First, let me preface this by saying I haven’t bought HoT yet (and no, I’m not sure I’m going to) and as such haven’t played the tempest. So if you think that disqualifies me from giving feedback that’s your prerogative and you are free to ignore my post.
However I did watch everything I could find on it from the beta weekend, which wasn’t much by the way, this spec seems to be pretty universally disliked, most played it the least of any spec before throwing up their hands in frustration and switching to another spec, or more often, the Revenant.
And I investigated all that because I really do want this expansion to succeed, I’m no doomsaying hipster who thinks its cool to be disagreeable and unsatisfied. This is not only the first MMO I have enjoyed (and I really enjoy it) but the first I haven’t despised from the perspective of a media artist and designer. But ANet just hasn’t been doing right by it so far, by this time in the vanilla beta I had seen a dozen things that had convinced me to prepurchase the game, I’ve seen no such thing so far, and the tempest has been one of the biggest offenders. In part because of the content of the tempest, but also in part because of how unfitting the base class content meshes with the tempest content. And I have a list of suggestions for that.
1. Revamp less used traits on the base class to reward attunement dedication. From what footage I saw, the fire overcharge was the only one used with the intention of staying in the element after using the overcharge. Why? Fire is the only tree with a trait that rewards you for camping in it, Pyromancer’s Puissance. The base ele needs more traits like this.
- Some good candidates
- Conjurer – Should be rolled in to One with Fire, making room for something new.
- Inscription – Trait supporting condition damage and utility skills for all elements, in the air tree? This trait has never made any sense where it is and as a result never seen any use, put inscriptions somewhere in the arcane tree and give air something attunement dedicated in its place.
- Lightning Rod/Bolt to the heart – These both go with the exact same type of builds and don’t make for a particularly compelling choice, either one could be revamped to be more dedicated to air attunement.
- Diamond Skin/Stoneheart – Cheesiest traits in the game. Either you don’t face an opponent that they work against, and you are worthless, or you do find one, and they are worthless. Either could be revamped as a dedicated earth attunement trait.
- Piercing Shards – Honestly could be amazing if it actually did enough to make staying in water attunement worth its use.
- Soothing Power – Good start, needs to do more for you for remaining in water attunement.
- ALL the ‘training’ traits – None of these do enough for their respective attunements, most are just plain awful. Fire needs to affect conditions, its not a power only tree. Air, 8% critical hit chance? Really ANet? Really? Geomancer needs to affect conditions, it is not only a tanking tree. Water not needs to be so harshly conditional and work with the support idea, not against it.
2. All overcharges should have both offense and utility. Meaning water needs to deal damage, and earth needs to apply bleeds. Obviously they shouldn’t be as offensively based as Fire and Air but without some offense they are never going to feel fun or likely even see play.
3. Overcharges should be more about the prep, less about the cost. Think about DBZ and other anime, and all the epic attacks the characters pull off, the world shaking build up and the pause of brief weakness afterwards. That should be what an overcharge feels like. It should feel epic, and awe inspiring.
To that end, increase the amount of time necessary in an attunement to overcharge up to 20 seconds instead of giving it a 20 second recharge. And for the love of all that’s good add a charge animation, something that builds up then ‘pings’ when you get an overcharge. When an overcharge is complete, there is a brief window where weapon skills from that element are locked, which scales up depending on how much of the overcharge you completed, maxing at five seconds. You can choose to weather this period of weakness or switch to another element that isn’t locked, and intelligent opponents can choose to pressure you, interrupt you, or evade depending on whether or not they want to take advantage of that moment of weakness.
(edited by Conncept.7638)