I’m telling you that DH build is more useful than druid.
You’re being wrong.
I still have no reason to use this. Everything I run with tempest immediately gets better the less tempest options I take.
The only thing I was able to do with it was a standard pve staff build with tempest replacing water. I could open with overload air and then just camp fire and use overload fire on cd to get reasonable results, but nothing I was doing with that build required tempest in any way.
Actually all 4 scepter autos are too weak. Arc lightning does 0.48 coeff./second. Necro scepter, a pure condi weapon, does 0.5 coeff./second with its auto along with 13.5 ticks of bleeding and 6 ticks of poison.
Can we actually talk about what would make people want to play a Tempest over vanilla Elementalist?
At first I would’ve said the obvious answer was making the overloads not suck, but really everything you get for speccing tempest is terrible.
The big issue as I see it is the lack of identity. Everything tempest does is just a reskinned way of doing something ele already does. I got the impression when first seeing tempest that it was trying to replace water and arcana at the same time so that instead of running say [Earth|Fire]/Water/Arcana you could do Earth/Fire/Tempest. I tried running something of this style but came to the conclusion that just doing it the old way worked better.
There are some other specific issues too such as the shouts. Having the shouts give auras seems to give some of them redundant or contradictory purposes, like flash freeze chilling and then giving frost aura for even more chill or aftershock being a close range immob that also gives a reflect. Additionally, the shout effects are mostly weak, being mostly useful for the trait and rune effects rather than their own.
Overall I’d say tempest needs things like:
Overloads: their effects need to have synergy with standard attunement abilities, not be carbon copies of those abilities. The drawbacks should not be so large, either.
Warhorn: needs a real identity instead of trying to just be a mix of offhand dagger, focus and staff. Being more control oriented would likely fit the bill, with skills split between setting up opportunities through control effects and others that take advantage of the opportunities provided.
Shouts: ditch the auras and give them effects that stand up on their own. Wash the pain away and aftershock are both decent enough on their own, though could do with some tweaks. There’s an effect that hasn’t really existed ever since it was removed from haste (and has never been available as an offensive perk) that I think could work for feel the burn, which is causing endurance loss. Flash freeze could place triplines around the targets like DH’s lb5 that cause some nasty effect like stun and a colossal vuln stack if you cross it. Rebound seems like a good idea but the aed style heal is way too low to make a difference. It might be interesting if instead of healing when you hit 0 hp it inverts all damage briefly.
Traits: should suit the control heavy style I’ve been continually bringing up rather than being a mess of water-lite and arcana-lite as they currently are.
Attunement cycling maintains more might stacks than using fire overload on cd, better healing over time than using water overload on cd and better prot uptime than using earth overload on cd all at once, all the time.
Tempest’s only role is to put an icon on people’s heads that lets us know who is playing ele wrong.
It’s only going to be sustained healing if you camp the legend though.
If you swap out of Ventari and then swap back in the moment it comes off cd you’ll immediately gain 50 energy, which is the same as what you would’ve gotten if you had camped it, but then you also got to use 100 total energy in your other legend. Thus the optimal use case for Ventari is as burst healing.
That’s a long wall of text to say “I’m going to ignore everything you say and pretend you said this instead.”
You cannot make a functional tempest build that cannot be improved by taking a spec other than tempest. Try and prove me wrong.
Chronomancer and herald are the only ones that really appear to have the issue of being strictly better than their base class. Chrono appears to be a straight upgrade to the already best mesmer build and if there’s a reason to not use herald I haven’t seen it yet.
That is not ‘the other elite specs’ or ‘a lot of them’, that’s 2 out of the 8 other specs.
[Citation needed]
That is a problem with the other elite spec if they are op then they need to be fixed you should not wish for your class to be op.
Other elite specs being worthy of play without being strictly better than their base class is a problem?
No one has ever said they want tempest to replace ele. Elite specs are supposed to be side-grades. We all know that. We all know that they should not be upgrades. We also know that they should not be downgrades either.
Tempest is a direct downgrade to ele. This is why we get threads saying tempest problems are not a numbers issue. If numbers are all that changed then the only way they would make tempest worth playing is if it became an upgrade, which is exactly as bad from a gameplay point of view as it being a downgrade.
Stop arguing against things we aren’t saying.
Here’s a better idea: people post theorycrafted builds for tempest and then ele mains improve them by replacing tempest with a useful spec instead.
“It will negatively impact WvW”.
Hasn’t stopped them before. >.>
Healing Power still scales for crap.
Better tell the metabattle admins that this build sucks then.
With ground targeting you can place it such that ‘whether the enemy wants to avoid the hit or not’ is a more difficult choice.
Now that you’ve removed Might on Cantrips and seriously crippled the fire line can you add a might on shouts trait instead to make Tempest at least have some proper damage potential?
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tempestuous_Aria
As is standard for tempest the other traits that compete with it are absolutely useless so you should have no trouble fitting it in.
Are you seriously trying to use overcharges as an example of a well designed elite spec mechanic?
Uhh no you can do sustained healing outside of ventari and it is almost the same as in ventari. What you lose is burst healing. (Assuming you are keeping staff and shield heal for glint and swap back as soon as possible back).
You really think staff auto, staff 4 and shield 4 are good enough to be considered sustained healing? Those skills in cleric’s crank out about as much healing as what a guard can do with mace in zerker.
Because bypassing line of sight isn’t really a ‘good’ thing for gameplay and in 99% of cases being ground targeted is a buff.
You do however lose that burst healing while you aren’t channeling ventari.
That was my main point. You can’t do sustained healing with Ventari because you have to swap out at some point. The tiny amount of healing available outside of Ventari’s skills is not even close to enough to justify your investment in salvation and healing power, but without them Ventari is only good for the projectile block shield.
Druid is more about burst healing in key moments as it takes a while to build up astral force to enter celestial avatar, Ventari is more about sustain healing.
How’s it gunna do that when you’ve swapped to your other legend? You need both healing power and salvation to make Ventari good and then the moment you switch out of Ventari both of them become 100% useless. Compare this to healing power and honor traits for guard or healing power and druid traits for ranger which are always useful because you can always have access to strong area healing.
Holy crap, Druid just COMPLETELY blows Tempest away in the group support department…AND does it at range.
Staff ele does it at range and from what I gather glyphs on ranger will be pbaoe.
You forgot the best part: you don’t have to pick tempest to do it.
I seriously hope tempest wasn’t made to be a water camping healbot in the same way as the druid because there’s always going to be a very big reason why that’s bad: attunement swaps. If you aren’t using all your attunements you should just reroll because you aren’t really playing ele.
You do realise don’t you that the goals of whatever new meta arises will be exactly the same as the current meta: sacrifice only as much damage potential as is needed to give the fastest clear time.
Right now that means things like slotting reflects or condi clears instead of more dps boosters since nulling attacks lets you spend more time attacking and less time defending. In raids the method might be different but the result will be the same. Getting as much dps as possible is always going to be the goal.
Needs a better ress utility if it’s gunna have a place in zvz.
Should be good in small groups though.
It’s a neck and neck race to the bottom between DH and tempest since they both ‘give’ the same thing to their parent classes (virtually any build you can make with DH/tempest can be done better without them), but I’m going to give DH the wooden spoon since ele is already better than guard.
Possibly the most disgraceful condi roamer every made.
This seems to happen a lot on the ele forms the lack of understanding any thing beyond one step combos.
Or they made a very accurate assessment that using 2 skills to give aoe stability on a 1 min cd is much weaker than using 1 skill to give aoe stability on a 24s cd, and since no one has ever considered stand your ground overpowered there’s no possible way that something much weaker than it could be overpowered, either.
If resistance and quickness are the things that supposedly make boon duplication op, why does it get nerfed on ele and not mesmer? Ele can’t generate either of those boons alone while mesmer has access to both and will be able to duplicate twice in a row with chronomancer, or 4 times in a row if it gives up its resistance access.
“GG Anet, you just deleted all condi builds. With the druid’s crazy good regen and resistance uptime they can basically stand in a condi field and STILL BE GAINING HEALTH as they do it! That plus their fully automatic heat-seeking bird that can’t be kited because of their OP Taunt makes the druid completely untouchable to condi builds WHILE STILL PUTTING OUT INSANE DAMAGE. This sort of zero counterplay bullkitten is totally unacceptable. And before anyone says “LOLGGL2P SCRUB KILL THE BIRD” YOU KITTEN CAN’T. If you target the bird THEY JUST CHANGE ASPECTS AND BAM! Bird is full kitten healed! Not to mention that with a glyph build the druid basically has 25 KITTEN SKILLS at any given time PLUS the pet. They are even more versatile than D/D eles and EVEN MORE IMMUNE TO CONDI PRESSURE. I’d rather fight a kitten Diamond Skin D/D ele than a druid. Calling it now, druid is the new D/D ele but with a NO SCOPE ONE HIT KILL UNAVOIDABLE TAUNT PET that it can use every 15 kitten seconds."
all is vain
Well, apparently nobody can give a straight answer, so I’ll just leave it at that.
If you want a better answer to take to your questionably attentive overlords…
Siege is incredibly unsatisfying both to use and to fight against. When large quantities of ACs are used it’s usually unreasonable to try and use rams so you generally have to go right to catas or trebs. That’s when things get double boring(!!!). The vast majority of your players are reduced to nothing more than glorified supply caddies and the few that are manning your siege get to play press 2 to kill tower for a while.
Once it gets to this state there’s essentially no gameplay at all. You just sit around waiting for something to happen; and depressingly often nothing actually happens. You knock down a wall and blow up the ACs then walk up and take the tower without even a finger lifted against you, because the ACs were the only reason anyone was “defending” at all.
To sum up: siege fights suck and are too much pve, not enough pvp.
Massive opportunity cost.
Doesn’t hold up in reality? Back during t2 gvg heaven I got plenty of chances to win outnumbered fights against zergs in ETA. It mostly happened exactly how I said unless we were against groups good enough to not get many double downed anyway.
In equal fights, this is fine and works, but when fighting against a bigger group this makes it harder for the small group to win.
Anyone trying to hard ress is removing themselves from the fight for the duration of the ress, mitigating their own numbers advantage while also making themselves an incredibly easy target.
Yeah it definitely has a better instant cast 600 radius 5 stack of stability. /s
Well, okay.
What would ACs be useful for now? I’m trying to figure out what would be considered their intended use.
Same thing it’s good for now; letting us know where the free kills are.
I think pain absorption needs a rework now that Mallyx rev won’t be gaining power from stacking condis on itself. Perhaps something like ‘convert 1 condition to resistance for nearby allies’ with a resistance duration of 2 seconds.
After we treb them they wp and we still don’t get a fight.
Number 1 reason for pvd: doors are more challenging to kill than the siege monkeys defending them.
ACs are hated because people that use ACs only use ACs and never fight even if they outnumber you. They just hide in their tower hoping their 111 spam will stop the big mean fight guild and run away when it becomes clear that it won’t.
The thing that should be removed is hardressing dead players while in combat.
Use your aoes and remove it yourself.
But you still didn’t answer my question. How is wanting people to fight not a good argument? These are PvP maps. They are supposed to encourage PvP.
Answer is simple. If you want to find fights you WILL find fights.. If you can’t because acs bother you, you are doing it wrong…
happy now?
You underestimate the lengths to which certain servers will go to avoid fights. Squashing the stragglers that didn’t wp in time isn’t a fight, either.
People with good arguments don’t have to put words in their opponents’ mouths.
If 2-3 could meaningfully delay 15-20 then towers would be 100% unassailable with even numbers.
Stop using cele dd being overpowered as a justification for tempest being useless. They’re separate issues.
Game balance can’t be made on the assumption that one side is outnumbered. If you server is outnumbered when defending, it’s outnumbered when attacking as well. Any change that helps you do one of those things hurts your ability to do the other.
No wonder this game mode is dying. Not many good players are left in it. Everyone wants to zerg and take empty objectives..
AC spammers are not good players. If I had the choice between defending something with 15 ACs or 15 gvgers I’d take the gvgers every time.
Suggestion: get better at managing downs.
It’s objectively worse than the old version.
It’s never been possible to condi when you get blocked. Why is that even a question?
Not a single shout trait? What the hell, Karl? None of them are usable… MAYBE the fire one but only because it’s a low cooldown fire aura…
The hilarious thing is that it’s about 10 times better than the focus fire shield on a way shorter cooldown but it still sucks.
I also don’t really agree with adding cooldowns to lots of skills because of how strong they are when used back to back. I think if you’re willing to limit yourself to autoattacks for 10 seconds just so you can cast jade wind twice you’re probably not coming out ahead.