The other week I thought of an interesting Elementalist mechanic and thought it may fit what the Tempest could be. So now I decided I would share this idea and somewhat of a prediction.
When I think of Tempest, I think of storms. And it may just be the Glyph of Storms, but storms make me think of AoE. I also don’t think we are getting an F5 skill, at least not as a new attunement of anything crazy like that.
Mechanic
My idea for the Tempest instead involved a meter that would go next to or above the attunements. After swapping to an attunement, after a 5 second delay, the meter would begin to fill with the attunement. After 45~ seconds, the meter would fill completely and get a bit of animation to it (e.g. fire meter would have burning effect). This meter would do two things:
- Based on how full it is, it will give you a stat buff varying with attunement. So Fire would get Power, Air would get Precision, Water would get Healing, and Earth would get Toughness. So at level 80 a full meter may give +200 or such to a stat to give a bit more benefit for staying in a single attunement for a while.
- But this would still fit in with Attunement Swapping. When you do swap attunements, the bar is instantly drained and used to create an AoE around you. The size and power of the AoE depends on how full the bar was. So the AoE from a 10% Tempest Bar would be rather small and weak compared to a 100% one. The AoEs would also vary with attunement; with Fire being damage, Air being knockback, Water healing allies, and Earth dealing lesser damage and crippling.
The idea is to give a new dynamic to swapping by encouraging players to stay on attunements longer for the buffs and the AoEs when they do swap. So instead of swapping to Earth for 6 seconds to cast a couple spells, you may want to wait a bit longer until the AoE charges first. I could also see it working well with Traits. For example, there could be one to remove the 5 second delay and increase charge rate (lowering the 45~ seconds to 30~). Another could add effects to the AoEs like burning for Fire, Regen for Water, Bleeding to Earth, and Stun to Air.
Skills
As for the new skill set, after giving it some thought I decided Mantras would be a good fit for the Elementalist. Mantras need to be charged before they can be used, but this could tie in well with our attunement swapping. And by that I mean the effects of the mantra could vary depending on the attunement you charge them in. For example, let’s say there is a Mantra that fires a projectile; I could charge it in Water, swap to Fire, and then active it and get a Chill projectile (Water) instead of a Burning one (Fire).
Weapon
As for the Weapon, I am going with Sword as that seems to be the case. At first, I was disappointed when I heard this, but then I realized it may not be a melee ranged weapon. We have seen the other mage professions use close combat weapons for ranged magical attacks (e.g. Necro’s Axe, Mesmer’s Greatsword). So my guess is the Sword will be a mid-range weapon, around range of scepter, but with a focus on AoE attacks. Some skills may require a shorter range or benefit from being closer though, but I think this would fit the sword nicely. Also, I expect there will be at least one skill were we stab the sword in the ground for an AoE.
Anyway, that is my Tempest idea/prediction. It may not be the best idea, but it certainly would be an interesting change for the Elementalist.