Guild Wars 2

Overloads have gone through some serious whack-a-mole balancing since their inception to try and make them useful. When I was thinking about how the most functional build I’ve seen for tempest only uses overload air because fresh air lets you ignore the extended cooldown I came up with a new mole to toss onto the pile.

What if overloads did not have the ‘5 seconds in one element’ requirement and just had independent cooldowns and, if you complete the cast of one, instantly recharged all other attunements?

The idea here is that you would then open up a new playstyle for ele. If you successfully cast an overload you would be able to go to any attunement, even the one you just left, even if it was on overloaded cooldown. This is as opposed to regular ele, which has to cycle attunements on a rotation to be effective.

There would still be drawbacks to this, as you couldn’t just always use overloads due to the cooldowns and getting interrupted means you have to deal with the overloaded cooldown on your current attunement and you miss out on recharging all the others. You also wouldn’t be able to swap as often as the current ele while doing this due to the 4 second cast time on overloads.

The reason why I think overloads need something like this is that the current model assigns them an insane cost, while also imposing massive risk for very little payoff. My idea would allow for a tempest to essentially get a refund on that massive cost as their payoff, as I don’t believe that increasing their power or just tacking on extra effects (swiftness and prot, null slows, stun break…) would result in good balance.