I was one of the stronger opponents to Tempest during beta. A lot of my opinions still stand about the overall design and mechanics; however, I’ve accepted it’s here to stay, so I won’t waste any more time sharing those. There is a number of things I was wrong about now that I have had time to play it for a prolonged period of time and experiment with builds. I’ve gotten a more balanced opinion on the spec, so here is my feedback. Mostly going to focus on the negative, because the point here is to improve the spec.
1. Warhorn is kittening awful. I’ve not even going to try to make suggestions about how to improve it. It’s so awful on paper that I haven’t even bothered to work it into a build. Plenty of feedback in like dozen threads on the first page of the forums, so won’t go into it.
2. I find that staff ends up being the most viable for tempest, because it has the most abilities with cooldowns that exceed the overload cooldown, even after cooldown reduction on specific attunements. Even more so, these are the abilities that are the most valuable, like static field, gust of wind, magnetic aura and both water fields. In fact, honestly, these abilities are the main reasons you swap into air, water or earth, so getting locked out of these attunements for 20 seconds is manageable. On the flip side, dagger/dagger, which works off a mechanic of flipping quickly through attunements and using multiple abilities on short cooldown gets penalized the most by this, particularly if the elementalist specs into cooldown reduction. I don’t really know how to fix this; dropping the cd to 15 seconds might help, but then again, the divide between long and short cooldown abilities is so great that it doesn’t really do anything. It doesn’t do much when 3 of your abilties are under 15 seconds and the other 2 are over 20.
3. It would be nice to see the trait elements that are absolutely essential to successfully pulling off an overload without dying (protection on overload, stability on overload, swiftness on overload) built into the mechanic itself and the traits leveraged with other bonuses that give the spec a much needed increase in power.
4. It would also be nice if, at least, one grandmaster trait, provided some type of utility that increased damage for usage in PvE. Lucid Singularity could stand to go away; it only has value in PvP and nobody is going to take that over Element Bastion, because you can’t play Tempest as anything else except a bunker without ending up in a ball in a dark corner, wrapped in a blanket and sobbing uncontrollably, thanks to all the power creep of the other elite specs. Element Bastion provides some usefulness in PvE, but you aren’t going to run the shouts necessary to get full value out of it. All the shouts except for Feel the Burn have no value in PvE compared to taking Ice Bow, Gylph of Storms, a signet or a cantrip for increased survivability and mobility when pulling off overloads.
5. The blast finisher component in Earth overload is absolutely useless and here is why. We don’t have an instant cast utility skill that applies a field that we can use to combo with the overload. Literally, all of our fields are in other attunements and their duration makes it mathematically impossible to cast, swap attunements, charge the overload and then complete it’s cast time in order to hit our own field. The only value would be using it to hit another person’s combo field which to successfully do would require coordination over teamspeak. Even then, it’s difficult, because most combo fields have cast times while most finishers are instant. Coordinating a blast finisher with a cast time longer than the cast time of most combo fields is hard. Getting rid of it and replacing it with blind on pulse or increasing the protection duration to 2 seconds so you get stacking value with each pulse of the overload would make it much stronger.
6. The heal and condi clear on water overload needs to be increased in order to really make it worth using in PvP. In my experiences, the heal and condi clear per pulse just can’t keep up with the amount of damage and conditions being thrown around right now.
7. Air and Fire are pretty great. No real complaints there, but Air is kind of weird. It’s weird to have a damage focused overload in an attunement that largely provides control utility except for mainhand dagger. Particularly with a weapon like staff when the attunement is pretty much all about blinds, knockbacks and AoE dazes. It’s hard to justify sitting in the attunement for 5 seconds and do mediocre damage just to overload for damage and those situations where the crowd control is useful are rare in PvE. The only time I really use it with staff is when I am in air attunement already from traveling in open world and run into something with it off CD.
8. The design of Latent Stamina is in direct competition with the spec’s core mechanic. Does taking a trait that gives 3 seconds of vigor and 10 endurance on swap into water make much sense when the core mechanic increases the attunement cooldown by 20 seconds? The answer is no, Karl. No, it doesn’t.
9. Gale Song could stand to have some short amount of protection added to it. Edited: Actually, forget that. Just add an aura to Eye of the Storm so it procs the aura traits. It’s currently the weakest shout, besides Rebound.
10. Tempestous Aria is kind of in a weird place. Vigor and regeneration has so much value in PvP, it’s hard to take it as trait. In PvE, only one of the shouts provides enough value to give up an utility slot for.
11. Rebound is just impractical. The margin of error is so high that it ends up being an AoE aura on a very long cooldown. It would be great if we can scrap it all together and replace it with some kind of elite spec that adds some actual burst damage value to PvE.
12. Stability on shout would be huge. The biggest con I faced when I worked on builds for PvP is my traits and utility choices left me with very little stability, which was pretty bad for a bunker. Facing off against a juggernaut flamethrower engineer who is slowly widdling you down while decapping you constantly while his own stability leaves you with no real way to decap him is a pretty miserable experience.
And that’s about it. All in all, I don’t think it turned out that bad. I think does provide the potential to improve existing builds. However, so much else is way stronger right now, the spec often feels very underwhelming in comparison.
(edited by MadRabbit.3179)