Guild Wars 2

This is my overall thought process on the Tempest, how ANET should handle the balance, and the concerns people are having for it.

When Anet created the specializations they had 2 thoughts in mind. First, is how they can make the class feel different while maintaining its core mechanics. Second, how can they give new roles to each class.

With those 2 concepts in mind I feel they hit the nail on the head. Tempest feels similar to an ele, but offers something a bit different. Anet said themselves they wanted to give a frontline support role to the ele. That is where they failed.

Traits

If you look at the traits of the Daredevil, Berserker and Reaper compared to the Tempest and Dragonhunter you will see a difference.

The first 3 specilizations I just mentioned all have traits that compliment the class as a whole, while tempest and dragonhunter have traits that make using their new weapons and utilties a requirement.

One line in the tempest traitline is focused on warhorn, another is focused on overloading and the final one is focused on using shouts.

Tempest as Frontline

I keep seeing arguements that tempest has to compete with staff and staff outshines it in almost every aspect. I agree with that statement, but its a narrow-minded way of thinking.

If anet wants to create a successful frontline ele, they should focus on the things that it can do that other classes cannot.

Tempest is good at giving auras and buffs to frontline through shouts, and I feel that should be a good center-focus on the future of the tempest.

The lack of water fields makes investing in healing power a requirement to upkeep ally health. If they want the healing support to be there, anet needs to increase the base heal from the skills and lower the affects of healing power scaling.

The lack of stability makes it hard to put a tempest in the front and makes “Eye of the Storm” and “Imbued Melodies” almost a requirement from a large scale wvw perspective. Stability will also give more reliable overloads.

Auras should be given on every shout. This helps give tempests its own identity and helps to justify using them over a staff elementalist.

Tempest as a Whole

Overall the tempest is too defensive. I think increasing the base damage of warhorn skills is good in the long run.

Overloads need a bit more fine-tuning, but I think stability is a huge factor. For example, they can change “Unstable Conduit” to give the aura while the overload is cast and change “Elemental Bastian” to auras you apply give 2 stacks of stability for 5 seconds. That way you will always have stability when you overload if you take those 2 traits.

Tempest is very ally-oriented and lacks the self-buffs that I feel is necessary in pvp.

I think it’s all a lot simpler than that. Close range and support are both themes that have been done to death with Ele, so Tempest as a close-range support bot was a failed concept out of the gate.

Even if Overloads were instant-cast, Tempest would still have been poorly-received because of this basic failure to define a new Ele playstyle.

So they really have to go back to the drawingboard on this one, while also keeping most of the animations as they are, because they’ve left the customer feedback loop so late in the process.

My view is either the support has to go, or the close range has to go (or both). There’s a bunch of ways either of these things could be done while preserving art assets, eg: making overloads move as AOE fields/storms in the player’s direction after casting, effectively making them usable at close and medium range, bumping up the ranges on warhorn skills and re-coding some of the support skills.

It just strikes me as odd how the tempest has so few build options, particularly with regards to traits. In most of the other elite specs you can see three clear lines along the traits that open up different playstyles. Often through a power, condie, and defense option. With tempest it’s kinda just support, support, support. And certainly none of it is so drastic as changing the core functionality of basic mechanics like the dare-devil’s dodges.

Also still bugs me how the name is so out of sync with the the playstyle that they’ve developed for the spec. A tempest is by definition a violent storm, and the spec is so heavily focused around healing and support. But I suppose that’s a tangent.

It was probably iterated over and over again without changing the name.

rotten.9753:

It was probably iterated over and over again without changing the name.

Which would be an odd decision considering how intent they’ve been on upholding “themes” with other elite specs.