon and utility defense are limited and on rediculous CD’s. 90% of survival comes from stacking sustain traits in water/arcana, making them required in every pvp build that is viable. This survival is 80% just healing and cleansing like crazy, meaning that little hard-mitigation is available. Combined, this means you can only make tank builds that stack heals from water/arcana.

Tempest does nothing to switch up this dichotomy. If you don’t take water/arcana you are going to be just as exposed to burst and condis as every other non water/arcana build. Sure, you could do decently on certain tempest builds during BWE3 against enemies who had no idea what you could do or how to counterplay it. Give it 1 week and people will just laugh when they see a tempest, and proceed to demolish you. You team will ask you to just play base ele b/c then you provide more support. Trying to build dps will be as succesful as staff or fresh-air marauder ele is (not successful at all)

Agreed entirely.

Nabuko Darayon.9645:

Be prepared for the worst. In this case, that we don’t get any changes at launch.

But don’t stress because I’m sure they will do Balance patches once they figure out what to do with Tempests.

Just as I’m sure they will do balance patches to make eles not reliant on water+arcane+cantrips once they figure out what to do with elementalists, right?

Nabuko Darayon.9645:

Just because you roll the meta zerker build that’s been forced upon us doesn’t mean everyone else sees Eles like that.

Sorry for not being clear, I am talking about PvP/WvW. In PvE, the bar for what is “viable” is MUCH lower. I am pretty sure someone leveled 1-80 by killing enemies with nothing but warrior’s traited dodge-roll.

That being said, I DO understand that different traits/skills cater to different modes (due to differing needs and priorities). In my assessment, I take both into account: If it brings something good to at least 1 game-mode it has value. When a trait/skill/specialization is universally bad across the board though…that is a major problem.

Oh so we are at this stage already?

I really like the optimism of some people:

“Hey guys, wait for reveal, war horn will be awesome”

Then it was:

“Hey guys, don’t knock it until you try it. It will be good at BWE1.”

Then:

“Wait guys, don’t judge, now with the BWE1 feedback it will become so awesome!”

Then ignored feedback:

“Hey guys, I know BWE2 didn’t have much changes, but we can only judge the final product.”

Now after BWE3, the knowledge that only minor changes will be made (as per developer post) people are already saying we can’t even complain of a final product?

News flash guys, what you get on the 25 is the product that is “worth the expansion price”, so if it is crap (which currently it is) we have all the right to complain about it.

The developers kittened up on the Tempest, it is crap. And I already anticipate this to you that this elite specialization will continue to be crap.

From day one people told the developers they were doing it wrong and what they were doing only created a piece of crap that would compete for the same spot of base elementalist and not open new build diversity, much less does it give the elementalist the tools to survive the new meta. Developers knowingly ignored said feedback.

And for the folks who are here saying “but you don’t have to play meta, you can play however you want.”

Sure you can, but come back with that thought after you are called a “free kill” class in PVP or kicked out of dungeon / fractals / raids simply because of your class choice. I spent long times like that when playing as a ranger and I see these days coming for the elementalist.

Well based on the update notes: invigorating torrents.

We got the potential for the condition removal we wanted, and it could possibly open up shout support builds a little more than I had originally hoped since with cleansing water, and shouts and soldier runes, it will remove 2 condis per shout.