Guild Wars 2

You can actually be a mage archetype in PvE. The game mechanics and structure just don’t allow it in PvP.

I’ve come up with some interesting glass cannon and damage/support builds for commanding in PvE.

From the PvE perspective, I kind of wish they would give us a weapon like druids have that focuses solely on support.

As far as PvP, I’ve just stopped playing lately.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

I didn’t say anything against zerker and tempest, only against zerker and auramancer (which doesn’t even imply that tempest is part of that build).

I’m not entirely sure wether tempest is a dps increase over fire air water or fire air arcane, or not. You’re sacrificing a 20% damage modifyer for a few highly damaging overloads after all, so I guess it depends on the situation.

However I can say with confidence, that auramancer doesn’t play well with any 0 defense setup. Except maybe if the only one you’re supporting is a tank? But that would basically require that you constantly run around together with a tank.

I use soldier’s armor, beserker weapons and beserker trinkets with a Air/Water/Tempest staff build with full shouts when I lead world events as a commander. It provides good damage with a large amount of AoE sustain and support for keeping the squad and myself alive.

Soldier’s only adds about 2k health so I am debating dropping it for full Berserker. I would go with Zealots if healing power didn’t scale so horrendously. I think I am sitting at commanding four successful Dragon Stand runs with only one of them where I died in the blighted towers. This is with me at the front of the zerg.

It’s not easy by a long shot; you really have to understand your skills and when to use them, particularly water and earth overloads. But a berserker auramancer certainly is viable and works in this scenario. It provides competitive dps with some of the best support in the game.

With the exception of Wash the Pain Away, the shout radius is large enough to support your squad without having to move into kill range of some of the harder mobs like stalkers.

Even if we all agree that the protection uptime is OP (which in my experiences even in the meat and potatoes brackets, it’s not given just how much dmg, particularly condi dmg, gets flung around), you are essentially stating that the merits of tempest lie in a very specific team support build and the boons provided by auras which has nothing to do with the main mechanics of the elite specialization.

Like, in what world, is this acceptable? There isn’t a plethora of builds for tempest being thrown around; I’ve seen like three in total with several variations of each. Two of them are based off very specific trait interactions; fresh air synergy with air overload and aura synergy.

Tempest isn’t a robust solid elite specialization presenting a variety of options and playstyles. Working builds are essentially gimmicks that we have made work by salvaging from poor trait choices and can be easily destroyed with a single nerf.

It’s following the same history at the moment as scepter. A collection of broken skills that was only utilized for the interaction of like two skills in order to do powerful burst. That’s a gimmick. A gimmick that was largely destroyed by nerfs without any changes of note actually being done to the weapon.

And it sucks, because I actually like tempest, particularly in PvE and think it has a lot of potential to be more than a gimmick.

I’ve been a large supporter of Guild Wars 2 for quite awhile now. It’s actually one of two games I will invest money on in micro-transactions in order to encourage continued Living World development. The expansion is, I think, historically, the only game I have ever pre-ordered, simply on the basis of my respect for the Anet dev team and what they are capable of.

Yet, despite this, these last few weeks have been quite a kick in the balls. Even though Tempest did not turn out to be the disaster the community originally predicated it to be, it has been still the general consensus of the community that it can use some improvements and at least, a number of quality of life changes, particularly when compared to the raw power creep of other elite specializations.

A number of posters have submitted suggestions, including myself, and these have been met largely with silence since roughly around the second beta weekend with zero feedback as to what the future held or if we were even being listened to. In the wake of this no communication, we’ve seen two patches that solely focused on FX changes and did nothing to improve the gameplay experience for the people who just recently purchased the expansion.

So…yeah…just saying….kind of kittening discouraging….

Even a simple statement of “Hey, we have heard all of your complaints and we think you are all completely bonkers. We feel tempest is fine and if you give it a chance, you may end up agreeing with us” would be a better way to handle it than this.

Sorean.5379:

What would be a good build then? Because I would like to use shouts too…not just minions.
Would “Rise” and another minion skill be enough? What about secondary weapon set? Full melee with dagger focus or staff for ranged support?

Some variation of this. Staff and sceptre/dagger if you want to go condi instead of power, but I think power is better for open world.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQJARWnM0Adbid1AO1As3glpBb6BcBqASDgCQAIOEeCfhA

There is a lot of mechanics that still makes minions either useless or a pain in the kitten due to a lack of control over the minions themselves.

Like, the final boss in Cliffside will use a CC effect after every stage transition that destroys all your minions. You resummon them only to lose them on the next transition.

Or really any fight that requires the group to stack while taking constant AoE damage causes your minions to be all over the place.

I usually run a Blood/Spite/Repear build in dungeons or fractals where having a crazy amount of self sustain is not as important as DPS. It’s much less annoying than running a full minion build.

But, in open world…all minions pretty much all the time. You can pretty faceroll 80% of champions in HoT and hold camps in VB at night solo, because you don’t take that much of a DPS for a huge increase in you personal sustain and survivability.

Supreme.3164:

MadRabbit.3179:

Supreme.3164:

As it stands now, a tempest with diamond skin stands little to no chance in the current condi meta

And, yet, every pro game I have managed to catch on Twitch since HoT has had a tempest elementalist represented in every team

First I meant to say “with no diamond skin”

That makes more sense. My comment wasn’t really relevant.

Verificus.4320:

To be honest that’s all true. Once raids go on farm mode people would rather run more of the better classes like revs than use Tempest. The DPS is high but thats about it. All the previous roles Ele has had in vanilla PvE have now been taken by other classes, and they are doing it better. DPS is all they have left and such I could only see Ele being brought if a guild doesn’t have access to a third rev.

Yeah, doesn’t make any sense. So like when raids go on farm mode, because they have mastered the content, that’s the magic moment when people are going to stop taking elementalists over the “better” classes. Apparently, right now, all the raids running dps elementalists when they are still mastering content, are doing it, because they all like the extra challenge of not having one of the “better” classes?

And alternatively, if that’s true, I’m sure there is some guilds out there that aren’t fully populated by a bunch of try hards who will run differing compositions based on what their members find to be fun.

Supreme.3164:

As it stands now, a tempest with diamond skin stands little to no chance in the current condi meta

And, yet, every pro game I have managed to catch on Twitch since HoT has had a tempest elementalist represented in every team

All the pros you list you can acheive more efficiently with a traditional Water/Earth/Arcane cantrip build or Warth/Earth/Tempest shout build.

There is a lot of wasted trait choices that don’t take full advantage of the synergy available and the build isn’t designed to burst, so Scepter is a sub par choice to Dagger or Staff.

Blinding Ashes is a waste in a build like this with the goals you have listed. Persisting Flames is a much better choice.

If you are going to run that many AoE auras, than Element Bastion is a much better choice than Lucid Singularity.

With that said, Arcane Wave, Ice Bow, Glyph of Storms are better utility choices for increasing dps than running shouts. A single cantrip like Lightning Flash or Arcane Shield for survivability will be also be more valuable than shouts, accept for case specific fights when you need the AoE reflect.

Scholar, Strength and even Rage runes (if you take persisting flames) would be better than Eagle.

If your goal is to increase your parties DPS, than running Arcane Brilliance as your heal skill for another blast finisher to apply might and fury is going to be more important than Wash the Pain Away. Beside that point, Etheral Renewal would also be a valuable choice, because your build lacks any kind of condi cleanse.

And with all that said, I still think staff is an overall better choice for PvE. I can find more efficient ways to inflict self torture than running a glass cannon dagger build with no condi cleanse in Dragon Stand or even in a Mai fractal fight.

It’s just the best option for a number of reasons.

- The meta shift to more condi heavy builds
- The shift in elementalist’s role from less of a bunker and more of a team fight support.
- The loss of a lot of condi cleanse if you run a full shout setup, particularly if you take Powerful Auras.
- The fact that it is a cross attunement trait; immunity to critical hits is earth only and the cooldown increase from overloads makes getting back into earth harder than an arcane based attunement swap build.

It’s not the end all be all though. You can’t hold points or even survive very long in 1vs1 fights against power based builds designed specifcally to win fights, particularly power revenants with a lot of chill.

The name should be Emo

Anet honestly doesn’t really give a kitten about your opinion. Nobody from the dev team will reply to this. There will be no serious consideration. They are busy with important issues like adjusting the visual effects of our abilities.

I’ve never actually used it in any serious capacity in my builds, because it’s really not that hard to get the profession with the lowest base hp and armor down below 90%.

Tempest is saved.

Hallelujah.

I guess this is a concept that is complete foreign to me, probably, because I haven’t done any of the raid content.

I don’t understand how a tank concept can exist without any kind of taunt mechanic.

savacli.8172:

Aomine.5012:

MadRabbit.3179:

Aomine.5012:

I assume this is SOLELY from a PVP perspective corret?

In PVE Tempest is quite a solid class with defining tools that outshine other specs in certain aspects. (Many of the new specs ofc are fun, but they’re still in a mix role generally)

Also I do feel like I’m playing a TEMPEST when I constantly summoning thunders all over me and do big AOE damage :P

But if you’re those “PVP-serious high-end must-win” type of players, maybe you’d find Tempest lackluster because it may not be the “top” like the old Ele always were. The funny part is you only brought up 3 specialization that’re considered abit OP right now.

Actually, no, not at all. I came up with a blood magic minion build for reaper that has about an 80% win rate going solo against champions in HoT with dps slightly less than what my tempest was putting out. I have a 0% win rate against champions with different tempest builds.

And that’s not the funny part. I brought 3 specializations, because I am too lazy to list them all. But outside of warrior, daredevil and chronomancer have added a lot more variation to the class than what was there before.

Tempest didn’t bring anything new and it gets boring pretty quick.

Using pet classes are a bad example after the -95% aoe damage patch yknow?

Yes, I didn’t use Reaper at all in jungle too. I use blood/death magic minion master and face-roll most HoT maps. Same can be argued with dps/ survival variant ranger with tanky pets. Those 2 classes are my only 2 classes that can safely solo around 70% of Champs in HoT. But pet class is pet class, they’re the exception. They have their limitation too, especially in big scale battle. Those 2 specs excel in roaming, but that’s about it. In big Dynamic event they do not perform as well as some of the other classes like DH and Tempest.

Chrono also fell in the “pet class” category since the AI on the Champs made them go after illusions. I mean, technically as an Ele, you can throw Golems at the Champ, but they lose out on the benefit of damage reduction since they grab aggro from everyone and don’t have the same replacability that other classes do nor the recovery that Ranger has with its pet.

In other words, it’s not surprising that you wiped as an Ele against those Champs. It’s not impossible, but unless you can lock the Champ into a pattern or have their attacks memorized I can assume there’s gonna be a lot of down time in those fights.

But yeah, having made all my characters go through the HoT maps the Pet Classes were much easier since you could just distract everything with meatshields while you focused on the objective.

Anyways, we’re digressing.

At the end of the day, Tempest has more options as a support build but also offers a different DPS build. Their two biggest items being Auras (a lot of traits here) and Shouts (Works with Soldier runes and have a lesser cooldown).

This is completely irrelevant and both of you are using the pet class thing as a crutch to avoid the real issue here.

Reaper greatly enhanced the MM build, because of the addition of Rise which increased the potential pet count up to 12 or 13 at once and the addition of multiple cleave mechanics in both shroud and GS that proc the vampiric traits. Because of these two things, bunker necro is a thing now in PvP. It also makes MM builds even easier and more powerful than they were before.

Tempest has had no impact on elementalist in that type of way, outside of a stronger support role due to the auras, which has nothing to do at all with the main mechanic of overloading. Overloading, realistically, is largely a failure compared to the other specializaitons and we just try to make it work somehow since we get stuck with it when we take it for the auras. There is actually one variation of the support build that takes Tempest solely for the auras and actively discourages overloading in it’s guide.

I will concede that on paper Tempest does increase elementalist DPS by some degree in PVE, but it’s marginal at best and is largely limited by the classes own frailty.

If Tempest had presented some huge increase in DPS for the elementalist class over what we had before, then would be 2-3 variations of that PVE sitting in draft in metabattle by now. But there isn’t even one.

So look, if you like Tempest, play it. It’s not an awful spec. I’ve defended it’s merits in other threads.

But let’s not kid ourselves to think it was really like a groudbreaking change for the elementalist meta. The other specializations are better, they present more possibility in terms of what the classes can do and I find them to be generally more fun, which is why I am not playing an elementalist at the moment.

I mean, I found overloading to be kind of cool for like a couple days, but I am liking having a huge army of pets and a kitten looking shroud at the moment much more.

Aomine.5012:

Yes, I didn’t use Reaper at all in jungle too. I use blood/death magic minion master and face-roll most HoT maps. Same can be argued with dps/ survival variant ranger with tanky pets. Those 2 classes are my only 2 classes that can safely solo around 70% of Champs in HoT. But pet class is pet class, they’re the exception. They have their limitation too, especially in big scale battle. Those 2 specs excel in roaming, but that’s about it. In big Dynamic event they do not perform as well as some of the other classes like DH and Tempest.

Provided those big dynamic events don’t involve dragons or really anything with strong AoE that makes overloading problematic, I might agree.

But following the same logic you have presented, you can acheive the same high dps, potentially more consistent and with less deaths, just by using the old staff Elementalist dps build, since the dps increase by the addition of Tempest wasn’t huge.

So, no, Tempest has not really introduced anything ground breaking and in only some areas, is it marginally better than the old builds.

And I disagree about Reaper. I think the cleave mechanics they introduced with the multiple hits and the addition of “Rise” have taken blood magic and minion builds much farther than Tempest has taken Elementalist.

Aomine.5012:

I assume this is SOLELY from a PVP perspective corret?

In PVE Tempest is quite a solid class with defining tools that outshine other specs in certain aspects. (Many of the new specs ofc are fun, but they’re still in a mix role generally)

Also I do feel like I’m playing a TEMPEST when I constantly summoning thunders all over me and do big AOE damage :P

But if you’re those “PVP-serious high-end must-win” type of players, maybe you’d find Tempest lackluster because it may not be the “top” like the old Ele always were. The funny part is you only brought up 3 specialization that’re considered abit OP right now.

Actually, no, not at all. I came up with a blood magic minion build for reaper that has about an 80% win rate going solo against champions in HoT with dps slightly less than what my tempest was putting out. I have a 0% win rate against champions with different tempest builds.

And that’s not the funny part. I listed 3 specializations, because I am too lazy to list them all. But outside of warrior, daredevil and chronomancer have added a lot more variation to the class than what was there before.

Tempest didn’t bring anything new and it gets boring pretty quick.

It is also the only the only specialization that introduced a trade off from using our main mechanic. All other specializations were purely additions and in most cases, just straight up power creep.

Tempest was represented by every team in the monthly finals the other day, so that is something, but still basically as a support/bunker role.

So given that, I don’t think it’s in too bad of a state. When I played with it, it certainly provided more support and survivability than the old bunker spec.

However, it’s a really bad time right now to be a bunker, particularly if you are going solo without a team you can count on to support you. There is just so much burst damage being thrown around right now that you get wrecked.

Personally, I still think the spec is underwhelming and flawed in comparison to other elite specs. Reaper, scrapper, dragonhunter, for example, opened up a lot of new builds. I think there is like 9 different reaper builds up for draft and test on metabattle. Like the addition of Reaper actually made bunker necro a thing. I saw someone play the build in the finals.

We, on the other hand, have like 4 which are all variations of the same celestial support/bunker theme and all of those focus on auras being their main mechanic and not overloads. Several of the guides I have read even actively discouraging overloading except at specific times, because of how bad it can kitten you over for very little gain.

To be hones, being an aura bot is straight up boring to me. And kind of sad. And I’m pretty much done with elementalist for the first time since the game launched. I’ve posted a lot of constructive feedback on how to make the spec better, but the developers have been completely silent for weeks now.

So I am going to my necro to play reaper because A it’s fun and B the developers apparently give a kitten about it.

It could be worse though. We could be warriors. I did a miss a few games in the finals yesterday, but the one’s I did watch, nobody rolled a warrior.

Ehra is correct. It doesn’t self heal.

I’ll update my original post later on. I’m still trying to experiment with the different healing sources.

Since we don’t have damage meters, a lot of it is just subjective perception.

I’ve been playing the game since launch and never been in a PUG group that kicked a necro.

I’ll take your word for it for the time being and assume that it’s just the bolt damage procing vampiric that I am seeing.

Even so, not a reason to change up the build. Just going to priortize frost field in shroud and save nightfall to use with gravedigger spam.

I’m still playing around with a grandmaster trait choice for Reaper. Blighter’s Boon and Chilling Victory seem to synergize really well and provide a lot of single target lifeforce gain which is one of the biggest weaknesses of this when fighting single champions.

xavios.3601:

Durian.5419:

Leeching Bolts don’t heal your in Shroud either, last time I tried.

Can confirm, no healing. Was wondering if i was just not noticing it because of the tint from shroud.

I played around with the trait choices a little bit last night and here is what I got. It’s hard to seperate out what healing effects are providing what value. The wiki of life stealing I used as a reference when making this doesn’t exclude Leeching Bolts from healing a necromancer in shroud.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Life_stealing

Using Soul Spiral outside of Nightfall causes no increased health gain beyond the normal regen and vampiric traits. Minions do seem to be healed by it. However, if you time it right and use it before your lifeforce runs out, you’ll gain some healing from it. The mechanic seems to target you; the shroud just prevents it from healing because it’s not a life stealing effect.

Using Soul Spiral inside of Nightfall for Leeching Bolts causes my health to significantly increase. I do need to compare it to a Soul Spiral in a frost field for objective comparison to see if the leeching bolts really are helping or not or if I am just imagining it.

Still running Transfusion, because it’s the only good trait choice.

I did drop Soul Eater though for might and lifeforce on chill.

Edited: Changed up the build based on feedback below.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNBhQD7khGobTsrGwpGg9GsMNYTPgLQFQaAUACAxhwT4KE-TRCFABF8AAa4gAUy+DAcBAKU9nrUCikyv001swRAAA-e

This is for open world mostly. It’s all about a large number of minions and life stealing. I think the max I have been able to get is 12 or 13 at one time, provided “Rise” hits 5 targets and you kill something during the fight. Minions increase your toughness, strip conditions off you, life steal and tank for you.

If all your reaper shroud abilities are off cooldown and you execute a whirling combo with Soul Spiral in a field, you can get roughly half your life back when you jump into shroud.

Dagger/warhorn is mostly a clutch and for movement speed. With the sigil of leeching and Blood Magic traits, Life Siphon can heal for roughly half of your life pool as well.

I think my win rate against champions I have encountered in HoT is about 60%. The large number of minions plus all cleave makes decimating large groups of mobs pretty easy.

This is what I run in open world.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNBhQD7khGobTspGwrGg9GsQNYTNgKwEQKAMAGWxfwS4KE-TBSBABccQA0TXwDPAAKV/xMlgXt/o8DPNOAcFAAA-e

You pretty much never die, particularly if you Nightfall before you enter shroud and Soul Spiral in the field, and do a ton of damage.

Dagger movement speed is also really nice for traveling.

There just isn’t any reason to take it.

If you running pure shouts, the vigor and regen is much stronger in PvP than might and weakness. This is more true for staff, because Earth, which is the attunemnt you typically go into in PvP for things like Stoneheart to mitigate damage, has weakness built into it’s auto attacks

If you are running Tempest in PvE, 9 times out of 10 it’s going to be focused on the overloads for damage and the stability on overload is much more valuable.

If you were running a support auramancer in PvE, it has value I suppose for might stacks, but there isn’t a whole lot of situations in PvE where that kind of build gives a group value over a straight up dmg dealer.

Jski.6180:

Grimreaper.5370:

If overloads become more reliable in tpvp I would be happy

How do you make it more reliable with out making it “you cant stop this” it dose go off every time you do a full cast and its not bugged to randomly not go off.

Having the payload go off even after being interrupted would make it far more reliable. You still lose out on the benefits from the channel, but it becomes less of an all or nothing.

Or the 20 second cooldown doesn’t take effect on the overload and attunement if you get interrupted. A 5 second cooldown takes effect on the overload so you have another shot at overloading or the attunment cooldown remains the same if you choose to swap out.

I feel both of those are pretty reasonable, since no other elite spec has this risk vs reward element added into their mechanics and are just straight up power creep.

This is the only variant of Iohana’s build that I was able to get to work without just being straight up hard countered by something.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWnMMA9XiVYCeOAcYiFRAzNtGXzrEdgFQFYIAMASgA-TJRJwAAeAA02fg7FA4XZAA

Gale Song, Rock Solid and Lightning Flash as stun breakers or ways to get back on point when decapped. Even then, this isn’t really enough to deal with engineers. Armor of Earth is potentially better than Lightning Flash in a lot of situations. Mistform is also potentially better than both, because of guarenteed stomps and rezs, but also potentially worse, because of point control loss.

Ether Renewal to be able to wipe a heavy condi stack. Rock Solid serves as a way to protect the cast time for Ether Renewal.

You still have two shouts on short cooldowns to provide AoE support from auras. Taking Aftershock over Feel the Burn is debatable, since reflection and CC are more valuable in PvP, but the 45 second cd means you can only generate less than half the protecton, vigor, regen and condi removal that Feel the Burn can.

Rebound over Gylph of Elementals is really debatable.

Iohanna.4863:

The sarcasm is palpable, but it’s about to get even better once the build editor updates.

Runes of the Scrapper give an additional 7% damage reduction to anyone within 600 range. Without Runes of the Soldier, there is no need for a full bar of Shouts, so I can use Ether Renewal, Armor of Earth, and Cleansing Fire.

0.o

If there is no need to run a full bar of Shouts, then you are no longer an Auramancer, because you have thrown out your main source of auras and with that, your group support.

If you are going to run mostly cantrips, then there really is no reason to run Tempest. You are better off going off Arcane. The overloads themselves aren’t strong enough to take Tempest in and of itself; the only reason it’s viable is the synergy with auras. And if you only run one shout, then you don’t have enough sources of aura to make all the traits you need to invest into buffing auras worth it. Besides your shouts, you only have one aura in Earth attunement and situational procs from traits.

Even the Arcane/Air/Tempest or Arcane/Water/Tempest variants only take tempest for the aura traits to buff their shouts for support, effectively turning elementalist into a support bot who can’t actually contend or counter any other build in the game.

Iohanna.4863:

Nothing protects a point better than a Staff Bunker Celestial Auramancer.

Playing one is not very difficult – at the bare minimum, where you are completely unfamiliar with the build, and you are just spamming everything while staying in Earth attunement – you shoud be able to hold the point indefinitely against any single player.

At a higher level you are more than just a Bunker – you provide insane defensive support for your team mates, and point denial with your vast array of AOEs. If the enemy has a troublesome Bunker as well, swap out a utility for Lightning Hammer to kick them off.

It’s just too easy to be a learn2play issue. Naysayers need to learn2build.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWn0XC9XiVYCOYCcYilNAzdv+XPsErgUwIY4BEAugA-TJRJwAAeAA02fg7FA4XZAA

Yeah, except I play that build and you are overselling it.

There is some pretty crucial weaknesses to it, particularly to the variant you posted and told everyone to learn2build.

One, you have no stability at all except for overloading on Earth element which means you can only really hold points indefinitely against incompetant players or builds that have no way to decap you. Anyone who can decap you will just constantly knock you off point and slowly take the point from you via attrition. You don’t have the damage to stop them from doing that one on one and you only have one decap in staff which will be negated by anyone with decent stability uptime. If you see a flamethrower engineer contending or holding a point, you might as well just run the kitten away, because you aren’t going to do kitten.

Hell, you don’t even take Rock Solid or Gale Song. You have no stun breakers. You will get thrown around like a rag doll.

Two, you have no reliable condi cleanse to deal with a heavy condi stack. Your condi cleanse is tied directly into your shouts which is also your source of AoE boons. This puts you in an awkward position of having to pop all your shouts at once, blowing all your auras and boons to remove a condi stack. Your only other options are your big water field with a very long cooldown or water overload which isn’t strong enough to keep up with all the damage being thrown around. The sigils procs are unreliable. This setup is great for removing a small amount of conditions that are applied constantly over time, but anyone who can dump an entire condi stack on you is going to force you to make some really hard decisions to get it off.

Any condi heavy composition will bypass stoneheart and totally wreck you with the posted build.

Senario.2038:

Oh and Bruce Lee said “Be water my friend” Not empty your cup. And I think it is not a good analogy for this. Maybe if you twisted it and said tempest is completely different and not in any way interacting with base ele but imo.

I prefer to use the wise words of BroScienceLife on Youtube when comparing the state of Tempest. He once said “It’s kind of like…would you rather be molested by your female teacher who’s kind of ugly, because they usually are or would you rather be molested by your uncle? Who’s a guy. And your dad’s brother.”

Playing Tempest is certainly better than having your uncle’s fingers up your butt, but the spec undoubtedly needs some work.

Ryld.1340:

MadRabbit.3179:

At best, I would want it to be 4 seconds just to remove the awkward pauses and the general roughness of the specialization. I think, in most cases, calculating the total cast times of the weapon abilities, 4 seconds would lead to smoother transition into overloading.

The idea was for the on demand overload effects when you needed them, not some arbitrary number afterwards. If you need the Water Overload heal, you need to be able to swap to water and use it right away, not wait till the called for situation is already over.

Not arbitrary. It’s part of the intended design. There is simply no way this trait would ever happen.

Axialbloom.8109:

Add Rune of the Tempest being the worst rune set in the game.

Yeah, I don’t really get this rune set. I mean, maybe there is this plethora of stun breaks available to tempest that I am not fully realizing, but in the builds I made, the overall count was pretty low.

You mostly end up with Gale Song and Tempest Defense being your two proccing stun breaks. You can’t take Earth’s Embrace because you need the protection on aura. You can’t run eye of the storm, because you need as many shout based auras as you can fit and if you are going to give up a slot, a cantrip is still a better choice.

Additional feedback:

There is a general feeling of roughness and awkwardness from the transition into a new attunement and into an overload. After contemplating why this is, I think it’s because the average collective cast time of abilities is about 4 seconds which leaves this awkward 1 second where you just kind of auto attack and do nothing while you wait for the overload. I think reducing the overload charge time to 4 seconds (matching it’s cast time) would smooth this out a lot.

xlion.3065:

Compared to Reaper (I main Necromancer but play all classes including Elementalist) it’s shocking how bad Tempest is. In the sense of how little it adds to the profession.

I’m desperately trying to find or make a real Tempest build, i. e. something that uses a lot of the new Tempest abilities and feels really different, but it’s frustrating .

Either I get a build that plays pretty much as what Elementalists can already do or I get something that is complete crap (Warhorn?) The only “new” build seems to be Shout Staff

This is essentially what I run in PvP at the moment and the experience can honestly be summed up by this section of the article…

Counter Pressured by

Everything except full on support bunkers. While staff Elementalist – and this build in particular – has a lot of sustain through healing, boons, evades, and kite-ability, it is squishy for a bunker. It needs to actively maintain its defenses by constantly moving, constantly cycling attunements, and never stop casting except when reviving or stomping.

You have the potential to live a really long time, but you don’t just have much of an impact on the battlefield compared to the power of the other builds. Your sustain and support doesn’t keep up, your teammates eventually die and then you eventually die.

It’s not the survivability that’s the issue. It’s really more of a power issue as in the amount of overall power you can generate vs the other elite specs currently filling up the matches.

The amount of support you can generate for your teammates just doesn’t really keep up very well with the amount of damage and conditions being thrown around. Water overload is a good example. The heal and condi cleanse on pulse doesn’t keep up with HoT mobs in PvE; much less in PvP. The heal at the end is relatively strong, but it just ends up mostly healing all the damage you and the people around you took during the 4 second cast time, so it ends up kind of neutralizing itself.

My general experience was living forever, but really not being able to do anything when my teammates were targeted. It’s not just a tempest issue, to be honest; I ran into the same issue with my old staff bunker build. The amount of AoE sustain and support you can put out just get’s overshadowed by the power creep.

You can chalk it up to me being bad at my class, but this wasn’t an experience or perspective I had before HoT.

I’ll just chalk your opinion up to a small sample set of matches where you happened to do well against relatively bad players, because so far, the overwhelming consensus I see is that Tempest (and the old builds) are somewhat impotent in comparison to what some of the new elites can do.

At best, I would want it to be 4 seconds just to remove the awkward pauses and the general roughness of the specialization. I think, in most cases, calculating the total cast times of the weapon abilities, 4 seconds would lead to smoother transition into overloading.

I run all Soldier’s ascended armor with all beserker’s ascended trinkets and a beserker legenadry weapon. I calculated the stats along time ago and they came out to be close to what was, by one opinion or another, an ideal WvW elementalist, at least, at the time.

I mostly run this in PvE, because I can’t really bothered to have two sets of armor nor do I think the stat lost from not going full zerk is the end of the world in casual PvE. Some people have a real hard on for dungeon speed runs and kitten, but I’m not one of them.

It’s close to what I play.

If you are playing for safety, no reason to take Unstable Conduit over Gale Song if you aren’t speccing into aura traits. The stun break is going to be a lot more valuable in HoT PVE.

Signet of restoration doesn’t give much value with the slow attacks of staff. You might find Arcane Brilliance for a blast finisher or Ether Renewal to be a lot more helpful.

Amineo.8951:

What has Tempest over Chronomancer that makes it useful? I’m saying this because people are saying it’s a bad spec, Ele is my 2nd character (my main is Guard and I have a Thief, I also made a Mesmer a while ago but deleted it even at lvl 80 because I didn’t like it), I like the playstyle but I’m worried about it’s utilities when in Tempest compared to what Chrono does…

It’s kind of like comparing apples to oranges.

Like in sPvP, neither has effectively changed the class role too much of what I have seen in the meta. Tempest is still filling bunker role and Chronomancer is still filling a burst or condi role. The playstyles for each are different then they were before.

But Chronomancer has given Mesmer a lot of power creep while Tempest has not done the same for elementalist which is why Tempest is considered bad.

Jski.6180:

Tempest can still use a staff and WH also makes the water field.

You aren’t paying Tempest much of a service when your justifications for why it’s better than Chromonancer is stuff that elementalist already had before Tempest was around.

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.

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.

Only feedback I would give is that Tempest Defense is potentially a lot more valuable with the break bar mechanics than Inscription.

I don’t really understand running this with scepter though over dagger. You are seriously gimping yourself on your damage potential in lightning while you wait for your overloads to charge and the frequency in which you will use them with fresh air procs means you will have to constantly be within melee range anyways.

I was one of the stronger opponents to Tempest during beta. A lot of my opinions still stand about the overall design and mechanics; however, I’ve accepted it’s here to stay, so I won’t waste any more time sharing those. There is a number of things I was wrong about now that I have had time to play it for a prolonged period of time and experiment with builds. I’ve gotten a more balanced opinion on the spec, so here is my feedback. Mostly going to focus on the negative, because the point here is to improve the spec.

1. Warhorn is kittening awful. I’ve not even going to try to make suggestions about how to improve it. It’s so awful on paper that I haven’t even bothered to work it into a build. Plenty of feedback in like dozen threads on the first page of the forums, so won’t go into it.

2. I find that staff ends up being the most viable for tempest, because it has the most abilities with cooldowns that exceed the overload cooldown, even after cooldown reduction on specific attunements. Even more so, these are the abilities that are the most valuable, like static field, gust of wind, magnetic aura and both water fields. In fact, honestly, these abilities are the main reasons you swap into air, water or earth, so getting locked out of these attunements for 20 seconds is manageable. On the flip side, dagger/dagger, which works off a mechanic of flipping quickly through attunements and using multiple abilities on short cooldown gets penalized the most by this, particularly if the elementalist specs into cooldown reduction. I don’t really know how to fix this; dropping the cd to 15 seconds might help, but then again, the divide between long and short cooldown abilities is so great that it doesn’t really do anything. It doesn’t do much when 3 of your abilties are under 15 seconds and the other 2 are over 20.

3. It would be nice to see the trait elements that are absolutely essential to successfully pulling off an overload without dying (protection on overload, stability on overload, swiftness on overload) built into the mechanic itself and the traits leveraged with other bonuses that give the spec a much needed increase in power.

4. It would also be nice if, at least, one grandmaster trait, provided some type of utility that increased damage for usage in PvE. Lucid Singularity could stand to go away; it only has value in PvP and nobody is going to take that over Element Bastion, because you can’t play Tempest as anything else except a bunker without ending up in a ball in a dark corner, wrapped in a blanket and sobbing uncontrollably, thanks to all the power creep of the other elite specs. Element Bastion provides some usefulness in PvE, but you aren’t going to run the shouts necessary to get full value out of it. All the shouts except for Feel the Burn have no value in PvE compared to taking Ice Bow, Gylph of Storms, a signet or a cantrip for increased survivability and mobility when pulling off overloads.

5. The blast finisher component in Earth overload is absolutely useless and here is why. We don’t have an instant cast utility skill that applies a field that we can use to combo with the overload. Literally, all of our fields are in other attunements and their duration makes it mathematically impossible to cast, swap attunements, charge the overload and then complete it’s cast time in order to hit our own field. The only value would be using it to hit another person’s combo field which to successfully do would require coordination over teamspeak. Even then, it’s difficult, because most combo fields have cast times while most finishers are instant. Coordinating a blast finisher with a cast time longer than the cast time of most combo fields is hard. Getting rid of it and replacing it with blind on pulse or increasing the protection duration to 2 seconds so you get stacking value with each pulse of the overload would make it much stronger.

6. The heal and condi clear on water overload needs to be increased in order to really make it worth using in PvP. In my experiences, the heal and condi clear per pulse just can’t keep up with the amount of damage and conditions being thrown around right now.

7. Air and Fire are pretty great. No real complaints there, but Air is kind of weird. It’s weird to have a damage focused overload in an attunement that largely provides control utility except for mainhand dagger. Particularly with a weapon like staff when the attunement is pretty much all about blinds, knockbacks and AoE dazes. It’s hard to justify sitting in the attunement for 5 seconds and do mediocre damage just to overload for damage and those situations where the crowd control is useful are rare in PvE. The only time I really use it with staff is when I am in air attunement already from traveling in open world and run into something with it off CD.

8. The design of Latent Stamina is in direct competition with the spec’s core mechanic. Does taking a trait that gives 3 seconds of vigor and 10 endurance on swap into water make much sense when the core mechanic increases the attunement cooldown by 20 seconds? The answer is no, Karl. No, it doesn’t.

9. Gale Song could stand to have some short amount of protection added to it. Edited: Actually, forget that. Just add an aura to Eye of the Storm so it procs the aura traits. It’s currently the weakest shout, besides Rebound.

10. Tempestous Aria is kind of in a weird place. Vigor and regeneration has so much value in PvP, it’s hard to take it as trait. In PvE, only one of the shouts provides enough value to give up an utility slot for.

11. Rebound is just impractical. The margin of error is so high that it ends up being an AoE aura on a very long cooldown. It would be great if we can scrap it all together and replace it with some kind of elite spec that adds some actual burst damage value to PvE.

12. Stability on shout would be huge. The biggest con I faced when I worked on builds for PvP is my traits and utility choices left me with very little stability, which was pretty bad for a bunker. Facing off against a juggernaut flamethrower engineer who is slowly widdling you down while decapping you constantly while his own stability leaves you with no real way to decap him is a pretty miserable experience.

And that’s about it. All in all, I don’t think it turned out that bad. I think does provide the potential to improve existing builds. However, so much else is way stronger right now, the spec often feels very underwhelming in comparison.

To be honest, at this point, I am more hoping they nerf the other elite specs down to the same level as tempest rather than buff tempest. I genuinely think that’s the core issue here.

The power creep across the board is starting to feel like anything without an elite is going to be inferior and with that, moving elementalist to the wayside, since our’s doesn’t compete.

Zenith.7301:

Dagger range is not melee range. Dagger ele has the highest max melee range and it actually allows you to attack away from the reach of most mobs. Fire overload does not.

And the arcane % is not hard or inconsistent. You’ll hev perma might, fury, and swiftness at the very least, add quickness from the chronomancer which they can provide close to 30-40 seconds of, permanent regen from the engineer turret or Glint’s facet or the Druid in your group.

You are virtually eating 3 useless traits and terrible minor traits just for the fire overload, let’s see how many times you complete it against mobs that actually force you to dodge since people whined so much about melee in the forums to the point that they’ve made mobs specifically designed to punish melee (so more people can camp and profit from ranged weapons that carry little risk).

To me it seems like Tempest is terrible for PvE on anything than staff and the staff variant probably cuts even with the vanilla build.

I think we are splitting hairs and most of this is your subjective opinion which is fine. I also wasn’t implying that the traditional DPS build is now bad or not viable; that there is reasonable objective arguments that don’t warrant a ranking of “terrible” for tempest in PvE.

I also think my point survives your arguments intact. Despite the increased risk of using fire overload, tempest does, on paper, provide more dps potential on paper. Whether or not you think the risk is worth it I think comes down to personal playstyle; I think it does and I have enjoying running so far.

In addition, the only traitline I would consider to be terrible would be the grandmaster line. Aura on overload with synergy with fury on aura in air plus the 10% increase in damage from harmonious contuit buff provide a very useful and strong boost to your meteor shower after you finish your fire overload.

As far as completing it when forced to dodge, I have yet to encounter anything in game that didn’t provide a 4 second window for you to use to complete an overload without getting one shotted with the increased protection on. I think it mostly comes down to knowing what you are fighting and when your window is for overloading and having a fallback like lightning flash to disengage.

But I do agree with your last point. I won’t play anything but staff with tempest, because most of the abilities on staff that are worth using are on longer or equal cooldown to overload, making the cooldown it less painful.

Zenith.7301:

Advice is not to build Tempest at all for PvE if you want DPS. You’re giving up Arcane’s 2% damage per boon (easily 10%+ damage in a group setting) and superior traits just to overload fire in staff, which is situational as it requires melee range anyways.

Tempest is a plain stinker in PvE.

As with everything in this game, they design something for PvP and PvE is an afterthought.

Except melee range is not situational. I mean, why would it be? If it was situational, then D/D won’t be practical at all, because it constantly requires melee range. Because it’s a ranged weapon, therefore it’s situational?

Okay, so you give up 2% damage increase per boon from arcane. Well, the thing is that Harmonious Conduit gives a flat 10% bonus to damage for 5 seconds after an overload. So theoretically, if you were to do a slow rotation on your attunements, you would always have a 10% dmg increase that is not dependent on a certain number of boons.

Of course, you aren’t going to do that in PvE. You are largely going to camp fire. Which means you have a 10% dmg increase for 5 seconds every 20 seconds. If you take cooldown reduction on fire abilities, this puts your meteor shower at 20 seconds which is the same cooldown as overlord. Therefore if you put a lava font → fire overload → meteor shower rotation, you always get a 10% damage increase to your heaviest hitting fire ability.

So when you compare that to a 2% stacking damage increase that’s inconsistent and situational, they are roughly equal in practice.

Therefore, you really aren’t losing much of a damage increase from dropping arcane. In fact, you’re gaining a huge boost to your damage output from a new ability which does 1,100 dmg a pulse in full beserker (300 less than meteor shower), stacks burn and might on pulse and has the same cooldown as a traited meteor shower.

This doesn’t even factor in the large increase in fury uptime from blasting fire fields and using auras.

The only real con to this new ability is melee range, which isn’t situational anymore than D/D is situational in PvE. It can just make using more difficult at time.

In conclusion, it’s not a plain stinker in PvE. The build I posted does potentially more damage than the traditional fire/air/arcane staff.