Guild Wars 2

BlackBeard I’m disappointed to say has most likely nailed it, as usual. I wouldn’t get your hopes up.

As Xillllix pointed out, Fire traits need an improvement more than Air which already brings more to the table for an elementalist than fire, particularly in PvP and especially a Tempest.

Also I personally would rather see Warhorn Fire/Air tweaked over the already amazing Focus but that may just be me and my love of Warhorn, both as it stands (air knockdown, water skills, earth skills) and conceptually for Tempest.

Elementalist was meta, is meta, and continues to be strong right now… in narrowly defined scopes, though you get mavericks like Alekt being successful with deviant earth shield shenanigans. This is what underpins the limited (significant and useful) buffs you’re likely to see, or not see, as the case may be.

This is personally frustrating for me as I adore GW2. It has amazing PvP mechanics with wonderful class concepts, but it does fall short as above and as many others have smoothly and understandably articulated in various other posts across the forum.

Yeah it’s dragon’s maw, and I believe Skyline Crash is right – sometimes the visual doesn’t play, which is extremely annoying as you get slammed on your kitten consistently before you realise what’s happened.

I’ve had this happen too many times myself.

Viktor, excellent battle wizard. I’ve been trying to get a look to suit the tempest shoulderpiece, and this is what I’ve come up with most recently – I’ll consider the outfit temporarily finished once I get the ley armor boots.

Added a bonus image of the pose he got stuck in after dying like an honest, defiant tempest, blowing his warhorn.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Having fun? You know, the main point of doing something?

+1

It’s also not an ineffective class. It is certainly not perfect either but suffice it to say, Tempest is fun and therefore worth playing.

I liked the bit where you suggest that heartseeker spamming thieves are effective.

That is not how competitive sPvP works, and will result in dead thieves unable to move around and decap points.

Conjure Lightning Hammer also helps a fair bit if you want to mindlessly thomp around as an imitation of Thor.

It hits hard and the auto attack chain blinds foes!

Plus it is quite the manly weapon.

Monk runes proc healing when hit and the outgoing healing to allies isn’t to be sniffed at. I’ve been having success with them.

Your rune suggestions however totally have merit and I’m sure would bring success to Tempest in PvP – I’ve been eyeing Durability runes myself, I’ll probably test them out on Tempest this weekend.

I didn’t say Tempest was the go to solution here, I’m simply saying Tempest can 1v1 a DH.

Yeah, you are correct in that Tempest is better suited to a team fight but this does not invalidate it’s ability to 1v1 a DH if it has to or chooses to, for whatever reason.

Celestial Tempest especially will generally never die vs a DH 1v1, especially running focus/warhorn offhand with Aftershock as a shout. The downside is that celestial Tempest will also not really kill the DH either, as the DH defense and healing even on a marauder amulet can out sustain a Tempest with this setup who cannot comfortably overload. If the Tempest owns the point in conquest and can avoid the DH’s on point trap, this is viable, especially if the Tempest can rely on an ally rotating to kill the slow moving DH who won’t be able to retreat in time – in fact, a DH on an effective team won’t solo assault a point and a Tempest on an effective team won’t really solo hold a point either so this hypothetical situation is unlikely in competitive pvp, but it’s true nonetheless.

Anyway my original point in this thread was don’t bring dagger offhand to a 1v1 with a DH and expect to win, instead use your mobility to rotate elsewhere that you can be useful instead of dead. If you want to 1v1 the DH with a hope of success, bring focus offhand or warhorn.

blubberblasen.3901:

do not use tempest LoL
play classic dd ele
armor of earth -> walk in -> teleport out -> kill him -> gg

This is one way to get murdered vs a competent DH; classic dd is still very vulnerable to the amazing longbow damage.

Also, Tempest is totally fine for 1v1 against DH.

I wouldn’t engage – without focus/warhorn for reflects, projectile immunity and straight up damage immunity they are going to tear you apart more often than not, especially when they F1 pull you into stacked traps. Their damage is well beyond the domain of classic d/d sustain.

DH is very flavour of the month currently, because it is not hard to be very effective with it due to it being an absolute power house; so yes, you will continue to see a lot of them.

I’ve been playing DH a lot myself this last week to verify the situation from their perspective. I have an absolute blast dominating most situations I come across on it, especially when I target individuals for my thief companion to +1. Swift deaths everywhere from 1200 range, and if I get into trouble… f1 pull into my traps, and then Heavy Light knockback them through the trap again for even more spike damage.

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJBIhdSfJ0fJ25A4gJwhJWeAM3J7l9zSMECC7AhAwBYDC-T5wHwA/2fAwDAoYZAA

I run a similar trait line up in sPvP, but I use rune of the monk to give my healing more oomph as my auras give regen, and my dagger/warhorn water attunement gives me 3 heals, and a 4th if I’m truly desperate and use overload water.

I sometimes swap Tempest Defense with Aeromancer’s training, depending on what I’m up against. Having Cyclone on a ~16s cooldown for example is just great vs revenants resurrecting allies with infuse light and so on, and the low cd on a manual shocking aura works wonders too.

Here’s a scenario I often find myself in:

Brawling on point, say by myself or with an ally vs 1-2 others and, oh kitten, here comes the ever so popular at the moment dragon hunter. Swap to water, Tidal Surge (knock back current people to interrupt/shove them a little off point), Aftershock! for Magnetic Aura, regen and vigor, Water Globe for moving water field, blast it with frozen burst, swap to earth, blast it again (move with it) with sand squall (which gives you another magnetic aura, so you don’t immediately melt to the dragonhunter/any other ranged being thrown at you – in addition to protection and extending boon duration even further! [specifically vigor and regen]), turn around so you’re facing the point, dust storm (to blind anyone now attempting to melee you or on the point), air attunement, shocking aura, and the attempt an overload if it’s safe.

Alternatively instead of going air at the end you can burning speed for damage + evade frames and then follow that up with dodging for your life. Sometime during all of this, you either stop being focussed because your comrades turned up and helped eliminate the enemy, you’re not being focused because they have switched focus to your allies (time to unleash overload air!) – or you may be dead, because you got overwhelmed and possibly should have rotated off point.

If you feel very fancy you can try to blast Water Globe with Aftershock! but when the enemy is raining fire on you, and with the moving water field and the delay on Aftershock!’s blast effect… I have not found this to be practical at all.

I used to run Armor of Earth so as I could get a ‘guaranteed’ or close enough overload off on a point, but I’m more in favour of running Lightning Flash now as per the linked build because I’ve lost the mobility I’m so used to from playing classic d/d pre HoT. It also helps me manoeuvre up to ledges in a pinch.

Also I’ve been playing with Rebound!, but I’m not as of yet convinced it’s better than the mobility provided by FGS, so that’s a variant I sometimes run too.

As for sigils I run energy + X, I’ve yet to decide what goes best here. Since I am mostly blasting my water field to stay alive these days, and as I don’t have evasive arcana to easily blast wildfire, and also since I’m not running might granting cantrips (which has been removed from the game entirely now) I find my might being either low or non existent – hence I’ve been experimenting with sigil of battle.

Unfortunately in my experience this trait is completely overshadowed by Invigorating Torrents and Harmonious Conduit so, no from me.

Actually it offers Magnetic Aura which no other offhand does, and a water field, which no other offhand does – they are both fantastic support (the aura skill more for it’s boon duration increase and aoe protection – but it goes well with ‘powerful auras’ if you’ve gone that route).

I’m not saying warhorn is in an acceptable spot overall, but I think you’re selling it short all the same.

Considering that the same dev who lead development on Dragonhunter and Daredevil also did Tempest, and they received post BWE3 updates and Tempest did not (though we did get earthen proxy baseline and the invigorating torrents traits super last minute, both of which are amazing) I would hazard to guess that anet plans to say something about Tempest in the not too distant future.

Call me optimistic.

PS please show warhorn air and fire some love!

I’m begging here.

Dastion.3106:

My biggest gripe is that since I haven’t fully unlocked Herald I feel like I’m being inefficient by using Legendary Dragon.

Being level 80 and only having two skills on my bar isn’t very appealing. The fact that the empty spots insist on flashing at me every few seconds makes it that much easier for me to ignore the skills for now – it’s annoying.

Yeah, slotting Herald before it’s fully unlocked prompts the game to be extremely obnoxious.

“Hey there… noticed you forgot to slot some skills? Don’t worry, I’ll pulse flash consistently forever until you do something about it.

Oh, what’s that, you can’t?

GUESS I’LL KEEP DOING IT ANYWAY IN CASE YOU SOMEHOW FORGET YOU’RE NOT RUNNING FULLY SLOTTED UTILITY AT LEVEL 80 LIKE AN IDIOT, EVEN THOUGH YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT"

Yeah… I know… can you stop flashing every 2 seconds, its’s not helping my headache caused by the hero-point spawned champion that stomped my face into the floor.

Elementalist is fantastic – if you enjoy it, by all means stick with it. Tempest is a lot of fun too.

I’m not saying that absolutely everything is perfect, but it never is for any class in gw2; and it’s all subject to potential change via patches anyway.

With elementalist you can be a traditional staff wielding ranged wizard, or a kitten scrapping battle wizard – or anything in-between. And on Tempest the auras and Overloads are a lot of fun. If being an awesome wizard appeals to you, I can recommend elementalist whole heartedly!

The long term meta is yet to be established since HoT’s launch if you’re looking for a ‘sure bet’ class, but elementalists are far from useless in groups at the moment in my experience.

As said before, Earth and Water are lovely on warhorn – fire and air not so much.

Edit: Though I’ll admit Cyclone is nice for interrupts. That’s about the only genuinely appreciated skill between fire 4, 5 and air 4, 5…

Ah, I’m running D/W with F/A/T traits (heh) myself – though honestly, I may drop fire as it’s a fresh air build and Earth might see more mileage for me. Still testing really.

The fact that I have less than 300 condi damage with the current setup further diminishes the potency of fire really.

choovanski.5462:

. winning is in the attitude you take.

Just so – have fun and relax a bit more.

Focus is better overall for missile defence if you only consider the weapons themselves, absolutely, however neither Swirling Winds nor Magnetic Wave are auras, and auras have a lot of synergy with Tempest builds which is why I prefer running Warhorn for it at the moment.

Also the Warhorn method of reflecting missiles gives you further protection duration, on top of increasing all current boons’ duration, which is nice. And I much prefer what Warhorn offers in Water compared to what focus gives me in Water – and since I run healing power in my set up, this works well for me. This is straying off the the thread a bit now though.

I like some of your ideas but honestly I feel that Aftershock is okay as it is, blast finisher and magnetic aura and respectable damage modifiers – makes it worthy of the cooldown.

In conjunction with warhorn, it’s an easy access to ~10s of missle reflects which is wonderful.

… yeah, I know, Warhorn. But the above works and I’m still trying to make Warhorn work on my ele, so the above scenario isn’t uncommon for me in ‘oh bugger’ situations with ranged foes.

Honestly I’d rather they paid attention to the more glaring Tempest problems than Aftershock – that’s my point here.

Fashion Wars can be pay to win, it’s true.

And they are absolutely serious.

Cloud Windfoot Omega.7485:

Ryld.1340:

grifflyman.8102:

Each class seems to have much more survivability without requiring must have traits.

Hello. Elementalist here. Would you like to revise that statement?

just faced an ele that i went to town on, never missed a ingle hit with hundred blades, and and wailed on him and it only took 10% of his health while i was in berserk

no one killed him the whole match and we even 3v1 against him at one time

so i disagree with revise

You said “without requiring must have traits”.

If we take your anecdote as reliable, then the Elementalist almost certainly had ‘must have’ traits to even have a hope of making this scenario a reality – Tempest’s Earthen Proxy, Earth’s Geomancer’s Defense, Earth’s Stone Heart, probably water traits for healing, and given that you said “only took 10% of his health”, hell, he probably had Rite of the Great Dwarf active from a Revenant, and the fates themselves probably intervened, and I imagine you were wearing a Settler’s amulet or possibly no amulet at all! Perhaps you were suffering from ‘Weakness’ and ‘Blind’ conditions.

Please think carefully before you make such sensational comments – basic research would have improved your meta knowledge (and thus PvP competence!) and possibly even enlightened your woefully ignorant perspective.

I love the varied and tricky to traverse maps myself, very interesting and very rewarding when you can successfully navigate them eventually.

Dastion.3106:

I love the Rev concept and I’m playing mine. But I’m in the process of unlocking the Glint Legend and doing so makes the design flaws glaringly obvious. Here I am at level 80 and I can’t even use my Legendary Dragon stance because it’s incomplete until I get 100 or so more HP. With my Mesmer I slotted a few Well’s and filled the rest with other skills – I had a full build no problem. But with my Revenant I’m forced to run an incomplete skill bar that constantly flashes as me demanding I select skills which I don’t have.

The Revenant design has no nuance and there is no saying that’s a good thing. Just because many players mindlessly conform to a meta on their professions (“the illusion of choice”) doesn’t mean it’s okay to shoehorn a profession in to that.

As another poster said, you do yourself no favors defending such design. There is literally no reason they couldn’t have had 4 utilities per Legend and a set of 4 neutral utilities.

The only explanation is lack of development time. Also – the proof is in the silence on the subject. This issue has been brought up several times before and all you’ll see is a select few Rev players blinded by the new profession hype disagreeing. Roy has outright refused to address the concern and it’s really saddening.

This summarises the issue perfectly.

They’re referring to the fact that the elementalist will have specced into cleansing water – you remove a condition when granting regeneration to yourself or an ally.

Thus the ‘condition cleanse for stability trade’ comes from the master traits in tempest, harmonious conduit for stability on overloads (1 application mind, therefore 2 CC will nail the tempest if this is their only defense) or invigorating torrents to give vigor and regeneration (and thus condition cleanse with the above water trait).

It’s also worth noting that the tempest will not have access to Powerful Auras (aura share) for spreading self-only auras using this cleansing technique, making it more self sustain than team support.

Magnetic aura is one of the few good things about the very underwhelming warhorn, thanks for pointing it out. It lasts for 5s on a 30s cooldown, and we also have Aftershock! shout for another 5s magnetic aura on a 45 seconds cooldown that yes, the elementalist can chain together. This is a very specific use of the skills though, and of course forces the Tempest to run warhorn and Aftershock!.

Blackbeard has done a stellar job of pointing out the Tempest weaknesses in this amusing thread about auras, I recommend giving his post more of a read through and trying to apply some of it in sPvP.

Even roll a Tempest yourself and experience it first hand, you’ll see.

I also don’t understand why it’s condition damage. I’d much rather see boon duration, aura duration or… almost anything else really.

As Ryld pointed out the Runes of Radiance are way more tempting for Tempest, due to the big Aura theme

. I currently run rune of the monk in sPvP though, as we have little choice but to embrace the bunker nature of Tempest in sPvP if we want to run it.

What the heck is Tornado?

Tornado is the 50% risk you take when you run Elixir X on engineer that you won’t get rampage and instead expose yourself hideously for a moment until you swap back out to humanoid form.

Edit: For a laugh, it’s also a pure skill you can slot on elementalist.

As everyone else has pointed out, this would cause the Tempest to remove the troublesome shackles of the limits of mortality and ascend to a state beyond everything else.

No thanks.

As much as I love the concept of conjured weapons, the fact that they are a one use only affair once you switch from them is maddeningly frustrating.

I doubt it would ever happen, but I’d be way happier if they could be closer to an engineer’s kits; I’m not suggesting they should be identical to kits, but more comparable in their nature to ‘swap to and swap back’ so we still have access to our basic skills beyond Overloads.

One example would be that swap 1 to the conjure gives you an effect, let’s take conjure earth shield:

Once activated, for the next X seconds you may summon this weapon on demand with a maximum of Y charges.

It would open up the elementalist’s options a lot. Perhaps a Tempest trait could convert conjures to function in this nature… make it more attractive. Ah, we can only dream.

It’s not complete trash, but it is still a lacking weapon.

Both earth and water are quite good I would say, Sand Squall is one of the best skills in the elementalists’ repertoire now (magnetic aura, blast, protection aoe + boon duration increase all in one!) and Dust Storm’s blind is acceptable, though it wouldn’t hurt to have more damage on it.

Water has two heals, one of which is a water field for blasts/leaps and the other is a knock back. I do wish Tidal Surge had a more significant range on both distance travelled and knock back caused, though.

Fire and Air on the other hand..

Fire was gutted, and is a sorry sight to behold now. Heat Sync is unfortunately laughable, and what it achieves was already achieved better by the Persisting Flames for elementalists who wish to offer aoe might and fury to the party. Heat Sync’s current form doesn’t do it nearly as well and is utterly forgettable (and thus cannot replace Persisting Flames as a substitute). On the other hand Heat Sync’s initial incarnation was a total game changer, and justified bringing a warhorn along almost by itself… sharing boons such as stability, regen, protection with everyone in a pinch could definitely alter the course of a battle. Then you would swap to earth and sandsquall to increase the duration, and the beautiful synergy of elementalist’s attunements was felt. No more. I and many elementalists sorely want to see a buff to heat sync, as the nerf was brutal for the above reasons.

Wildfire is also disappointing. A snail paced fire field with truly underwhelming damage, be you power or condition spec’d. This needs both a damage increase and speed increase to how fast it spreads. That, or bring back it’s boon strip which gave it a unique and dangerous aspect brand new to the elementalist.

Air:

Both skills scream ‘meh’. Cyclone can be useful vs breakbars, and interrupting players at least… the damage and swiftness are not worth writing home about.

Lightning Orb is a potentially amazing skill, ruined by the fact it only travels in a straight line, making it frustratingly impractical to get the best use of. As I suggested in another thread, this skill should be ground targetable. If they won’t do that then at least increase it’s damage, so that for the mere moments it’s actually damaging a target, they feel pain and went to get the hell out of dodge, rather than suffer negligible damage and vuln.

I really like this – adds cleanse options without having to run trooper runes and trait what is currently mandatory for pvp due to conditions, water.

Diversity!

+1!

Excellently put Autumn, +1.

Oh, so that happened. Well in that case… please can we add back protection, swiftness, regeneration, vigor, retaliation and stability? I appreciate that quickness, aegis and resistance may be too much.

My thoughts to help improve Tempest via these skills:

Lightning Orb

Problem – difficult to utilise it’s maximum potential as you would have to overlap it’s trajectory with that of your target(s). In PvE this is difficult because your foes will be stationary, running directly for you or even leaping around wildly. In PvP, people can just move sideways or run through it, and the skill ends up having very little point control or damage impact.

Solution – make the skill ground targetable, even if it has to travel to that point first at it’s current velocity. This would allow the Tempest to stack the damage and vulnerability on foes at a particular spot, or discourage foes to enter a particular spot without meeting a lot of pain. If kept to a short range, it helps a lot with the frontliner concept that Tempest is pursuing in my opinion.

EDIT: Forgot to add that if it was made to be ground placed, then it would synergise wonderfully with warhorn 4 Cyclone, to pull targets back into it.

Rebound!

Problem – As the cast time and very low healing factor make it very impractical to use in most situations, it’s more of a glorified delayed aura on a 75s cooldown. This is underwhelming and does not impact play much at all.

Solution – As this elite can only be utilised if one is a Tempest, then it should be encouraged to be used by Tempests.

One of the things a Tempest benefits most from is stability – so how about we gave Rebound! stability, and removed the cast time? In a pinch we could then use this shout to defend ourselves whilst heavily exposed during an overload, and as the shout affects allies we could also offer team stability in a tight situation… which followed up with lovely things like invigorating torrents, would really make the elite feel elite.

The fact that this opens up reactive defense during overloads is huge because typically an elementalist’s defense is to dodge via high vigor uptime, and if we dodge during an overload it is cancelled, undermining the Tempest due to the nature of the base elementalist.

Furthermore it gives the elementalist access to utility stability aside from armor of earth, via a shout, thereby increasing synergy with invigorating torrents and other baseline aura synergy traits in the non-tempest trait lines.

Overload Water

Problem – no lingering effect once the channel is finished, unlike the other 3 overloads.

I appreciate this may be a balance and design choice however as a player I feel it is very disjointed from the other three overloads, causing it to function like ‘something is missing’.

Solution – add a lingering effect of some kind. One simple suggestion would be to add a delayed effect, such as x seconds after the overload finishes the ground will erupt with water (like Cleansing Wave) for further healing and 1 more condi removal.

Just my ideas as a player, would be interesting to hear other peoples’ thoughts and views.

Also… obligatory request for Heat Sync to actually share any boons!

A stun breaking, instant cast, higher healing rebound would actually feel like an elite skill.

It would also suit the front line support that Tempest is envisioned to be – cast times are normally for a calculated gain, Rebound feels more like a reactivate “oh no” skill; you see impending doom, you have a moment to hit Rebound.

It’s purpose to heal on deathblow is often impractical with the cast time.

I’m currently using FGS on my Tempest builds instead, or sometimes the elemental glyph instead for Rocky in pve.

Edit: Yeah I’m aware of the aura effect on Rebound too. However considering Tempest’s easy access to auras already, a massively delayed extra aura for a few seconds of our choice is so underwhelming to me, I actually forgot about it when talking about the skill.

I’m actually looking forward to playing Tempest at the end of this week. Yes, it’s far from perfect… but the BWE3 Tempest was worlds beyond the BWE1 Tempest, at least. And changes far beyond bandaids happened; every overload is a stun breaker, a stability on overload trait (with a nice damage boost at the end, though I feel 5s is too short for the bonus), new effects on overloads (water cleanse, air static charge on weapons, protection stacking on earth dust effect…)

The most glaring issues in my view with Tempest are:

1.The comparatively awful minor traits – at the very least, combine them into one trait and give us another trait that has some synergy with base elementalist, as opposed to making Overloading more viable. This is especially desired as Overloads are designed to be situational, thus traits solely affecting them have a poor uptime as if you spam Overloads you’ll have a lot of 20s attunement cooldowns to deal with (unless you’re running Fresh Air and spamming Air Overload).

2. No attunement swapping during Overloads (without disrupting the channel). If there is a balance concern here then perhaps stipulate that yes, you can change attunement during the Overload… but the attunement won’t begin it’s 20s cd period until the Overload channel finishes. This change would open up more gameplay diversity for the Tempest (attunement swap boons and spell effects, interrupting Overload channels with evasive/block/immunity skills and preparing two Overloads in quick succession if we still have to wait 5s in an attunement [balanced by the fact half our attunements are now on 15-20s cooldowns – thematically suits Tempest, recovering after going all out with half their attunement potential]).

3. The 5s delay in an attunement before you can overload it… this kills the potential to be reactive with it, and as it always carries the pricey penalty of a 20s attunement cooldown, this seems too restrictive.

4. Shout cast times. This is particularly problematic with the already mediocre Rebound skill.

Aside from these points, I think they’ve been pushing Tempest in a positive direction.

I whole heartedly agree with the point that Anet should communicate something to this forum and elementalists generally however, even if it is simply to confirm that no tweaks are incoming. The silence is defeaning and even though I imagine their schedules are completely full with the Halloween event, HoT launch, general maintenance and background issues we players are blissfully ignorant of, it would be wonderful to receive some acknowledgement and reassurance that the devs are content with Tempest so we know where we stand, or that they plan changes down the line as they agree with players that Tempest is unpolished.

Horus.9685:

Humblekain.5418:

I like the idea of ride the lightning being ground targeted, opens up options. However I’m not sure adding yet another blast finisher to dagger offhand, which already has 2, is such a great idea though.

If they were to add a blast to dagger off hand you would now have 2 blasts that you can use, instead of one on a kitten cd, and a theoretical one.

Fair point!

Bit strong handed Gokil.

Whilst you have a point that you cannot straight up compare a skill of one class to another arbitrarily out of context and come to a meaningful conclusion, this should by no means preclude future discussion about the evolution of the elementalist class skills as the game moves forward – and using other classes for inspiration, well, that’s hardly a crime.

As mentioned above, I liked some of the suggestions that came from the comparison.

I like the idea of ride the lightning being ground targeted, opens up options. However I’m not sure adding yet another blast finisher to dagger offhand, which already has 2, is such a great idea though.

I’m hoping for an update to the minor traits, but not much else at this point.

Oh yes, and it would be lovely to see Rebound as an attractive option however I’m just not holding out on this one. Definitely on my wish list though!

Kaleban.9834:

All this said, I’m tired of people proclaiming the Elementalist OP when its really the use of the Celestial Amulet in CONJUNCTION with the jack-of-all-trades design. Your post ignored the entire point of the argument. The Ele in comparison to other professions is objectively weak, dependent on either heavy boon stacking, high player skill, or dumb opponents (player or AI) standing still like target dummies, and often a combination of all three.

I do see your point, I still feel your opinion is too strong though. Yes there are failings with elementalist, such as pvp build diversity being contained to water/arcana/x, but so long as ele’s continue to thrive in pvp (even if it is d/d celestial, it still works if you don’t like it) and in pve via fire staff, we’re really not going to get much sympathy. All I can suggest is that if it really puts you off and you continue to be disappointed with the lack of other viable builds, maybe try another class in the meantime.

Also boon stacking is no gimmick or crutch, but is inherent in the design of elementalist. It’s why signet necromancers wreck us so hard.

Kaleban, your comment feels like bait but I’ll comment on the options your post overlooks for people who may get on board with you, just in case;

Protection boon access

Attunement skills vs weapon swap (20 skills vs 10)

High regeneration uptime if traited water, which almost every ele is in the pvp meta

Signet of Restoration providing excellent healing, especially for dagger

Magnetic aura access for reflects, in addition to frost aura for further incoming damage reduction on top of protection

Defensive outgoing conditions access; blind, cripple, immobilise, weakness

Mobility options on every weapon set excluding sceptre, which can retain some mobility via dagger offhand. My only concession here would be that lightning flash is only 900 yard range and not a stun breaker, but as ele is far from weak in pvp, it is a small quibble

Do not forget that this is a team game at heart, and an ele is fantastic at blasting fields – such as water for team healing, or smoke for team stealth

—

All this said however, I agree that I would have preferred to see vigor shaved from cantrip traits and not from arcana’s vigor trait, as it otherwise continues to reinforce cantrip dominance in pvp which is very uninspiring alongside traiting the water traitline.

From my sPvP testing:

I used a celestial amulet and dagger mainhand, to compliment the up close and personal nature of overloads.

This has been my favourite version of Tempest so far. The improved overload features really helped, especially with overload air. I had modest success with some Tempest setups, but there are still some improvements I would like to see:

Ability to change attunement mid overload, without interrupting the overload. This would open up options for elementalists who have also chosen Arcane and Water, or even earth to cripple them inside your fire overload for example.

A second blast finisher on warhorn, to match the 2 blast finishers both focus and dagger offhands come with. Yes, warhorn has Heatsync but given the intended nerfs and the fact it deprives us of a damage skill in our fire moveset, I think it’s more than fair to maintain two blasts on warhorn as an offhand choice.

Continuing with warhorn, the air #5, lightning orb, moves far too fast. Either a velocity reduction, or a damage increase should be considered here in my view.

Fire overload did need it’s damage reduced, but I almost feel it was reduced slightly too much. I’m not sure if many would agree here, but I often felt I would have done better to spam lightning whip instead of use a fire overload when attempting to finish a player off which seems uncomfortable, given that fire overload is such a short radius compared to air overload, and the Tempest traits are all about overloading.

As I commented in another thread re. minor traits, the minor traits really are lack lustre. The only affect overloads, and thus only an actively overloading Tempest, devoid of any synergy for any other aspect of the elementalist. This is not true for other elite specialisations of other classes (fantastic examples in the other thread, such as chronomancer and reaper). I would like to see minors that encourage eles to grow out of the water/arcane/x meta, so cleanse/utility would be lovely options to see in Tempest. Perhaps they would help in designed raid encounters too, making ele/tempest a more tempting prospect to bring along. One example could be that shouts offer resistance for x seconds, to encourage the use of shouts as a Tempest, giving them more of an identity and place in sPvP etc.

Speaking of shouts (ironic unintended pun, honest) I really wanted to make at least one work for my non-aura focused Tempest, but I just couldn’t drop any of the usual culprit PvP cantrips (cleansing fire, lightning strike, armor of earth) for them – even when I wasn’t running Water traits for vigor and regen. One idea here would be to consider adding stability to “Shock and Aftershock” – I would happily drop armor of earth then, as this allows me a near guaranteed overload in a pinch, which is the main reason I kept armor of earth.

Those are very brief points on what comes to mind first, so perhaps the most prominent for me.

Oh, I forgot to comment on rebound – it is definitely better than it was, but I think to function as it is the heal needs to be more significant. ~2-3k is hardly enough to get you out of a tight spot, especially if condis are stacked on you. Frankly though, I would prefer it if we had an offensive elite we could utilise – fiery greatsword is mostly used for movement, the elemental summons are situational, and tornado is just underwhelming generally, especially as it kicks us out of attunement swapping for bonuses. Again, I appreciate we are very late in the development cycle… but I would be surprised if most elementalist players are satisfied rebound.

One suggestion would be something to fit with the theme of tempest and overloading attunements – you could conjure a field depending on your current attunement as well as a unique spell effect, such as a water field + aoe cleanse for water, with the same aoe chilling foes, lightning field and aoe blind for air and superspeed for allies, fire field and aoe burn.. perhaps mini burning tornadoes, as a mimic of the fire overload but without granting might to everyone as we have enough of that already and/or grant quickness to allies… and for earth, a field here is tricky but I would hazard to say smoke as elementalists have enjoyed this before with their underwater skills, or if giving stealth access to ele’s is too much, perhaps poison instead, mostly for weakness, with a pulse of cripple or bleed on foes and resistance or protection on allies (resistance preferred, as tempests can already quite handily give allies protection).

Essentially something that’s flashy and worthy of being an elite, and not another “I wish we could have 4 utilities instead” would be absolutely wonderful.

I completely agree with this subject – it’s one of the problems I have with tempest, and trying to make it work for ele.

Overloads carry heavy risk to go with the risk vs reward concept behind them (long channel time vulnerable to interrupts, increases attunement recharge to 20s, 17.5 with arcane…), and due to this heavy risk and penalty if you succeed in overloading, it is not practical to cast overloads as often as you can. This puts us in a position which as you highlighted, the minor traits of our elite specialisation are doing nothing when we are not actively channeling an overload. Furthermore they lack synergy with any other aspect of the base elementalist as we know it.

This adds up to the minor traits purely making overloads more viable, which is disappointing.

Perhaps it is asking a lot, but I feel that the minors as they currently stand should be baseline for overloads, with new minors added to encourage elementalists to spec Tempest over other options. Perhaps a cleanse option of some kind to encourage dropping water, or a damage/utility minor, to encourage dropping arcane. This is speaking from a pvp perspective.

Obviously we’re very late into the development cycle and so I don’t hold any hope of seeing changes like this before HoT launch, if ever at all, but those are my thoughts all the same.

Everyone has pointed out the shortcomings of this elite skill so far in great detail – all I’ll add is that it was disappointingly bland and for most situations I’m likely to find myself in (pugs, no voice comm groups with friends and lack of telepathic links to my comrades) pretty impossible to coordinate effectively.

As others pointed out, it’s a harder to effectively use version of the boon alacrity… which is a shame for two reasons; it’s a psuedo-boon that requires extremely impressive coordination to use effectively, where as alacrity is a buff and forget affair that will help at any and every moment… and also, it’s more of a mesmer utility really, I don’t think it suits elementalist.

I’m quite a new player and also a new elementalist, and from my recent foray into unranked pvp arenas I feel I rely too much on arcana to drop it – elemental attunement, evasive arcana and the attunement cooldown reduction are all too useful to give up, I feel.

I should probably try going without arcana, but the popular traits (and core trait of elemental attunement) fit so naturally into the playstyle that I’m not sure I’d be comfortable without them.

It’s worth mentioning that I’ve been paying d/d celestial so far, loving the battle mage feel to it.