Guild Wars 2

Ten Ton Hammer published this article about the Tempest. Between the flashy overload attunements, the shouts and the non traditional warhorn it seems to me it’s time to by excited. CHOO CHOO!

http://www.tentonhammer.com/news/guild-wars-2/guild-wars-2-tempest-revealed

Byby scepter fresh air

It be kind of funny if the water overload creates a big enough water bubble to put you in water combat :P

KaneZ.4910:

The utility skills are uninspiring I think, not enough “wow” when I read about them.

Eye of the Storm! – The tempest will call the storm down on nearby allies and himself, breaking stun on anyone affected while granting superspeed.

That’s pretty awesome in my eyes. Stunbreak for your team + superspeed? Yes please!

Those overloads better be awesome because getting locked out of your attunement for 20 seconds is brutal. Does it go on cooldown if you dodgeroll? Can you cast instacast things while overloading? With the amount of interrupts in PvP this is not only going to be situational, it may even be suicidal.

Utilities seem boring although that aoe stunbreak seems neat.
Elite seems incredibly lackluster unless it has a very low cd..kinda expected since we talk about elementalist here
Class mechanic seems.. amazing !! lots of potential.Also i love that we get a control weapon. Im hyped!
Also i bet the air overload thing has to be the weakest or else its gonna be super op with fresh air.It might still be worth running with air just to overload it more frequently?! hmmm

I still don’t like it. Making it flashy won’t make me overlook the ugliness and how overall uninspired and boring the spec is.

Not just a warhorn (and associated blowing animation) but also shouts and being locked out of attunements for a good long while. Ugh.

Wish Karl could see my sad, disappointed face right now.

Guessing you’re rooted while overloading? I’m deeply skeptical about the viability of 3-5 second root in WvW. The second a group sees you channeling you’re going to eat dirt.

I really like the Overcharge idea on your attunements. Well played ArenaNet.

Hmm tempest sounds pretty awesome, still not sure on the warhorn though.

I’ll have to watch the stream. Dagger/Warhorn freshair ele sounds like it will be fun though.

xev.9476:

Guessing you’re rooted while overloading? I’m deeply skeptical about the viability of 3-5 second root in WvW. The second a group sees you channeling you’re going to eat dirt.

You probably aren’t rooted considering this :

Speedy Conduit – You gain 33% bonus movement speed when overloading an attunement.

stof.9341:

xev.9476:

Guessing you’re rooted while overloading? I’m deeply skeptical about the viability of 3-5 second root in WvW. The second a group sees you channeling you’re going to eat dirt.

You probably aren’t rooted considering this :

Speedy Conduit – You gain 33% bonus movement speed when overloading an attunement.

Thanks, I missed that.

Really erks me that Karl pretty visibly went out of his way to not mention scepter to address what a clunky piece of kitten it is.

Also kitten support. We’re already decent at it, why are they giving us more when our main cry for improvements is on damage… half of the garbage I see in this post looks like Im going to have to be surrounded by at least 5 other people to make full effect of it…

How long do you have to be in an attunement before you can overload? If it is only 5s or so then it might still be ok, but I have no intention of sitting in one element for 20s with dagger/warhorn fresh air spec waiting to get charged up.

This is dumbest thing they could have done. We eles already excel at AOE support,damage, and CC. Not only that we also can do many things such as blasting fields in general, group might, and sometimes with clever use of our skill aoe blinds and even downstate rezzes. We don’t need an aoe offhand that will lock us out of our attunment making us into 1 shot trick pony. We already have enough aoe and group support. We already have those extremes. S/F is the selfish version, Staff is the group support version. D/D or d/f can be both, but then the problem is our mainhand weapons set sucks so hard that we are literally locked into water and arcane in pvp/wvw, and in pve even daggers are useless since bolt to the heart was moved to Gm.

Right now instead of having some fancy offhand that will not be used except for in very specific situation, we need scepter revamp, or a new main hand so that we can literally do something else. Even the anet avoids talking about scepter in the Tenton hammer interview because they know how kittenty it is. Also they don’t mention that dagger offhand has some crazy long cd for what it is (earth quake 40+ sec, churning earth ridiculously long cd, RTL patched, updraft 40 sec compare to other ccs, and fire grab 45 sec without trait).

I don’t care if eles can equip some other legendary offhand or something. I’ll still call for scepter revamp, bug fix on our air trait (ferocious winds), and new trait synergy that will allow us to be viable outside of water and arcane.

we are doomed

/sarcasm

There will be cries we are op after the livestream I’d bet all my gold on it

Hanako.1827:

Really erks me that Karl pretty visibly went out of his way to not mention scepter to address what a clunky piece of kitten it is.

Pretty much this. Especially after the Fresh Air build nerf, scepter really needed this kind of boost to make it more viable much, much more than dagger mainhand. Looks like it could be a cool spec, but as someone who got the most enjoyment out of Fresh Air w/ scepter I’m a bit disappointed.

oZii.2864:

we are doomed

/sarcasm

There will be cries we are op after the livestream I’d bet all my gold on it

Definately..i can already see the NERF TEMPEST threads post friday.

Im personally interested in knowing more about the elite.It seems so bad !25% for 1 abilitiy for an elite????Even if its an aoe.
Unless it can be stacked and like 4 elementalists can fully recharge 1 ability of each or something like that? I think i dont really understand how this skill is supposed to work and what will its purpose be.

Hmmmm…. and hmmmm again….

Definitely going to have to watch the stream now, even if it means telling my boss to shove it. XD

Avead.5760:

oZii.2864:

we are doomed

/sarcasm

There will be cries we are op after the livestream I’d bet all my gold on it

Definately..i can already see the NERF TEMPEST threads post friday.

Im personally interested in knowing more about the elite.It seems so bad !25% for 1 abilitiy for an elite????Even if its an aoe.
Unless it can be stacked and like 4 elementalists can fully recharge 1 ability of each or something like that? I think i dont really understand how this skill is supposed to work and what will its purpose be.

If it stacked that would be crazy. I imagine it will work like Ele casts Rebound → Ele casts Glyph of Storms → Cooldown is now 45 seconds instead of 60.

Singularity – We’ll see usefulness. Channeled effect makes it very iffy. It’s clearly designed to support Frontline, but channeling stuff on the front line is usually suicide. Earth sounds like only thing you’d really want to do that with since it seems to have a “Break Bar” like they said. Considering how often you need your attunements in WvW I can’t really imagine this working out too well except for Earth because it’s the least useful attunement for WvW. But locking yourself out of Water when your team needs a refresh or Fire when you need to do damage seems counter productive.

Horn – Toot toot. Basically a field generator on 1h about what I expected. May work out better for D/x play in WvW but already plenty of field generation and blast generators in /Dagger and /Focus. Have to see what the actual ability numbers are. The mobile water field sounds pretty slick though can’t deny that.

Traits – Seems not bad, we’ll have to see how things are really setup. Elementalist really doesn’t have the same survivability to be a close-mid range fighter so without enough traits to reinforce that it won’t work. The 40% reduction with Protection seems a good start.

Shouts – What an ‘effin joke but again as expected. At least they ain’t Mantras. Cantrips still going to dominate a bar especially as a frontline fighter. Rebound is interesting at least, might be a decent one to go in especially if you don’t gotta spec Tempest to get it. If you do it’s a hard sell for one whole specialization choice for one finally decent Elite move.

Avead.5760:

oZii.2864:

we are doomed

/sarcasm

There will be cries we are op after the livestream I’d bet all my gold on it

Definately..i can already see the NERF TEMPEST threads post friday.

Im personally interested in knowing more about the elite.It seems so bad !25% for 1 abilitiy for an elite????Even if its an aoe.
Unless it can be stacked and like 4 elementalists can fully recharge 1 ability of each or something like that? I think i dont really understand how this skill is supposed to work and what will its purpose be.

Best use I can see is for long boss fights, ele pops it, everyone else pops their elite at the start of a fight and then again part way through.

Things like feel my wrath go from 30s CD to 22s, which increases quickness uptime from 16% to 22%.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_the_Trooper

I can hear it now Ele’s condi removal is to good because shouts. Ele players who are fixated with self balance to appear unbiased will say “nerf ele sustain”

The biggest problem I see after reading the article and going through skills and traits is the fact that AoE CC and group support is not rewarding to play for yourself at the moment in pretty much all game types:
>> PvE (open world) – No need to play group support; In dungeons you get yelled at by PUGs when you tactically CC instead of Fire Field + Blast etc.
>> PvP (e.g. unranked arena) – you might do your party members something good, but you lose defense (no Focus and probably no super synergy Cantrips); Welcome to the world of under-appreciated Mesmer game play from Gw1 ?
>> WvW (big groups) – depending on how much choke points really make a difference on the new BL maps, we will have to see if Eles are really wanted to CC chokes or just go “Staff boom boom” in bigger groups which works well now.

Where can the Tempest shine?
With people you know and players you coordinate with (guild groups in all game types e.g.), but in my experience those adventures take a minority of your total game time. In HoT maps in the Maguuma jungle? We do not know how rewarding CC will be in open world content, adventures or against certain monster types.

In a nutshell:
Need to play test to make a true verdict; have doubts about effectiveness of mechanics compared to established meta roles of Eles.

I am not surprised, ele’s getting neat stuff always. But that worries me because they are all focused on some classes while others are just ignored. Each class should have their own dev. 1 dev for 2,3 classes favorizes one. You can’t have 3 stuff and love and balance it all properly.

And shouts for ele…ahh….rune of trooper + cele gear (or even zerker) = true gods.

Tempest is suppose to be close-mid range. I just hope that the overloads have a good range. The data mined I saw on one of the overloads was ~160 range and low damage. Wonder if the damage scaling of overloads will make it worthwhile.

Since tempest is a specialization I wonder what everyone ill pick for their other specializations? Arcane/air will be the best way to reduce the cd of attunement swap that are overload. Fire/air pure dps, Fire/water some survival and damage or something else.

Hardy Conduit – Grants protection when the tempest begins to overload their attunement. This trait can also be bolstered by a specific major trait icalled Earthen Proxy. The effects of protection on you will be increased from 33% to 40% damage reduction.

Oh yea elemental attunement and contingency bolstered

inb4 “omg arcana mandatory”

oZii.2864:

Hardy Conduit – Grants protection when the tempest begins to overload their attunement. This trait can also be bolstered by a specific major trait icalled Earthen Proxy. The effects of protection on you will be increased from 33% to 40% damage reduction.

Oh yea elemental attunement and contingency bolstered

inb4 “omg arcana mandatory”

Considering that arcane is already mandatory and will continue to be mandatory, your joke is terrible.

Worst of the specs I’ve seen so far, at least from the general explanation given (will need to wait to see actual numbers and effects). We are already getting a bad deal here in that we can’t use the new weapon with all of our builds, like most of the other professions can (ex: guardian can toss longbow on any build, as long as it is ‘dragonhunter’, same with the others). We on the other hand will only be able to dagger/warhorn or scepter/warhorn, and of course no swap. As a staff player it is really depressing.

Hell, even engineers have a better deal with their hammer as they can still mix it up with kits and stuff.

Speedy Conduit – You gain 33% bonus movement speed when overloading an attunement. Similarly to Earthen Proxy, you can also enhance this trait by equipping the Lucid Singularity trait, which heals you every second and reduces the duration of incoming inhibiting conditions by 100%

inb4 “nerf ele sustain bro”

The tempest looks awesome, guys, and I wasn’t even particularly excited for warhorn.

PlatinumMember.5274:

oZii.2864:

Hardy Conduit – Grants protection when the tempest begins to overload their attunement. This trait can also be bolstered by a specific major trait icalled Earthen Proxy. The effects of protection on you will be increased from 33% to 40% damage reduction.

Oh yea elemental attunement and contingency bolstered

inb4 “omg arcana mandatory”

Considering that arcane is already mandatory and will continue to be mandatory, your joke is terrible.

Was it a joke or prediction? It’s a prediction as I have said before this reveal today. I’m just foreshadowing the cries of the forums.

edit: arcana is not mandatory anymore this has been discussed a lot water most agree but not arcana.

what the showcased traits and soldier runes allow for is to drop water or arcana, build diversity here we come.

The water overload is interesting. Cast all of your water heals then overload for some regen and another big heal. wait 20s and do it again. The traits that are know for tempest are mostly defensive. I can see the tempest specialization replacing water/earth/arcane for one of my defensive specs.

Hanako.1827:

Really erks me that Karl pretty visibly went out of his way to not mention scepter to address what a clunky piece of kitten it is.

Also kitten support. We’re already decent at it, why are they giving us more when our main cry for improvements is on damage… half of the garbage I see in this post looks like Im going to have to be surrounded by at least 5 other people to make full effect of it…

For all we know they could be reworking or improving Scepter and so it doesn’t, at this time, need discussing.

Ragnarox.9601:

And shouts for ele…ahh….rune of trooper + cele gear (or even zerker) = true gods.

Cause we weren’t already doing it with Cantrips, Regen and Cleansing Water? lol…

oZii.2864:

Speedy Conduit – You gain 33% bonus movement speed when overloading an attunement. Similarly to Earthen Proxy, you can also enhance this trait by equipping the Lucid Singularity trait, which heals you every second and reduces the duration of incoming inhibiting conditions by 100%

inb4 “nerf ele sustain bro”

Hope some of these traits might break up some of the dependance on water/arcana, we’ll see.

While it will be god mode in pve, in pvp the entire elite spec is shut down by mantra of distraction.

Kodiak.3281:

Ragnarox.9601:

And shouts for ele…ahh….rune of trooper + cele gear (or even zerker) = true gods.

Cause we weren’t already doing it with Cantrips, Regen and Cleansing Water? lol…

Yea but all cantrips are selfish and so are their traits.Shouts might have good offencive or defencive potential that is shared (based on their numbers of course).Condi clear that is shared could be the icing on the cake
I for once would love to use a non selfish utility on my ele

So far initial thoughts are disappointment. Not being able to attunement swap for ~20sec sounds horrible. Channeling it sounds worse. Further even if they make it good enough it sounds like something you’d prefer to take with staff not dagger/warhorn.

The shouts all look meh to bad. But won’t know for sure of course till we see numbers.

I really hope they pull this off but am having a difficult time imagining it.

Can anyone explain how does this overload mechanic exactly work?

Thief’s steal and thief’s pistol 4 too

I think cantrips will be mandatory for tempest. You would be insane to try to channel a 5 sec skill without armor of earth or mist form. There is this thing called Mesmer that can interrupt you from 1200 with a skill that is instant and has no casting animation.

I think I’ll stay with d/d where I know my skills are going to be reliable. The flashiness of the tempest channels are just going to be a giant kill me sign to stun lock slayers like thief and mes

Avead.5760:

Yea but all cantrips are selfish and so are their traits.Shouts might have good offencive or defencive potential that is shared (based on their numbers of course).Condi clear that is shared could be the icing on the cake
I for once would love to use a non selfish utility on my ele

Yea Elementalist is definitely one of the most selfish classes in the game.

I’m sure glad they addressed the lack of Support on an Elementalist.

atreyu.9624:

Can anyone explain how does this overload mechanic exactly work?

So you’re in Fire Attunement (F1). You press F1 again and it begins to channel while overloading. While overloading you pulse AOE Burn and Might around you. At the end of the channel, you explode leaving an AOE Firestorm on the ground. Fire Attunement now goes on a 20 second cool down so if you leave Fire Attunement you can’t return for 20 seconds.

The flashy animations are going to be a giant kill me sign for stunlock slayers like war thief and mes.

When I see a solar nimbus on my screen that looks Captain Planet taking a radiation bath in the center of an exploding nuclear reactor, I know who is going to eat my bulls rush > 100 blades

lordhelmos.7623:

While it will be god mode in pvp, the entire elite spec is shut down by mantra of distraction.

how do u even know that is the case without any insight of the specc? Lol. Ur Just making stuff up now and throwing at the fact he does not have a Sword, lmfao you have no idea what will and will not counter it til the preview goes live.

Reaper will be SLow as hell and shut down by merely being ranged and capable of kiting, people will still be using it in pvp and it prolly still work in a way, Just because ONE proffession counters it, doesnt make it useless Everything NEEDS to have a counter.

Mist Form would interrupt the channel as well, which means you’d still lose the attunement, correct? Lightning Flash would be a better option, but that’s more for “getting out of red circles” than preventing interruptions (current usage case: Meteor Shower).

Unless self-interrupts don’t apply the penalty, Mist Form wouldn’t work. But yeah the only overcharge that doesn’t REQUIRE Armor of Earth/stability support would be Earth. Or, well, running dungeons, you just have to be smart about it.

My primary concern about Tempest is that it seems to be made for PBAOE…but eles are still squishy as hell. The only storm to really support that is Earth.

Kodiak.3281:

atreyu.9624:

Can anyone explain how does this overload mechanic exactly work?

So you’re in Fire Attunement (F1). You press F1 again and it begins to channel while overloading. While overloading you pulse AOE Burn and Might around you. At the end of the channel, you explode leaving an AOE Firestorm on the ground. Fire Attunement now goes on a 20 second cool down so if you leave Fire Attunement you can’t return for 20 seconds.

Don’t forget if you get interupted full cd. Luckily interupts are hard to come by and are in no way easily spammable.

Drayos.8759:

lordhelmos.7623:

While it will be god mode in pvp, the entire elite spec is shut down by mantra of distraction.

how do u even know that is the case without any insight of the specc? Lol. Ur Just making stuff up now and throwing at the fact he does not have a Sword, lmfao you have no idea what will and will not counter it til the preview goes live.

If you get interrupted the attunement goes on a 15 to 20 CD, luckily for ele. Interrupts are not very common in guild wars 2.

Drayos.8759:

lordhelmos.7623:

While it will be god mode in pvp, the entire elite spec is shut down by mantra of distraction.

how do u even know that is the case without any insight of the specc? Lol. Ur Just making stuff up now and throwing at the fact he does not have a Sword, lmfao you have no idea what will and will not counter it til the preview goes live.

Calling it now though, tempest will be interrupt food until changes are made months after launch. Right now armor of earth and mist form are the only skills giving you a safe channel and is rather save those for safe stomp/res.

D/d will live on though. I will have fun wrecking pve with this spec. Tempest will be the penultimate speed clear boss