When I first saw the overload skills there was something about them that I just didn’t like. I liked the idea of having to choose between continuing your attunement cycle or delaying it for the sake of a powerful skill, but the overloads in their current state don’t really behave this way. They have what I call the signet problem.
The signet problem is simple enough to understand. Signets give you a passive boost when off cooldown, and this boost is lost if you use the signet, so you theoretically have to weigh the cost of losing the passive against the benefit of the active. This becomes a problem when both the passive and active do the same thing (such as signet of restoration having a pure heal for both its passive and active) because one of those effects will always be better than the other, meaning you should always either leave it on passive or activate it on cooldown.
The comparison to overloads is clear. If you use an overload you have to spend 5s plus the channel duration in a certain attunement and then cannot reactivate that attunement within 20s of using it. This forms the drawback part of my signet analogy. Now if we look at what the overload skills do we can see the problem. Fire overload does damage, gives might and burns. Water overload heals and cure condis. Air overload does damage. Earth overload cripples and immobs. These are all things you can do just by cycling through your attunements normally.
Because of this, I don’t believe that the current form of overloading can ever result in good skills. Currently they are far weaker than the alternative so you should essentially never use them. For them to become worthwhile with their current behaviour, however, would require them to become absurdly powerful. Water overload, for example, would need something like 15k total healing to compete with the aoe heals you could’ve done if you didn’t use it.
As a result I think the behaviour of overloads needs to change and the specific effects of each overload should also be changed so that they are no longer redundant. I think the wait times on overloads should be removed. The only requirements for activating them should be waiting for the standard attunement gcd before use and having to stay in the attunement while channelling. I believe that this is enough of a drawback to make their use a matter of player judgement.
The specific effects need to bring something new to each attunement. Here’s some examples I thought up quickly:
Fire: targets lose endurance every time they’re hit. No skill in the game does anything like this.
Water: thick fog causes unremovable blindness to nearby foes or gives evade frames to allies. Water is usually about the cure, this would be prevention instead.
Air: the cloud follows your target at a distance. Every weapon’s air attunement would gain something from this.
Earth: the final strike launches foes. Earth has many ways to stop people from moving, but no way to move them against their will.
