Guild Wars 2

It’s a net dps loss

Just tested. It deals less damage per second than other classes, and even worse than just normal Fireball + Lava Font.

Basically, it doesn’t offer enough to justify the 4—5s casting time, and then another 5s waiting time when you get into the attunement.

It wasn’t designed to be the highest DPS build. The question that we should be asking is, in terms of group support, survivability, and damage, is this on par with the other builds we have? So far I don’t believe that the damage loss is worth the minimal gains (if any) in the other two areas. Maybe it is because the jungle is harder than previous areas, but it almost feels as though taking the tempest line results in even less survivability than before, with clearly less damage.

Having said that, I agree with your second point.

It definitely has less survivability too. Group support in both PvP and PvE are lacking. Tempest doesn’t provide support, it’s the warhorn that provides support. I wish we can take Warhorn without having to take Tempest.

Sunshine.5014:

It definitely has less survivability too. Group support in both PvP and PvE are lacking. Tempest doesn’t provide support, it’s the warhorn that provides support. I wish we can take Warhorn without having to take Tempest.

I agree with you on that, too. It’s unfortunate because the arcane line is STILL required for vigor on crit. Tempest line has vigor on water but that seems like a waste to go into the attunement just for vigor, and honestly makes no sense for that traitline.

Only thing Tempest has going for it is the Warhorn, specifically the synergy between Earth4 and Fire4. With a good team, you can maintain ridiculously high uptime on all the boons, including quickness.

So… numbers? Because ATM I’m not sure that tempest is a DPS loss. Going with a PVE Fire/Air/Tempest staff build.

A bit about Firestorm: it hits 11 times for 17% more damage than fireball per hit. The important thing is that Firestorm hits 6 times after the animation has been spun up and cast. It is also a whirl finisher, which sends out 8 bolts of whatever field you spin in (little hint, its gonna be fire). So basically it acts like a stronger second lava font that also causes a lot of burning, both by direct action and by the bolts it sends out. The way the DPS rotation works usually goes like this:

Earth Attunement Eruption into Fire, use lava font and arcane skills to blast might. Auto attack after blasting.
Firestorm will be charged immediately after Lava Font recharges, so lay down a second Lava Font and spin up firestorm.
Firestorm’s animation ends about half a second after lava font recharges, follow through with lava font.
You will now be attacking simultaneously with fireball, lava font, and firestorm for the next 5 seconds or so.

Now, I only get out about 3 fireballs per each lava font. So, using my PVP setup (for scale, not for an absolute number), this comes to 7251 tooltip damage per lava font 839 per each fireball, 3 fireballs. I get about 4.5 overload ticks in that timeframe, which does 987 damage per hit with 2.5 seconds of burning per hit, coming to 9175 damage during this lava font, not factoring burning. There’s 0.5 attacks between lava fonts, and then afterward there is 6 attacks of firestorm along with the next lava font and fireballs, coming to 13,173 tooltip damage during this timeframe. But, since we lost half a second on lava font, we can reduce this down to 12779 tooltip damage.

This isn’t factoring in the 30 burn ticks from the whirl finisher + burning, and the additional 11 stacks of might. So, at the moment it looks like there’s three periods of damage: Pre Firestorm which is the same, Firestorm which is 26% more damage, and then firestorm + auto attack which is a 76% increase in damage. Wait, scratch that: direct damage. There is still 30 burn ticks to be accounted for.

So, please tell me how you’re getting lower values.