Guild Wars 2

I love elementalist and i cant stop playing it, but seriously, why did they made such a shameful spec?

It really isnt… at all

Because it nullifies dancing through attunements. It is just less intuitive and feels clunky. you also feel as if you have nothing to do as you wait for overloading. Unless you’re a filthy staff user… they havnt changed at all.

Tempest is not bad its just that elementalist are use to swapping spec to get boons and healing. Tempest plays differently than that. You get multiple boons from aura (protection, regen, vigor, fury, swiftness), you have multiple aura (3 magnetic aura) and can heal from aura. It has slightly less survivability than the standard builds but the overloads are helpful for dps when using melee weapons and you have more AE.

It didn’t turn out that bad. The bunker spec for pvp is actually stronger than the whole spec. The staff spec I am running for PvE does more damage than the old meta and it’s an interesting way to play.

But for PvP, it’s still a bunker and nothing new.

And a whole lot of other stuff is a lot stronger.

MadRabbit.3179:

It didn’t turn out that bad. The bunker spec for pvp is actually stronger than the whole spec. The staff spec I am running for PvE does more damage than the old meta and it’s an interesting way to play.

But for PvP, it’s still a bunker and nothing new.

And a whole lot of other stuff is a lot stronger.

You had a go at Bunker Tempest right? It was more of an upgrade than an alternative to the traditional Bunker Ele yeah?

It doesn’t give Elementalist a true new role or at least build upon existing roles like Chronomancer does for Mesmer. It only vaguely represents an Auramancer build with some highly costly Overloads which are dubious on their benefit. Fire is ok, Air is alright, Earth is eh, and NEVER use water. It honestly just is a spec that lacks understanding of elementalist and direction. In all honesty if it was retooled to be called “Auramancer” you wouldn’t be far off on what it does that is somewhat unique.

That said they had so many ways they could do an elite spec. Either with the existing base idea “shouts” and “auras” or with something particularly new. Personally I want mainhand sword, and I think that giving ele a good frontline spec for big groups would be great. Just use wells for the utilities. Another idea is an Ele spec that boosts conditions and applies a lot of them with low cooldowns. Particularly Fire, Bleed, Vulnerability, and chill. Ele has at best dubious Condition options for offense as it is always paired with power or being purely a support role. Though I think they would need to add a new buff to make it so massive condi removal isn’t crippling to such a condi build, maybe a new debuff that shields 1 condi removal?

Almost every skill on warhorn is worse than the counterpart on focus or dagger. the fire skills got nerfed to the point that they are awful, and air #5 is bad as well.

The shouts are very underwhelming. Why doesn’t the air one give an aura? I have been running a reaper and those shouts feel so much more impactful.

Maybe one of these years rebound will be replaced with something that fits the spec.

Brando.3891:

I love elementalist and i cant stop playing it, but seriously, why did they made such a shameful spec?

I think at the source it’s a lack of communication with the community and the concept artists, perhaps a lack of time invested in the fine-tuning of the skills (rebound specifically and warhorn) and a misunderstanding of how the class is played by the best players.

Perhaps 10% of the elementalist like to play bunker builds, I know I don’t; dagger and focus are better offland.

Xillllix.3485:

Brando.3891:

I love elementalist and i cant stop playing it, but seriously, why did they made such a shameful spec?

I think at the source it’s a lack of communication with the community and the concept artists, perhaps a lack of time invested in the fine-tuning of the skills (rebound specifically and warhorn) and a misunderstanding of how the class is played by the best players.

Perhaps 10% of the elementalist like to play bunker builds, I know I don’t; dagger and focus are better offland.

I don’t think the problem was that eles don’t like bunker builds. I like bunker builds, I see their place in the game. But I am confused as to what does Tempest do that base Ele cannot do better? Warhorn just screams of a rushed concept same with overloads. With only 2 skills per attunement and needing only to compete with offhand dagger/focus it is very obvious that it was chosen for these reasons.

I don’t have a problem with any ele build but the pure fact is that warhorn added nothing new to the table, and what they did add was nerfed into the ground. That and being the only spec without actual minors and extremely punishing overloads I think that the whole spec is honestly just a huge miscommunication and a rush job. Minors serve to make attunement’s overloads actually worth it to use and it still isn’t worth it. Look at scrapper and Chronomancer minors and how good they are+how they actually add to the class things that are not specific to only the new mechanics.

Boons on finish/revive (you have a gryo that does that automatically for you), dazes that last longer when applied to enemies and the effect of those same statuses are decreased on you, function gyro and base traitlines that already synergize with hammer for scrapper.

A new shatter/shield, Alacraty when you shatter (huge use out of this regardless of build as lower cooldowns are always good), and time marches on which is faster movespeed and base speed. Not to mention it also synergizes with any other spec.

Tempest at least until the end only has one minor that does a little bit more than providing overload benefits. First and second minors are for overloads and for swiftness on overloads, third one also is mostly overloads but it increases the effectiveness of Protection which I think is a mostly good minor in general. That said, most of the major traits are based on making overloads viable, using the new shouts (without a lower cooldown trait), or buffing auras. Really it is just an “Auramancer” Tempest sounds better but is totally a misnomer on what the class actually does.

This would be less of a problem if the aura traits weren’t so spread out. Earth has protection on aura, Air has fury/swiftness on auras, fire has might and competes with reduced fire recharge, water has powerful auras which allows you to support the team in an auramancer style, except it competes with cleansing water meaning you can’t even be an up front support removing condi from your party if you want to. You would have to burn a shout to do that, and not the air one. Besides the air one, shouts are mostly offensive and the reason cantrips are so successful is that you need them as an ele with light armor and the lowest base hp in the game. Other classes which have light armor can get away with a little less focus on utility escapes because they either have clones/stealth (mesmer) or they have as much base hp as a warrior (necro).

People often complain about cantrips but honestly until ele gets more survivability through health/toughness/different escapes, cantrips will always be top tier. That said, I have ZERO problems with that as if it is effective and fun to play there is no problem.

Iohanna.4863:

MadRabbit.3179:

It didn’t turn out that bad. The bunker spec for pvp is actually stronger than the whole spec. The staff spec I am running for PvE does more damage than the old meta and it’s an interesting way to play.

But for PvP, it’s still a bunker and nothing new.

And a whole lot of other stuff is a lot stronger.

You had a go at Bunker Tempest right? It was more of an upgrade than an alternative to the traditional Bunker Ele yeah?

Yes, I found a tempest staff auramancer build to be a stronger bunker than the old staff bunker with better group support.

But it did take a hit when they got rid of ministrel. Going back to celestial was more of a downgrade.

It’s mostly due to the auras though and less due to the overloads. You have a number of ways to provide auras to yourself and the group via traits and shouts. The auras provide a lot of protection uptime and the percentage increase from tempest traits along with stoneheart amount to a lot of mitigation. That and they heal and grant regen and vigor. You can spec into cleansing water for a lot of condi clear.

Rebound is mostly useless; I ended up going back to gylph of elementals for the earth/water elemental. You can’t really run the heal shout; the current meta is really heavy with conditions, forcing you back to ether renewal. Like, seriously, the build below maxes out on condition clear as much as possible and still wasn’t enough in the matches I fought in.

I think this is what I ended up with. Earthen proxy is now part of the minor; the major replacement grants regen and vigor from auras.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWnMMAVYiNYCWOA0RgFRAzNtGXzrEdgFQFYIAMASgA-TJxHwAGeAA62fAwFAoYZAA

There is actually a lot of potential alternative trait choices. This is geared towards heavy mitigation, a lot of condi clear and a lot of dodges.

Mist form ends up being pretty crucial for securing stomps and rezs. It also adds some interesting utility with overload. If you pop it before the overload, it ensures, at least, 3 seconds of the overload at the expense of canceling the overload when it expires, preventing the payload.

There is some noticeable downsides to this compared to the old build. Mostly, the lack of Armor of Earth and trading out Earth’s Embrace for Elemental Shielding means you will be getting decapped noticebly more, but stuff like Rock Solid and Gale Song help with that.

Rune of radiance also ends up being a very interesting choice.

Here is the thing, you can make working builds that include tempest, as some aspects are strong. However, there are many aspects of the specialization that are just so bad.

What is strong: aura healing, aura cleanse, a few shouts (mostly for traited aura effects), air overload spam is decent in PvE

What is weak: overload mechanics in general, warhorn skills are unfocused and just poor in many cases, most traits besides the “aura traits,” shouts themselves are pretty bad except for the traited aura effects

So yes, you can make a tempest build that works ok with d/d or staff to improve your tanky/support (at the cost of damage, which is a fair trade), but tempest doesn’t have anything NEW to open up new builds. Also, most of the tempest mec,hanics are directly opposed to many built-in traits that rely on swapping into/out of an attunement. These things would need to be amended to improve synergy (perhaps by also proccing them (if active) on overloading). Finally, overload risk/reward is too skewed towards risk making it impractical against foes that aren’t just dumb AI.

It would be interesting if heat sync wasn’t bugged. It just doesn’t seem to do anything.

Tempest is good very good its just melee for the most part and its still a mages type class so it has a harder time doing dmg, high dmg and staying in melee you tend to have to chose one or the other. If you chose staying in melee you lose spike dmg all though your dps is good the hallmark of tempest more of a dps class then a spike dmg class unlike ele who is mostly a spike dmg class.
As for WH its nearly a pure support wepon to use it as a solo tempest its just simply not going to work out a d/f or d/d tempest will out do an d/wh tempest any day when solo play but the wh is great for group play.
You can kind of staff tempest but overloads fill a def/support roll only not the dmg roll that you see them play for d/x tempest.

emikochan.8504:

It would be interesting if heat sync wasn’t bugged. It just doesn’t seem to do anything.

They fixed it 1 or 2 days ago. It now shares might and fury. Still really bad and not nearly worth a 30 seconds cooldown though seeing as we pretty much fart those 3 boons left and right anyway.

First of all Tempest clearly involves major design errors, and if I would been head of that company, I would have reason enough to fire anyone, who is mainly responsible for the tempest design. He obviously has no idea, how that class gets played. I have given Feedback like many others, and most of it got ignored (with the exception of the rebound redesign, which surprised me a lot, that they were willing to change an ability completely from the core). But its a shame, that they didn’t step back from the overload mechanic.
However even with the current overloading mechanic there is a huge design error:
The Water Overload needs a water field. Otherwise, it will always be a noob detector, basically each elementalist, who overcharges water in its current state, doesn’t know its class. And we can agree, that you shouldn’t design spells, so that the best play is, to not use them. Overcharging in water means a longer wait time for another waterfield, this can only be justified if you get in exchange an immediately water field.
Arena net seems not to understand, that healing in this game is done by blasting water fields, and doesn’t require heal stats. Everything which gets effected by heal stats leads just to a bunker role, not to a healer one.
The other core design error is in the new form of Rebound: The heal is far too low, thus the entire effect doesn’t matter in those situations, for which it should be designed. Its only useful for its auras….
The whole tempest doesn’t feel new in anyway. The warhorn cannot in any way compete with dagger offhand (greater mobility, which is one hell of a reason d/d bunker is so strong) or focus (more blasts, more auras, more utilities).
The heal shout is ridiculous week.

Its really a shame, since I want also to play something new, I had to leave my elementalist as a main class, and now having fun on druid, which in some areas feel like a better or at least fresh version of elementalist.

I would be very happy with the state of tempest if the following happened to overloads and shouts:

A.) Instantly available when entering an attunement

B.) Only suffered additional attunement cd if overload was interrupted or channel was not finished.

C.) Overload channeled cast time was reduced to ~2.5-3 seconds

D.) Shouts received a trait that could reduce shout cast time by 20%, preferably added to the Invigorating Torrents trait.

Balance accordingly

“Tempest is bad” because people can’t adapt.

If you can adapt, you’ll see it strangely fits in the current meta better than D/D ele ever could. You have to throw away every idea you have about playing D/d ele to play tempest well. Tbh, it plays a lot more like a necromancer in terms of weight and feeling and intuition, since it’s slower and more strategic instead of fast paced and rotational,

nearlight.3064:

“Tempest is bad” because people can’t adapt.

If you can adapt, you’ll see it strangely fits in the current meta better than D/D ele ever could. You have to throw away every idea you have about playing D/d ele to play tempest well. Tbh, it plays a lot more like a necromancer in terms of weight and feeling and intuition, since it’s slower and more strategic instead of fast paced and rotational,

This is totally a legitimate argument, I mean. It is as if you are arguing that “Well they think it is bad because they don’t know how to play, I know how to play and it is ok”.

Seriously though, you completely disregard any feedback about the class which is generally not fun to play and maybe is only viable or usable in PvP (and likely can’t even keep up with good players of the new elite spec). There is WvW (useless in this mode) and PvE where it is likely that it isn’t viable at high level fractals or raids.

You also argue that it is more like Necromancer but isn’t that a bad thing? If you wanted to play a Necromancer go play a Necromancer, the spec has no business being an Ele spec that tries to be a Necro when reaper exists.

Less of the strawman of the “Players who can’t adapt” and more looking at the actual facts. Warhorn is subpar compared to focus and off hand dagger, and it’s only unique skill to share boons was stripped of all boons except might and fury. Overloads are something you have to pay 3x for a relatively small benefit and bunkering more with regen is really the only thing the spec offers. 1) You pay with 5 second wait time, this makes water overload useless because your team needed healing 5 seconds ago. 2) You have a channel time of 4 seconds, this is a problem without stab and you only get one stack of stab per overload and cannot swap attunements while overloading. 3) After you finish or don’t finish all that your attunement is now on a 20 second cooldown with which you can either attack a few more times in the attunement then swap or swap immediately to get a new set of skills to rotate through. Generally in terms of dps you were able to achieve good amounts simply by swapping. And the only real useful overloads are Fire and Air and that is because of faster stacks of might and vulnerability, that said they are absolutely too risky to use with one stack of stab and the amount of investment you have to put in to use them.

While I won’t say the guy who created Tempest should be fired, I do think that Anet should at the very least get somebody else to do elite specs next time. Preferably somebody who knew what they were doing with the class like with Herald/Scrapper/Chronomancer.

Right now I think a lot of players are hung up on a few issues:

1) They mindlessly follow a rotation and can’t overload because they’re constantly switching attunements.
2) They’re not willing to use anything other than cantrips even though some shouts would work well in their build.
3) They don’t know how to play builds without arcane or water trait lines.

If they can adapt and get around these issues, then Tempest opens up a whole lot of build options.

What clownmug says. I’m not going to argue with the guy that went all logic bomb on me, but I will say that tempest is fun and it works well enough in pvp that I don’t feel as though I’m gimping myself by not running normal ele. Though personally I’ll be sticking to reaper for tournaments and whatnot, but that has more to do with it being my actual main than it being better than tempest.

Loving tempest and warhorn and I fricking HATED the idea when it was spoiled. I was REALLY hoping for rifle for a sort of spell sniper type deal. But after all is said and done I feel like tempest fits right into ele as a 6th spec more than other elites. Like “snug” I guess is what I’m thinking. The warhorn abilities are useful and I’ve been having a blast with scepter/WH fresh air. Haven’t tried it in pvp tho.

Well I will tell you this when I play D/D no warrior can land me an Eviscerate, when I play tempest in that 4s that I am running around like headless chicken, I am like a pinjata that everybody pounds me

No amount of kiting can prevent this at the moment I feel like I am in Lich form the moment people see Tempest animation they switch to me..

They should really change Tempest like you drop the effect somewhere and it does not follow you, they should free us from this 4 s animation lock…..

Clownmug.8357:

Right now I think a lot of players are hung up on a few issues:

1) They mindlessly follow a rotation and can’t overload because they’re constantly switching attunements.
2) They’re not willing to use anything other than cantrips even though some shouts would work well in their build.
3) They don’t know how to play builds without arcane or water trait lines.

If they can adapt and get around these issues, then Tempest opens up a whole lot of build options.

They mindlessly follow a rotation because that rotation is how you maintain DPS in PvE.

What are you going to do, sit in fire and do fire autoattacks on dagger? Bye-bye DPS.

You gotta keep using burning speed, frozen burst to blast, earth 4 to blast again, and switch to air for the only non-garbage autoattack DPS on dagger.

It seems like you are the one who doesn’t have a clue why elementalist can only function by constantly swapping.

It will continue to be the case until the autoattacks on attunements besides fire staff and air dagger aren’t total garbage. Any autoattacks besides those two are a large DPS loss in PvE and doing an overload doesn’t come close to compensating.

And yes, you have to swap attunements to blast your fire fields to proc perma fury from persisting flames for your group. That is why they’re even bringing you.

Right now Tempest only functions as a gimmick bunker pvp spec, complete garbage in any other game format or gear set/playstyle.

How is that not a problem?

I don’t see reaper/chrono/scrapper/dragonhunter/herald being pigeonholed into a single role and a single tank stat combo.

Clownmug.8357:

Right now I think a lot of players are hung up on a few issues:

1) They mindlessly follow a rotation and can’t overload because they’re constantly switching attunements.
2) They’re not willing to use anything other than cantrips even though some shouts would work well in their build.
3) They don’t know how to play builds without arcane or water trait lines.

If they can adapt and get around these issues, then Tempest opens up a whole lot of build options.

Yeah, that MUST be it. It cannot possibly be that the spec has several obvious flaws, that make it difficult to use…

Zenith.7301:

They mindlessly follow a rotation because that rotation is how you maintain DPS in PvE.

What are you going to do, sit in fire and do fire autoattacks on dagger? Bye-bye DPS.

You gotta keep using burning speed, frozen burst to blast, earth 4 to blast again, and switch to air for the only non-garbage autoattack DPS on dagger.

It seems like you are the one who doesn’t have a clue why elementalist can only function by constantly swapping.

It will continue to be the case until the autoattacks on attunements besides fire staff and air dagger aren’t total garbage. Any autoattacks besides those two are a large DPS loss in PvE and doing an overload doesn’t come close to compensating.

And yes, you have to swap attunements to blast your fire fields to proc perma fury from persisting flames for your group. That is why they’re even bringing you.

Right now Tempest only functions as a gimmick bunker pvp spec, complete garbage in any other game format or gear set/playstyle.

How is that not a problem?

I don’t see reaper/chrono/scrapper/dragonhunter/herald being pigeonholed into a single role and a single tank stat combo.

I don’t know how you’re stuck auto-attacking for 5 seconds, I don’t have that problem. Also, if you care enough about might generation there’s Tempestuous Aria.

Axialbloom.8109:

Yeah, that MUST be it. It cannot possibly be that the spec has several obvious flaws, that make it difficult to use…

I’d like to know what these flaws are. Care to list them?

Hello there!

I enjoy this conversation because I have an 80 d/d ele alt (my plan was to get the elite for this alt second) and I want some more info on Tempest. If it does not worth the hassle I will upgrade a different prof first.

And I’m listening….

Zenith, I think most of us were talking pvp. For PvE I don’t think it matters as much considering ele/tempest will probably be pushed into some sort of semi-healer role for raids. Don’t know about super high level faptals though.

Clownmug.8357:

Zenith.7301:

They mindlessly follow a rotation because that rotation is how you maintain DPS in PvE.

What are you going to do, sit in fire and do fire autoattacks on dagger? Bye-bye DPS.

You gotta keep using burning speed, frozen burst to blast, earth 4 to blast again, and switch to air for the only non-garbage autoattack DPS on dagger.

It seems like you are the one who doesn’t have a clue why elementalist can only function by constantly swapping.

It will continue to be the case until the autoattacks on attunements besides fire staff and air dagger aren’t total garbage. Any autoattacks besides those two are a large DPS loss in PvE and doing an overload doesn’t come close to compensating.

And yes, you have to swap attunements to blast your fire fields to proc perma fury from persisting flames for your group. That is why they’re even bringing you.

Right now Tempest only functions as a gimmick bunker pvp spec, complete garbage in any other game format or gear set/playstyle.

How is that not a problem?

I don’t see reaper/chrono/scrapper/dragonhunter/herald being pigeonholed into a single role and a single tank stat combo.

I don’t know how you’re stuck auto-attacking for 5 seconds, I don’t have that problem. Also, if you care enough about might generation there’s Tempestuous Aria.

Axialbloom.8109:

Yeah, that MUST be it. It cannot possibly be that the spec has several obvious flaws, that make it difficult to use…

I’d like to know what these flaws are. Care to list them?

Where to begin…Warhorn abilities are subpar and the only unique one on fire 4 was nerfed to only be might and fury.

Overloads have a 5 second wait time which makes water overload mostly useless because if you needed to heal your teammates they needed healing…five seconds ago. 4 second channel which is easily interruptible and only comes with 1 stack of stab (except for earth overload which gets more). Overloads also have a 20 second cooldown in addition to being generally not as rewarding as you still are channeling for 4 seconds and will get hit for damage/CC or both. Any increases in dps are dubious at best.

None of the spec feels like it synergizes well with the base mechanics of the class unlike say Chronomancer and auras are pretty much the only real build for the spec.

Oh and have we mentioned Tempest just doesn’t feel fun to play? That is the biggest offender imo because you play a videogame to have fun right? If something is not fun to play I would say it isn’t worth playing.

I am talking PvE here:

- The lack of baseline Stability: every enemy and their mum in the new zone has a zillion stuns, pulls, knockbacks, knockups, interrupts, etc. You cannot Overload without taking the Stability master trait, unless you go Fresh Air and like having to refresh a lot.

- The 5 second cooldown upon entering an attunement: This is fine for Fire and Air, but it screws Water and Earth. Water is a heal and cleanse, yet you have to wait 5 seconds to use it, which is ridiculous. Earth is a CC, which would be good for break bars, yet having to wait 5 seconds kills your damage. It is also a blast finisher, that you can never time because you need 9 seconds.

- The 20 second cooldown after attunement: 20 second cooldown on interrupt means you are screwed. 20 second cooldown means many Arcane and Water traits become rubbish.

- Non-instant Shouts: They interrupt Overloading. Rebound also fails to save you due to this.

- Rebound sucks: A small heal does nothing, because the new zone is all about massive multiple hits, not the single death hits of the past. Needs to be instant, 60 second cooldown, and do a better job.

- No Aura on Eye of the Storm: 45 seconds for this?

- Melee Overloads: Using Overloads get you smashed, and a lot of this is condition damage, which goes through your Protection.

- Sceptre sucks: The autoattacks for the Sceptre are the worst attacks in the game. This means 99% of the time you will be using a dagger with the warhorn.

- Warhorn is sub-par for DPS: Heat Sync is weak. Wildfire is a massive static AoE on a long cooldown. Every single mob moves like a trackstar in the jungle, which means your fire carpet is constantly wasted. It also does not benefit from Persisting Flames’ 2 second increase (neither does Fire Overload), nor can Phoenix Blast it. Lightning Orb is absolutely horrendous.

-Trait Issues: Latent Stamina is horrible. Unstable Conduit needs the master Stability trait to work, yet it is meant to syngerise with the master Aura trait. This is ridiculous. No one can take Tempestous Aria, and Lucid Singularly is just too weak.

I have probably missed something.

The only point I can agree with from you or Senario is that overloads are easily interrupted. For PvE I wouldn’t use Tempest outside of open world anyways. Also, you guys know you don’t have to use warhorn right? Most support weapons are subpar.

Clownmug.8357:

The only point I can agree with from you or Senario is that overloads are easily interrupted. For PvE I wouldn’t use Tempest outside of open world anyways. Also, you guys know you don’t have to use warhorn right? Most support weapons are subpar.

Wow…

‘Tempest is bad for open world but your points for open world PvE are wrong. Warhorn is bad but your points about warhorn being bad are wrong’.

Why should I take you seriously?

Tempest isn’t bad for open world and warhorn isn’t bad for a support weapon. Is that simple of enough to understand?

Anyways, I don’t really care about PvE. For PvP and WvW, Tempest functions very well if you know how to think outside the box.

Clownmug.8357:

Tempest isn’t bad for open world and warhorn isn’t bad for a support weapon. Is that simple of enough to understand?

Anyways, I don’t really care about PvE. For PvP and WvW, Tempest functions very well if you know how to think outside the box.

This isn’t an argument that is a legitimate rebuttal to points made about what things are currently not good on tempest. What you are doing is essentially setting up any argument that is not “tempest is great” as “Well you can’t think outside the box” when really you provide no rebuttals on any points as to why tempest functions well in spite of the mentioned flaws.

Please, enlighten us as to why tempest is good because everybody else can’t think outside the box apparently (a huge assumption).

It functions decently enough but it’s boring as could be and feels totally uninspired from a design perspective. After I finished the tempest elite, got my shoulder piece and what not I just logged off and rolled a reaper. Just don’t really see a point to tempest, there isn’t really any noticeable impact on my game-play between tempest and base ele. And with so many more exciting options to play its hard to actually want to play my ele.

Axialbloom.8109:

I am talking PvE here:

A lot of your points are valid, so I will only bring up the few points I have contention with. I’m also answering in the same context.

- The 5 second cooldown upon entering an attunement: This is fine for Fire and Air, but it screws Water and Earth. Water is a heal and cleanse, yet you have to wait 5 seconds to use it, which is ridiculous. Earth is a CC, which would be good for break bars, yet having to wait 5 seconds kills your damage. It is also a blast finisher, that you can never time because you need 9 seconds.

At best, I would ask to have it knocked down to 4 seconds, but I guess I don’t have the same experience or opinion, at least, with staff and in PvE and here is why.

Typically, in PvE, you aren’t doing blasts on water field, but rather fire fields for might and fury. Also, the only reason to swap into water for PvE is to heal. Usually, when you do this in staff, you end up stacking both of your water fields to restore health, because you aren’t blasting them. And both of these are on 20 and 45 second base cooldowns, so the 20 second lock out on water isn’t that much of an issue. Usually, in PvE, I swap into water, cast my heals, then overload without much of a notice in tempo. Now, in PvP, water overload is a huge issue, but that’s a seperate discussion.

Yeah, the blast finisher on Earth is pretty awful, but the Earth overload is far from useless in PvE. Usually, I am overloading it on my way into a fight to stack protection, then laying down my blast finisher or a glyph of storms for blind and then swapping into fire to stack AoEs. The 4 second duration of the Earth storm provides just enough protection uptime to swap into fire and stack lava font and meteor storm before fire overloading.

- The 20 second cooldown after attunement: 20 second cooldown on interrupt means you are screwed. 20 second cooldown means many Arcane and Water traits become rubbish.

Arcane has a lack of synergy with Tempest and it’s pretty obvious it’s intended to be that way and they aren’t supposed to be in the same build. Whether or not this is bad design is subjective.

From a staff perspective, I think the 20 second cooldown is a bigger deal in PvP and less so in PvE, because it mostly amounts to a longer, slower rotation thru the attunements. If you are swapping elements with the intention of overloading each one, the cooldown cycles mean you will always have an element to go into.

As I mentioned before, the 20 second cooldown is less of an issue in staff, because most of your big abilities have cooldowns that exceed that cooldown.

Now, if you are playing D/D with shorter cooldowns and a faster playstyle, yeah these are valid cons, but just because a certain sets of traits doesn’t work well with a particular weapon’s playstyle doesn’t mean its broken as a whole.

- Non-instant Shouts: They interrupt Overloading. Rebound also fails to save you due to this.

I am hoping this is a bug

- Melee Overloads: Using Overloads get you smashed, and a lot of this is condition damage, which goes through your Protection.

My experience in PvE with overloads hasn’t been getting smashed and I think, at best, this is hpyerbolic. I will say that it requires more thinking and more situational awareness, but that’s the nature of the new open world content.

The rest of your points are room for improvement, though.

Clownmug.8357:

Zenith.7301:

They mindlessly follow a rotation because that rotation is how you maintain DPS in PvE.

What are you going to do, sit in fire and do fire autoattacks on dagger? Bye-bye DPS.

You gotta keep using burning speed, frozen burst to blast, earth 4 to blast again, and switch to air for the only non-garbage autoattack DPS on dagger.

It seems like you are the one who doesn’t have a clue why elementalist can only function by constantly swapping.

It will continue to be the case until the autoattacks on attunements besides fire staff and air dagger aren’t total garbage. Any autoattacks besides those two are a large DPS loss in PvE and doing an overload doesn’t come close to compensating.

And yes, you have to swap attunements to blast your fire fields to proc perma fury from persisting flames for your group. That is why they’re even bringing you.

Right now Tempest only functions as a gimmick bunker pvp spec, complete garbage in any other game format or gear set/playstyle.

How is that not a problem?

I don’t see reaper/chrono/scrapper/dragonhunter/herald being pigeonholed into a single role and a single tank stat combo.

I don’t know how you’re stuck auto-attacking for 5 seconds, I don’t have that problem. Also, if you care enough about might generation there’s Tempestuous Aria.

Axialbloom.8109:

Yeah, that MUST be it. It cannot possibly be that the spec has several obvious flaws, that make it difficult to use…

I’d like to know what these flaws are. Care to list them?

Tip, any skill that is not burning speed on dagger is DPS negative compared to the air autoattack. Even fire autoattack is better than drake’s breath.

I know you people from PvP think Drake’s Breath is the bomb, but it’s utter garbage in PvE, as are all the other dagger skills that are not the autoattacks and burning speed.

Tempestuous area is horrendous, it requires you use the shouts which are WORTHLESS in PvE because auras are worthless in PvE except magnetic aura.

You’re better off taking arcane blast and blasting burning speed.

DPS doesn’t matter in PvP because you’re fighting targets which at best have 20k HP so anything seems decently damaging to such low health pools.

nearlight.3064:

Zenith, I think most of us were talking pvp. For PvE I don’t think it matters as much considering ele/tempest will probably be pushed into some sort of semi-healer role for raids. Don’t know about super high level faptals though.

Super high level fractals introduce bosses with 5k armour and 5 millions hp (that’s basically 10+ millions hp for power builds) while at the same time they hit like a fly. In other words, high level fractals promote condition builds while any kind of healer build makes you waste even more time on those massive health sponges.

For a healer role druid is much better since it is a spike healer meaning it can deal damage and heal when it’s needed. Tempest probably can fulfil that role on some level, the problem is that its spike heal, overload water, is hardly on demand unless you literally camp in water attunement which doesn’t bring much damage potential.

Am I misinterpreting here or are you saying WH is a good weapon for PVP? IMO it is by far the worst ele off-hand for PVP. It is so godkitten slow… The skills are only useful for hitting stationary targets. Actually I don’t think the devs ever intended it to be used in PVP. It’s the only logical conclusion.

Clownmug.8357:

Tempest isn’t bad for open world and warhorn isn’t bad for a support weapon. Is that simple of enough to understand?

Anyways, I don’t really care about PvE. For PvP and WvW, Tempest functions very well if you know how to think outside the box.

Clownmug.8357:

Tempest isn’t bad for open world and warhorn isn’t bad for a support weapon. Is that simple of enough to understand?

Anyways, I don’t really care about PvE. For PvP and WvW, Tempest functions very well if you know how to think outside the box.

Why do you always contradict yourself? I think you should just stay away from commenting on PvE.

MadRabbit.3179:

Axialbloom.8109:

I am talking PvE here:

A lot of your points are valid, so I will only bring up the few points I have contention with. I’m also answering in the same context.

- The 5 second cooldown upon entering an attunement: This is fine for Fire and Air, but it screws Water and Earth. Water is a heal and cleanse, yet you have to wait 5 seconds to use it, which is ridiculous. Earth is a CC, which would be good for break bars, yet having to wait 5 seconds kills your damage. It is also a blast finisher, that you can never time because you need 9 seconds.

At best, I would ask to have it knocked down to 4 seconds, but I guess I don’t have the same experience or opinion, at least, with staff and in PvE and here is why.

Typically, in PvE, you aren’t doing blasts on water field, but rather fire fields for might and fury. Also, the only reason to swap into water for PvE is to heal. Usually, when you do this in staff, you end up stacking both of your water fields to restore health, because you aren’t blasting them. And both of these are on 20 and 45 second base cooldowns, so the 20 second lock out on water isn’t that much of an issue. Usually, in PvE, I swap into water, cast my heals, then overload without much of a notice in tempo. Now, in PvP, water overload is a huge issue, but that’s a seperate discussion.

Yeah, the blast finisher on Earth is pretty awful, but the Earth overload is far from useless in PvE. Usually, I am overloading it on my way into a fight to stack protection, then laying down my blast finisher or a glyph of storms for blind and then swapping into fire to stack AoEs. The 4 second duration of the Earth storm provides just enough protection uptime to swap into fire and stack lava font and meteor storm before fire overloading.

- The 20 second cooldown after attunement: 20 second cooldown on interrupt means you are screwed. 20 second cooldown means many Arcane and Water traits become rubbish.

Arcane has a lack of synergy with Tempest and it’s pretty obvious it’s intended to be that way and they aren’t supposed to be in the same build. Whether or not this is bad design is subjective.

From a staff perspective, I think the 20 second cooldown is a bigger deal in PvP and less so in PvE, because it mostly amounts to a longer, slower rotation thru the attunements. If you are swapping elements with the intention of overloading each one, the cooldown cycles mean you will always have an element to go into.

As I mentioned before, the 20 second cooldown is less of an issue in staff, because most of your big abilities have cooldowns that exceed that cooldown.

Now, if you are playing D/D with shorter cooldowns and a faster playstyle, yeah these are valid cons, but just because a certain sets of traits doesn’t work well with a particular weapon’s playstyle doesn’t mean its broken as a whole.

- Non-instant Shouts: They interrupt Overloading. Rebound also fails to save you due to this.

I am hoping this is a bug

- Melee Overloads: Using Overloads get you smashed, and a lot of this is condition damage, which goes through your Protection.

My experience in PvE with overloads hasn’t been getting smashed and I think, at best, this is hpyerbolic. I will say that it requires more thinking and more situational awareness, but that’s the nature of the new open world content.

The rest of your points are room for improvement, though.

- My experience in PvE is doing all 4 new zones. Overloading in Dragon’s Stand is most often a death sentence, and you end up just not using it because it is a DPS loss if all you are getting is the might stacks.

- Opening in Earth means your Fire Overload goes on a 5 second cooldown when you switch, and also means you are now meleeing mobs who fire off multiple zillion damage hits. Now if you mean you are stacking Protection on the way to a fight, that would work.

- You do not swap to water, lay both your fields, then overload ‘without loss of tempo’. That is impossible, because of the 5 second cooldown.

- The 20 second cooldown is an issue because of interrupts. It means you must take the stability trait, because EVERYTHING has interrupt in the new zone.

You know what the best Tempest trait in the new PvE zones is, by far? Persisting Flames. The Lava Font on downing is absolutely critical to using the Tempest abilities. What does that tell you?

Tempest is bad because they shoved it out the door and completely ignored customer feedback.

MadRabbit.3179:

Axialbloom.8109:

- Non-instant Shouts: They interrupt Overloading. Rebound also fails to save you due to this.

I am hoping this is a bug

Nope the lack of synergy between overloads and pretty much every skills (even dodges) is by design and it’s the main thing players have been complaining about since the first beta. If I use tempest I only equip insta-cast skills, everything else I consider it “unusable” .

Axialbloom.8109:

- My experience in PvE is doing all 4 new zones. Overloading in Dragon’s Stand is most often a death sentence, and you end up just not using it because it is a DPS loss if all you are getting is the might stacks.

I have been swapping around in all 3 game modes to play around with Tempest, so I haven’t gotten to last zone. Maybe, my opinions will change at that point.

- Opening in Earth means your Fire Overload goes on a 5 second cooldown when you switch, and also means you are now meleeing mobs who fire off multiple zillion damage hits. Now if you mean you are stacking Protection on the way to a fight, that would work.

Uh, yes, but sort of. The idea is more to ride Earth overload on initial engage so as you approach, you lay down the dust storm, which gives you an additional 4 seconds of protection while you stack your AoEs in fire. Leaves you 1 or 2 seconds out of protection before overloading to get it again and killing the group.

I find that most of my focus ends up being on managing my protection uptime, almost to the point where dropping Air for Earth to get more protection from aura is sounding better and better when solo.

- You do not swap to water, lay both your fields, then overload ‘without loss of tempo’. That is impossible, because of the 5 second cooldown.

I said ‘without much of notice of tempo loss’ as in applying that there is some. I can do math. A drop in the charge time to 4 seconds would smooth out the rotations a lot and remove those awkward pauses. I should add that to my feedback thread.

- The 20 second cooldown is an issue because of interrupts. It means you must take the stability trait, because EVERYTHING has interrupt in the new zone.

I do think this should be part of the minor traits or built into the mechanic itself.

You know what the best Tempest trait in the new PvE zones is, by far? Persisting Flames. The Lava Font on downing is absolutely critical to using the Tempest abilities. What does that tell you?

I couldn’t tell you, because the only time I find myself downing with my Tempest spec is once or twice in new champion fights where I don’t know the mechanics of the AI patterns.

Xillllix.3485:

MadRabbit.3179:

Axialbloom.8109:

- Non-instant Shouts: They interrupt Overloading. Rebound also fails to save you due to this.

I am hoping this is a bug

Nope the lack of synergy between overloads and pretty much every skills (even dodges) is by design and it’s the main thing players have been complaining about since the first beta. If I use tempest I only equip insta-cast skills, everything else I consider it “unusable” .

Well, that sucks.

Tempest is basically a “me too” line for the standard PvE Fire/Air build. Where before we had the general “whatever” options of Water (10% dmg, some healing, aura share) or Arcane (Vigor, Evasive Arcana, some boons) now we also get Tempest as a third option.

If you’re capable of getting in melee some of the overloads do more damage than our autos so you can use them to fill that in. Otherwise it’s the same base class we had before. We don’t have a new role. We don’t have a new play style. It’s just another filler line for the same role and play style we had before.

This is the only sense most people have made out of the Tempest. Tempest as a trait line doesn’t have enough defense to replace Water/Arcane and it doesn’t have any offense to replace Fire/Air. One could argue this is a good thing, because it’s different, but then that’s pretty much ignoring the fact different doesn’t mean useful.

Tempest asks of you to take every trait at once to be viable. It wants you to take it over Arcane (because nothing works with only one attunement specialization) but doesn’t give a reason to. And within Tempest there’s too much conflict. Unstable Conduit needs to be a minor trait instead of Speedy Conduit (which is pretty much plain wasted space) and Hardy Conduit needs to be something more based on your current attunement. The Major Shouts and Aura traits don’t need to be separate spots because shouts and auras resonate with each other, and Elemental Bastion and Imbued Melodies are the only things that make Tempest worth a kitten yet they’re needlessly competing.

Too much conflict. Too much.

I’ll double down and say the two biggest things is making Unstable Conduit a minor trait over Speedy Conduit and allowing Imbued Melodies and Elemental Bastion to work together. Ideally move Elemental Bastion to Master and combine Invigorating Torrents with Latent Stamina, removing the vigor on attuning to waster but keeping the endurance gained when granting vigor.

just wanna add that I am having a BLAST!! playing tempest..

My biggest problem is that the base class was clearly designed with attunement swapping in mind. If you try to stay in one attunement with a scepter you will lose your mind because the AAs are so bad.

So if there is going to be an elite spec that requires attunement camping, there needed to be a MH weapon that would have been better designed for this purpose, as well as traits that give bonuses the longer you stay in an attunement. Even something like the ‘on swap’ bonuses changing to ‘on swap and every 7 (or so) seconds thereafter, while you stay in the attunement’ would have gone a long way to fundamentally making this elite specialization synergize with the class as a whole.

Axialbloom.8109:

I am talking PvE here:

- The 5 second cooldown upon entering an attunement: This is fine for Fire and Air, but it screws Water and Earth. Water is a heal and cleanse, yet you have to wait 5 seconds to use it, which is ridiculous. Earth is a CC, which would be good for break bars, yet having to wait 5 seconds kills your damage. It is also a blast finisher, that you can never time because you need 9 seconds.

This is the problem that I have as well.

How do I know that I will need a blast finisher in 5 seconds?

How do I know that I will need an aura after an overload completes? Aura application should not be semi random like that. at the very least, it should happen at the start of the overload.

Swiftness on overload? totally useless in PvE, should not be a baseline trait.