Need advice for a pve tempest
Yeah, I wrote up a short guide at the bottom of this thread here:
Rehabilitated Elementalist. Now, trolling the Thief forums with my math.
Yeah, I wrote up a short guide at the bottom of this thread here:
Other than the strength runes, that’s basically the build I tried out with the soldier armor/zerk trinket combo (minus the strength runes, they aren’t cheap).
I’m really underwhelmed by the Tempest so far.
If you only “occasionally use the overload skills” you’re not using that fresh air build properly. It’s main purpose is to constantly overload air by using [Fresh Air] to instantly reset the cooldown of air attunement, after which you re-enter air and use it’s awesome autoattack until you can overload air again. The tempest and earth lines are there to provide survivability/utility through auras and boons on auras (60% dmg reduction when you have a frost aura).
Ah ha, the link provided show me bolt to the heart, not fresh air, I’ll try the using fresh air in this case.
If you only “occasionally use the overload skills” you’re not using that fresh air build properly. It’s main purpose is to constantly overload air by using [Fresh Air] to instantly reset the cooldown of air attunement, after which you re-enter air and use it’s awesome autoattack until you can overload air again. The tempest and earth lines are there to provide survivability/utility through auras and boons on auras (60% dmg reduction when you have a frost aura).
He is not using a Fresh Air build. Nor was the link to a Fresh Air build…
Ah ha, the link provided show me bolt to the heart, not fresh air, I’ll try the using fresh air in this case.
Don’t use that with staff. Nothing in air on staff does any reasonable damage; you’ll just be waiting 5 seconds to do any damage everytime the cd resets.
Sorry you find this underwhelming; it’s difficult for me to comment as to why without knowing how you play. All I can say is my experience hasn’t been the same. The stacking AoE damage in fire has been pretty powerful for me.
Rehabilitated Elementalist. Now, trolling the Thief forums with my math.
Advice is not to build Tempest at all for PvE if you want DPS. You’re giving up Arcane’s 2% damage per boon (easily 10%+ damage in a group setting) and superior traits just to overload fire in staff, which is situational as it requires melee range anyways.
Tempest is a plain stinker in PvE.
As with everything in this game, they design something for PvP and PvE is an afterthought.
Advice is not to build Tempest at all for PvE if you want DPS. You’re giving up Arcane’s 2% damage per boon (easily 10%+ damage in a group setting) and superior traits just to overload fire in staff, which is situational as it requires melee range anyways.
Tempest is a plain stinker in PvE.
As with everything in this game, they design something for PvP and PvE is an afterthought.
Except melee range is not situational. I mean, why would it be? If it was situational, then D/D won’t be practical at all, because it constantly requires melee range. Because it’s a ranged weapon, therefore it’s situational?
Okay, so you give up 2% damage increase per boon from arcane. Well, the thing is that Harmonious Conduit gives a flat 10% bonus to damage for 5 seconds after an overload. So theoretically, if you were to do a slow rotation on your attunements, you would always have a 10% dmg increase that is not dependent on a certain number of boons.
Of course, you aren’t going to do that in PvE. You are largely going to camp fire. Which means you have a 10% dmg increase for 5 seconds every 20 seconds. If you take cooldown reduction on fire abilities, this puts your meteor shower at 20 seconds which is the same cooldown as overlord. Therefore if you put a lava font → fire overload → meteor shower rotation, you always get a 10% damage increase to your heaviest hitting fire ability.
So when you compare that to a 2% stacking damage increase that’s inconsistent and situational, they are roughly equal in practice.
Therefore, you really aren’t losing much of a damage increase from dropping arcane. In fact, you’re gaining a huge boost to your damage output from a new ability which does 1,100 dmg a pulse in full beserker (300 less than meteor shower), stacks burn and might on pulse and has the same cooldown as a traited meteor shower.
This doesn’t even factor in the large increase in fury uptime from blasting fire fields and using auras.
The only real con to this new ability is melee range, which isn’t situational anymore than D/D is situational in PvE. It can just make using more difficult at time.
In conclusion, it’s not a plain stinker in PvE. The build I posted does potentially more damage than the traditional fire/air/arcane staff.
Rehabilitated Elementalist. Now, trolling the Thief forums with my math.
I know tempest is supposed to be high risk/reward, but I really can’t stand getting into melee range while having so little base and modified health. Also, I tried it with fresh air and found it far more palatable than before, but I still really don’t like getting into melee range. However, given the mobs’ propensity to jump around and move a lot more, I suppose melee range will have to do for now.
Advice is not to build Tempest at all for PvE if you want DPS. You’re giving up Arcane’s 2% damage per boon (easily 10%+ damage in a group setting) and superior traits just to overload fire in staff, which is situational as it requires melee range anyways.
Tempest is a plain stinker in PvE.
As with everything in this game, they design something for PvP and PvE is an afterthought.
Except melee range is not situational. I mean, why would it be? If it was situational, then D/D won’t be practical at all, because it constantly requires melee range. Because it’s a ranged weapon, therefore it’s situational?
Okay, so you give up 2% damage increase per boon from arcane. Well, the thing is that Harmonious Conduit gives a flat 10% bonus to damage for 5 seconds after an overload. So theoretically, if you were to do a slow rotation on your attunements, you would always have a 10% dmg increase that is not dependent on a certain number of boons.
Of course, you aren’t going to do that in PvE. You are largely going to camp fire. Which means you have a 10% dmg increase for 5 seconds every 20 seconds. If you take cooldown reduction on fire abilities, this puts your meteor shower at 20 seconds which is the same cooldown as overlord. Therefore if you put a lava font -> fire overload -> meteor shower rotation, you always get a 10% damage increase to your heaviest hitting fire ability.
So when you compare that to a 2% stacking damage increase that’s inconsistent and situational, they are roughly equal in practice.
Therefore, you really aren’t losing much of a damage increase from dropping arcane. In fact, you’re gaining a huge boost to your damage output from a new ability which does 1,100 dmg a pulse in full beserker (300 less than meteor shower), stacks burn and might on pulse and has the same cooldown as a traited meteor shower.
This doesn’t even factor in the large increase in fury uptime from blasting fire fields and using auras.
The only real con to this new ability is melee range, which isn’t situational anymore than D/D is situational in PvE. It can just make using more difficult at time.
In conclusion, it’s not a plain stinker in PvE. The build I posted does potentially more damage than the traditional fire/air/arcane staff.
Dagger range is not melee range. Dagger ele has the highest max melee range and it actually allows you to attack away from the reach of most mobs. Fire overload does not.
And the arcane % is not hard or inconsistent. You’ll hev perma might, fury, and swiftness at the very least, add quickness from the chronomancer which they can provide close to 30-40 seconds of, permanent regen from the engineer turret or Glint’s facet or the Druid in your group.
You are virtually eating 3 useless traits and terrible minor traits just for the fire overload, let’s see how many times you complete it against mobs that actually force you to dodge since people whined so much about melee in the forums to the point that they’ve made mobs specifically designed to punish melee (so more people can camp and profit from ranged weapons that carry little risk).
To me it seems like Tempest is terrible for PvE on anything than staff and the staff variant probably cuts even with the vanilla build.
Zenith appears to live in a world where his entire party is perfect and never gets hit by anything. No need for permanent Protection, Healing, Vigor, Regeneration, and so on – just need damage!
Zenith appears to live in a world where his entire party is perfect and never gets hit by anything. No need for permanent Protection, Healing, Vigor, Regeneration, and so on – just need damage!
And you seem to live in a world where others cannot provide those without gimping their damage output like the ele does by going tempest aura specs.
I’m currently playing tempest for the novelty of it but in my opinion running vanilla traits instead of tempest is better.
You often have to break off your overload channel in order to dodge attacks, which results in you not getting the 10% modifier and the extra damage the overload is supposed to provide. The increased cooldown on your overloaded attunement also sucks. If you have to swap out of fire after overloading because of the need of emergency reflects or heals, it will take even longer to return to your damage rotation. In comparison, you have water and arcane, which provide equally strong/stronger (not hard with guardian or revenant in the group) and more reliable damage modifiers and traits that offer better support.
I suppose you can make a decent build that focuses on healing and farting boons instead of doing damage. But, as already stated, there are plenty of other classes that can provide that without having to give up all of their damage. In my opinion you help your (kittenpug) group a lot more by properly playing a staff meta build instead of a build that hits like a wet noodle and helps party members that like to facetank survive 4 hits instead of the usual 2.
(edited by petyr baelish.9675)
Ah ha, the link provided show me bolt to the heart, not fresh air, I’ll try the using fresh air in this case.
Don’t use that with staff. Nothing in air on staff does any reasonable damage; you’ll just be waiting 5 seconds to do any damage everytime the cd resets.
Sorry you find this underwhelming; it’s difficult for me to comment as to why without knowing how you play. All I can say is my experience hasn’t been the same. The stacking AoE damage in fire has been pretty powerful for me.
The fresh Air build’s supposed to be run with D/X.
If you only “occasionally use the overload skills” you’re not using that fresh air build properly. It’s main purpose is to constantly overload air by using [Fresh Air] to instantly reset the cooldown of air attunement, after which you re-enter air and use it’s awesome autoattack until you can overload air again. The tempest and earth lines are there to provide survivability/utility through auras and boons on auras (60% dmg reduction when you have a frost aura).
He is not using a Fresh Air build. Nor was the link to a Fresh Air build…
Oh, I was looking at the OP of that thread.
just a reminder… there are some people who think that “PvE” means “dungeons only.” and they respond under that false assumption.
– The Baconnaire
Dagger range is not melee range. Dagger ele has the highest max melee range and it actually allows you to attack away from the reach of most mobs. Fire overload does not.
And the arcane % is not hard or inconsistent. You’ll hev perma might, fury, and swiftness at the very least, add quickness from the chronomancer which they can provide close to 30-40 seconds of, permanent regen from the engineer turret or Glint’s facet or the Druid in your group.
You are virtually eating 3 useless traits and terrible minor traits just for the fire overload, let’s see how many times you complete it against mobs that actually force you to dodge since people whined so much about melee in the forums to the point that they’ve made mobs specifically designed to punish melee (so more people can camp and profit from ranged weapons that carry little risk).
To me it seems like Tempest is terrible for PvE on anything than staff and the staff variant probably cuts even with the vanilla build.
I think we are splitting hairs and most of this is your subjective opinion which is fine. I also wasn’t implying that the traditional DPS build is now bad or not viable; that there is reasonable objective arguments that don’t warrant a ranking of “terrible” for tempest in PvE.
I also think my point survives your arguments intact. Despite the increased risk of using fire overload, tempest does, on paper, provide more dps potential on paper. Whether or not you think the risk is worth it I think comes down to personal playstyle; I think it does and I have enjoying running so far.
In addition, the only traitline I would consider to be terrible would be the grandmaster line. Aura on overload with synergy with fury on aura in air plus the 10% increase in damage from harmonious contuit buff provide a very useful and strong boost to your meteor shower after you finish your fire overload.
As far as completing it when forced to dodge, I have yet to encounter anything in game that didn’t provide a 4 second window for you to use to complete an overload without getting one shotted with the increased protection on. I think it mostly comes down to knowing what you are fighting and when your window is for overloading and having a fallback like lightning flash to disengage.
But I do agree with your last point. I won’t play anything but staff with tempest, because most of the abilities on staff that are worth using are on longer or equal cooldown to overload, making the cooldown it less painful.
Rehabilitated Elementalist. Now, trolling the Thief forums with my math.
(edited by MadRabbit.3179)
I would never sacrifice Ferocious Winds for Zephyr’s Boon. Fury is such an easy boon to stack for any class, if the ele isn’t doing it by blasting persisting flames, a druid with clarion bond or Herald with facet will be providing the permafury instead at very little cost.
Same goes for swiftness, which is an even easier boon for a group to stack.
My personal suggestions would be for that trait that grants the aura on overload provide groupwide auras.
Make speedy conduit instead of giving redundant swiftness, which is easily gained by other means, give quickness to yourself and allies for X amount of time after finishing an overload.
Latent stamina should happen on any attunement swap, not just water.
Harmonious Conduit’s buff should grant 3 stacks of stability and the damage buff should last 10-12 seconds.
Tempestuous Aria should increase to 5-6 stacks of might and 6-8 seconds of weakness.
Lucid Singularity should apply to allies and grant superspeed.
The other two will become worthwhile once the warhorn isn’t kitten as hell.
As far as overloads, all of them could use adjustment, fire and air a bit more reward for the risk, it’s silly that a meteor shower can be cast from a distance and still does more damage than higher risk abilities.
Fire and air are close to good, but water and earth are huge stinkers. ZERO DPS for 4 seconds for absolutely mediocre effects. That water overload should be on the scale of the guardian’s book elite healing, and the earth overload should apply a block aura to allies so it can be used like the dragonhunter’s virtue.
The shouts are almost as bad or worse than the warhorn, they’ll need to beef up the effects as only the earth one seems worthwhile in PvE
(edited by Zenith.7301)
If you only “occasionally use the overload skills” you’re not using that fresh air build properly. It’s main purpose is to constantly overload air by using [Fresh Air] to instantly reset the cooldown of air attunement, after which you re-enter air and use it’s awesome autoattack until you can overload air again. The tempest and earth lines are there to provide survivability/utility through auras and boons on auras (60% dmg reduction when you have a frost aura).
He is not using a Fresh Air build. Nor was the link to a Fresh Air build…
Oh, I was looking at the OP of that thread.
No worries. It seems half the people here did the same thing. There are two different conversations going on.