Hello all, I am an Elementalist who strictly pvps in spvp. I am unsatisfied with the current design of Overloads due to them being easily countered and also rather useless since they end up locking our class out of an attunement for far too long. Something must be done about overloads or we may as well start to disregard their existence in high level spvp play.
I would like for you to rate my idea im about to present you, this is my vision for the new and improved overload.
Picture an overload like a super ability, in order to use a super ability you must reach a certain threshold by performing a specific task (street fighter anyone?). Each attunement has their own unique way of unlocking their overload. Fire could require a certain amount of burn tics, water could require that you heal your allies a specific amount of times via active heals, and so on. Each attunement has some sort of requirement via skill usage to unlock its overload, make sense? Scrap the additional time an overload locks you out of an attunement after use.
Now let’s say that threshold bar which unlocks an overload is filling up in fire for example, its a fourth of the way full but the elementalist decides they need to leave the fire attunement for a different attunement. The progress which has been made to unlock an overload should NOT be lost once leaving an attunement, instead the progress that had been made is saved and then can be continued on once the user re-enters the attunement. Since the progress is not lost the amount of time it may take to unlock an overload could be extended for the sake of balance.
Once an overload is capable of being unlocked I believe an animation should queue both the user and the opponent that the overload is now active and ready for use. The fire and air overloads should not be channels, it makes sense for water and earth overloads to be channeled skills (because counter play is a good thing) as long as they provide strong support capability but if a channeled skill; should not extend much longer than a second. I currently find the water and earth overloads very underwhelming and think a new method of support could be implemented when it comes to these abilities. We dont need another heal in water and we already provide a great amount of protection from swapping into earth near allies. ( no elementalist will go with out the arcane line in a serious spvp match) Rather than having the fire and air overload provide damage via long channel time execution these abilities should be reworked so they may be used in a more timely fashion. Please keep in mind that abilities which take 3/4ths of a second or longer to cast are usually very easy for an experienced player to counter or dodge.