Guild Wars 2

Condition builds are only viable in 1v1s, where they generally perform quite well, except against necromancers of course.

In team fights, their damage is easily negated by D/D eles doing their normal rotation, as well as shout guards, shout warriors (soon to be shout tempest/reaper and druid too as well in some circles), inspiration memser, engineer heal turret, etc.

When you’re worrying about one persons cleanses, its fine and balanced and even powerful. But when you have to worry about the AoE cleanse that a good amount of the “meta” builds bring in a teamight in addition to your target’s cleanses, it ceases to be effective. The only exception is burn guardian, but only because burning does so much burst damage that you can sneak in a huge stack of burns and get a payoff from it before its cleansed 4 seconds later… with a stack of 10 bleeds, you’d need a drastically longer time to get the same payoff as an equivalent stack of burn. Even then, teamfight comps with extra heavy duty cleanse (ie. radioactive’s staff ele+double shoutguard) will negate burn guardian even further.

I think the biggest challenge with these types of passive proc traits is just keeping track of the ICD, which a per-target ICD would help with, especially because this trait is much more active than most passive procs, compared to say spinal shivers or panic strike that happen at 50% to help lock down a target when you hit them below that threshold and make finising them off from their quite easy.

Since ancient seeds is much more active, you can easily mess up if you attempt to immob someone with LB4 then 1 to proc it, but on GS 4 seconds earlier you accidentally cleaved an updrafted individual with maul but didn’t notice that they got the ancient seed proc instead of the target you’re focusing. Its a random situation but could happen in the chaos of battle.

A per target CD would help you maintain control over the trait, and I think raising it to 15 seconds per target would be a bit more balanced to compesate for an overall more versatile and easier to control effect.

Godservant.8736:

Karl McLain.5604:

Bam!
Thanks everyone in advance for your constructive feedback. Please keep in mind that we’re getting close to day zero and that the smaller the change, the more likely we’ll be able to discuss and action that feedback. This isn’t the end, however. We’ll continue to make changes, when necessary, after HoT releases, as well.

Thanks!
-Karl

Karl;

I understand that it’s very busy over there at Anet right now, but I was wondering if we could have a moment of your time to get feedback on your work on Tempest at the moment? This would allow us to focus our efforts on constructive, specific responses to the changes you are making/would be willing to make.

Again, we know that your time is incredibly limited, and appreciate whatever you would be willing to spare us. Thank you.

Considering he posted Daredevil notes for post beta changes a few days ago, I expect that sometime between now and Sunday we’ll get a detailed list of changes that are considered as such, works in progress that may change before launch, rather than final eternal notes.

As it stands, I think Tempest is mostly good for what it does and what it tries to be, it just needs minor traits, the whole middle line of master tier traits, shout CDR in TA, lightning orb, water overload, and a smidgen of condition removal on a shout (like 2-3 condis on self on a 25-30 CD shout) to be looked at and improved.

The last time this happened, back in 2013, we experienced a condi ranger meta. Do you really want that again?

Except this time around, it’d probably be condi chronomancer/revenant/berserker/dragonhunter. Does that sound like a fun metagame to you?

Cynz.9437:

nearlight.3064:

Not a teef player but shouldn’t daredevil give you guys more viable roles? It focuses on helping you survive without necessarily needing stealth through evades and weakness, and a lot of the interrupt traits look like they could be very powerful in 1v1s, which is the weakness of most theif builds when they try to fight bruisers.

drd is ok vs bad/mediocre players, it is still subpar to old sd and even current dp sa vs decent enemies, imo

- it is extremely selfish,
- it offers no dmg mitigation (besides that 10% after dodge if you take corresponding GM), you WILL run out of dodges and you WILL die really fast if there is persistent aoe/getting focused
- condi removal actually requires you to successfuly evade an attack (sounds good on paper, is actually not that useful imo if you consider amount of condis thrown around)
- trickery is so mandatory now, drd build only works with dodges so you need acro as well > that means you get no dmg traits from CS or DA

the list is pretty long but you may as well just visit thief forums if you want to know what’s wrong with drd and why it is not really a solution to thief woes

i tried drd in both beta weekends and found it extremely underwhelming; on other hand i had no issues killing drd thieves on standard dp sa :/

also, besides drd, xpac shouldn’t be p2w…. it was really wrong from begin with to nerf everything thieves had just to offer (rather underwhelming) drd elite spec

lemme cut off your legs so i can sell you this wheelchair <<<basically what happend to thieves

Would SA/trIckery/DD work? Panic strike doesn’t seem like the end all be all even though it’s a powerful proc, but as a non thief player your concerns do make sense to me, especially considering the acro traitline controversy needed to balance DD.

And yeah during BWE2 I destroyed a staff DD with the reaper GS on a soldiers build, which is perhaps the easiest to dodge weapon in the game.. So yeah there’s that.

Not a teef player but shouldn’t daredevil give you guys more viable roles? It focuses on helping you survive without necessarily needing stealth through evades and weakness, and a lot of the interrupt traits look like they could be very powerful in 1v1s, which is the weakness of most theif builds when they try to fight bruisers.

Vatlaaw Fierceshot.5713:

NapTooN.6283:

Jericho.4598:

What Hammergaurd said. It’s a pretty strong trait, compare to all the useless Grand Master Traits we have.

Spike Trap’s knock down does not trigger Ancient Seeds. I don’t know if it’s intended or a bug, I hope they fix it.

The CC is not what triggers AS, you have to deal damage to a CCed Enemy to trigger AS

The bleed doesn’t trigger it either. And if it only activates on direct damage then it should be changed to include condition damage.

You can just hit longbow 4 then 1 and profit. (Or SB 5 and 1 of condi to proc it easily, but there are so many other ways, like immobing enemies CCed with ally skills). I just mention the LB method because it can easily get decaps on things like necros that don’t have stun breaking teleports or tons of stability.

Ganathar.4956:

nearlight.3064:

OneKlicKill.4285:

Jski.6180:

That just silly why would you give up on your ele main if tempest is not to your like? If you did like tempest then you would be benched your ele main just the same. So if any thing your more likely to play ele becuse you do not like tempest that or you realy did not like ele in the first places.

Any way every thing ele has tempest gets they are not going to add in another set of cantrip like shouts for tempest becuse tempest can still use cantrips. You would need to remove cantrips from the tempest set to add in more cantrip like ability why replaces something that you already have?

Back to benched ele main if you wanted to play something comply new then you would of benched ele any way and the play type. If you wanted something new for ele then say that do not take it out on tempest something that is set up to be a different class then ele.

OneKlicKill.4285:

I’ve been playing cantrip ele since pre launch beta, tempest failed at making something
A. more enjoyable, and
B. Something equally as viable (preferably with a new role…)

I thought I was pretty clear. I’ve been playing the same ele since pre launch beta. Yes I wanted something new, look at reaper, or chrono, or ranger, or war. They all have synergistic new trait lines that augment their style of play to make it new. Tempest just slaps some abilities on and calls it cost vs reward, emphasis on auras, which are really bad (shocking excluded, and situationally earth), and gave us kittening WH… It’s a bruiser support playstyle, EXACTLY what we’ve been doing, and sitting afk for 4 seconds channeling isn’t my idea of fun, especially when ele has always been one of the most actively engaging classes. And because they didn’t give us a MH wep staying in one attunement isn’t adventagis as our abilities are all balanced around rotating, CDs and Damage

In raids tempest is easily outclassed in its current state and I’ve done my runs through all the instances and fractals be it FA or staff. So I’ll move to something else and enjoy new until they can bring something new to ele THAT CAN COMPETE AND BE FUN.

At the end of the day the ele meta wont change, it’ll be staff/fa in instance and d/d in pvp sounds plenty new eh?

To be fair, its difficult to bring something completely new to a class that can already do nearly everything with a degree of proficiency. They gave us a new playstyle thats more strategic instead of scripted, and I’m happy with it so far, pending some of the traits are brought up to more reasonable levels.

It always amuses me when people say that eles can do nearly everything.

Can they:

• take hits nearly as well as other professions when going full glass?

• have stealth at all?

• use reflect fields against area effect?

• utilise boon-stripping or boon corruption?

• use support that involves resistance, quickness, retaliation, aegis or alacrity?

• have a good condition spec that can deal long-term damage? They are missing a few conditions as well.

• be dedicated healers?

• deal good mobile damage in PvE?

As you see there are a lot of things that the ele either cannot do or at least not perform proficiently at. I am sure that there are more examples than these as well, but that’s all that came to my mind in about 5 minutes.

Ironically, the tempest does have potential to address some things that the ele lacks. Mobile PvE damage is a big one, but the fact of the matter is the tempest needs buffs to compete in that area, especially because the ele needs to also make up for its survivability problems when going glass. The tempest could also have the potential to be a good healer with the right gear, if Anet tried to adjust the healing scaling of ele abilities.

I have also been reading about the tank tempest and that has been an interesting prospect that I never thought of. If you get the right gear and traits for that role, I wonder if it would work.

I think that dedicated healer roles, whether base elementalist or tempest are definitely possible.

as far as stealth goes, I think stealth isn’t an elementalist thing simply because they want to maintain differentiation between the skillset of different classes. The differentiation argument extends to other things you mentioned, like rare boons or boon strip (that tempest was supposed to have), but having those niche roles in a jack of all trades class would be a little bit too much versatility. Let’s not forget that tempest has more ability than any other class in the game to easily give their team protection permanently, and protection being as strong of a boon as it is should not be overlooked.

Fresh air builds in pvp are held together by earth focus skills with reduced cooldown and superspeed for kiting and repositioning and blinds in 1v1. I mean, yeah it’s less active defense than what a PU mes or SA thief has but there are options if you look for them. Condition damage builds actually feel a lot more viable since the burn stacking change for sure, and the tools are definitely there, but they’re relatively weakened by the eles jack of all trades design that makes it more efficient to be hybridized to max.

Tempest gives a lot more Mobile AoE damage through overloads for sure, it just has a higher risk higher reward setup in a game where low risk, high reward builds typically dominate.

Ehecatl.9172:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Somewhat true, but you have to remember that they will have defensive traits and skills that can help them survive. For example, the Protective Ward trait may be rather popular on Druids, as other traits in the Nature Magic line can come in handy. Plus, since you will almost assuredly be running Wilderness Survival anyway, the Bark Skin minor trait does a lot to help you avoid an opening burst.

The main reason to do 1200 Power, 900 Precision, 900 Healing Power, though? Because that’s what Zealot’s gear is. If it was a 4 stat set, they would need to add a different name.

Most people would want to run druid in place of Wilderness Survival as it provides decent condition clearing potential. Especially if the glyphs get some buffs to make them competitive with survival skills. Natural Magic also isn’t always ideal to run because it doesn’t have very good traits aside from Protective Ward.

Then Protective Ward has an internal cooldown and can be triggered by a stray auto attack. It’s very, very unlikely a druid will have that trait up in team fights where the druid is both most wanted and most at risk of getting blown away.

Granted this wouldn’t be an issue if players could just tweak the amulet stats to make them a bit more flexible.

In the last beta I stuck with wilderness survival simply because the survival utilities were the best skills to use (especially troll heal for AF gen), If the glyphs were brought up that could work in place of them, especially if we won’t be bound to troll to generate AF on non-staff builds after the possible changes. On a power build you go into druid basically for condi clear, celestial shadow’s utility, and ancient seed’s CC. If we get an offensive healing power amulet, then staff could work in place of GS for “team support”.

Anyway regardless of the name, the 4 stat amulet combo I listed would be ideal, but I’d be happy with a 3 stat version.

OneKlicKill.4285:

Jski.6180:

That just silly why would you give up on your ele main if tempest is not to your like? If you did like tempest then you would be benched your ele main just the same. So if any thing your more likely to play ele becuse you do not like tempest that or you realy did not like ele in the first places.

Any way every thing ele has tempest gets they are not going to add in another set of cantrip like shouts for tempest becuse tempest can still use cantrips. You would need to remove cantrips from the tempest set to add in more cantrip like ability why replaces something that you already have?

Back to benched ele main if you wanted to play something comply new then you would of benched ele any way and the play type. If you wanted something new for ele then say that do not take it out on tempest something that is set up to be a different class then ele.

OneKlicKill.4285:

I’ve been playing cantrip ele since pre launch beta, tempest failed at making something
A. more enjoyable, and
B. Something equally as viable (preferably with a new role…)

I thought I was pretty clear. I’ve been playing the same ele since pre launch beta. Yes I wanted something new, look at reaper, or chrono, or ranger, or war. They all have synergistic new trait lines that augment their style of play to make it new. Tempest just slaps some abilities on and calls it cost vs reward, emphasis on auras, which are really bad (shocking excluded, and situationally earth), and gave us kittening WH… It’s a bruiser support playstyle, EXACTLY what we’ve been doing, and sitting afk for 4 seconds channeling isn’t my idea of fun, especially when ele has always been one of the most actively engaging classes. And because they didn’t give us a MH wep staying in one attunement isn’t adventagis as our abilities are all balanced around rotating, CDs and Damage

In raids tempest is easily outclassed in its current state and I’ve done my runs through all the instances and fractals be it FA or staff. So I’ll move to something else and enjoy new until they can bring something new to ele THAT CAN COMPETE AND BE FUN.

At the end of the day the ele meta wont change, it’ll be staff/fa in instance and d/d in pvp sounds plenty new eh?

To be fair, its difficult to bring something completely new to a class that can already do nearly everything with a degree of proficiency. They gave us a new playstyle thats more strategic instead of scripted, and I’m happy with it so far, pending some of the traits are brought up to more reasonable levels.

When it comes to healing power in spvp, only existing two amulets give us healing power with ample offensive stats, however those amulets are flawed for certain types of builds.

First, we have the celestial amulet, which is an all around hybrid amulet, but doesn’t give the focused offensive stats needed for a an offensive-healer role to truly take form.

Second, we have the crusader amulet, which is almost never used because it gives 0 precision, opting to give toughness and ferocity and healing power instead, along side its high power stat. Its only ever used in rather gimmicky crit-chance subsitution builds that you make with remorseless ranger, death perception necro, and rolling mists revenant, but those builds struggle to be viable because they rely on crit-chance substitution to be viable.

Now we have a problem, because an offensive amulet will be needed after the launch of HoT more than ever before. Druid is coming, and its having its healing power scaling values adjusted so that maruder builds can’t tank a point in celestial avatar form anymore, they’ll need healing power to truly be able to make use of druid mechanics since the druid healing will presumably only be useful with enough healing power. The zealot stat combination would be perfect for PvP for Druid, among other classes.

It should give stats that include: 1050 power 1050 precision 560 healing power 560 vitality. This stat combo would go a long way to make power Druid builds viable, or else they’ll be pigeonholed into running cleric support, settlers condi-side-point holder, or simply be unable to use their new elite specialization, that many people have paid $50 to play, to play a viable power build that doesn’t eat dirt. Furthermore, the zealot stat combination could be potentially useful on various Warrior, Elementalist/Tempest, MM necromancer/reaper, and offensive support chronomancer/revenant builds.

And just think about it, do we really want a game where the only viable amulets are Marauder/Zerker, Celestial, and Soldiers? NO, we want amulet diversity, and we want it in two weeks!

tl;dr-When druid heals have a low base heal but high healing power scaling, druid will need a zealot amulet in order to have a viable power build in the future meta

Discuss.

mistsim.2748:

jcbroe.4329:

Puck.9612:

Knighthonor.4061:

Honestly, i have to wonder, if many of the people here who are crying that Druid is useless outside of Raids, ever even played the Druid as a Healer at all.

because at the same time during the BWE3 as the Ranger forum was yelling about how bad and useless Druids are outside of Raids, people were on the PvP and WvW forum yelling about how strong Druids are.

lol. I played healer druid and it was awesome. Just need better self defense because as people figured it out, they started to do the “Target the Ranger” tactic which left me screwed since Toughness stat is pretty lacking on Cleric gear and the heals cant counter full target of the Druid from dps heavy enemies.

but the class was great. I left the beta with a nice memory in WvW when it was a three side zerg war ground in which I managed to heal my outnumbered team zerg and keep them alive far longer than they would without my heals. Was a great feeling of Support actually matters for once instead of it just being a byproduct of DPS zerker builds.

The only “druid OP” threads I saw were posted before the weekend. Everyone considered them a free bag after they played against them.
Damage mitigation>healing. Druids can’t out heal coordinated spikes, and it’s very easy to just target druid first and chain cc/burst him down.

100% this. People weren’t making claims of effectiveness, they were upset it takes a few seconds longer to whack through a health bar being “extended” by healing, but every “Druid OP” post was either about our traits which have little to nothing to do outside of functionality, and our healing; meaning that at that point they were asking for nerfs to the only thing celestial form and to some extent the main feature of Druid could even do.

Celestial form was in desperate need of being support oriented and not just a healbot with exclusive usage in PvE content, and 9/10 times in PvP you’d be better off picking up the traitline and then not using celestial form ever except maybe to “flash” into it and drop 2 and 3 real quick and then immediately exit.

basically. pure healbots will never work in pvp. when youre not doing damage, peeling, and killing people, youre wasting time and getting killed yourself. spike damage is fairly nasty in live currently. some of the elite specs take this to the next level in HoT.

I made a sturdy druid using celestial amulet and grove runes, so perma prot. had some stab, wasn’t really dying. problem was, with about 750 healing power, I wasn’t able to keep players up. my top plays were LI + natural convergence combos on a point when people weren’t paying attention to me. it really had nothing to do with my heals. in a game where we’re spiking each other for 12-15k damage, mitigation is king.

now the only interesting thing about the druid in BWE3 were the offensive builds with marauder stats. lb/gs, staff/lb, and to an extent gs/staff all worked very nicely. we could roam, 1v1, support the team, hold points briefly. I was excited about the possibilities. offensive/hybrid druid rocked. I could count on 1 hand how many druids played this way, i.e. properly, during the beta, and we were hella strong.

the worst thing that can happen now is some sort of nerf to base healing of the druid to force people to wear healing stats. given our low base HP, cleric wont work in conquest because mesmers can spike for 15k on 3k armor. celestial stats don’t heal enough and tickle people.

the best thing would be to allow druids to excel at HYBRID builds that can do damage and support the team. leave the scaling . instead improve our avatar skills, weapons and a few traits. druid needs nothing but buffs to healing AND damage.

Lewis Burnell.2493:

In all honesty I think it’s too late in development to change anything on the druid besides minor skill functionality such as tweaking healing numbers or adding a boon or two

Yeah, I had a ton of fun playing marauder LB/GS druid with WS/BM/Druid and it worked very well. I know the nerf is justified to keep the sustain on glass builds from being a little too great (although its honestly worse on herald) but I’m just dismayed at the complete lack of amulet choices that provide a combination of power, precision, and healing power. The only power build amulet with healing power that has the potential to actually do damage is crusaders, which is completely held back by its lack of precision. I mean we can run marksmanship for remorseless and Moment of Clarity, but I honestly don’t think thats enough. PvP needs a zealot amulet so badly, not just for druid, but for a lot of warrior, tempest/ele, and guardian builds to truly open up.

posthumecaver.6473:

I don"t plan to ise Tempest other than trolling d/d does everything that tempest does and better.

Well you could always play d/d water/arcane tempest with cantrips that uses overloads just situationally such as for a random stunbreak or whatnot. It will depend on the “finalized” tempest traitline at launch, but since they nerfed fire to not give you dramitcally faster might-stacking ramp up time, I think tempest could be competitve with fire, of course depending on the changes. Harmonious conduit can make up for the 10% damage modifier you lose by not going fire, the gale song proc is nice, elemental bastion gives you increased sustain as D/D that would make up for losing blinding ashes, and earthen proxy/latent stamina could be useful as bunker/support depending on how Karl changes them, as we know we plans to bring those two traits up a bit. You could even take imbued melodies with warhorn if you really want to be a boonspamming machine, that spams boons better than base D/D ele does. I also hope that they’ll rework the minor traits to give some useful incentive to pick tempest that isn’t overload centric.

The only overload you wouldn’t really want to ever use for obvious reasons is water overload since it breaks your defensive rotation, but air does a ton of damage with celestial stats. Fire overload brings a burst of might stacking. and earth overload’s lingering dust tornado can easily give your team perma-protection.

So yeah you’d trade some 1v1 potential by trading fire for tempest, but you’d also gain a lot more defensive/offensive/supportive tools in teamfights. Yeah base elementalist can generally do the same things, but when it comes to protection, auras, and AoE damage, tempest honestly has the tools to do it better.

Wondrouswall.7169:

Knighthonor.4061:

…and 5 Revenant Energy.

Interesting.

Make it grant 5% necromancer life force too, all is fair in love and war.

sicsempertyrannis.3510:

I agree with the overall theme of your post, ie that the Tempest is fundamentally flawed and needs a significant overhaul before release.

Do we expect Karl to do anything but tune numbers at this point? Absolutely not. I predict that he’ll improve some of the cooldowns and damage values, move a few traits around, but the flaws will remain untouched.

It’s a shame that someone more experienced with the Elementalist class was not in charge of its Elite Specialization. He’s not a bad developer, he just doesn’t understand the subtleties of the class particularly well, as demonstrated by past comments he’s made on Twitch, various design decisions with the Tempest, and lack of certain minimum experience metrics in-game.

Well based on what hes posted on the thief forums so far about Daredevil, I expect that he’ll focus on buffing/reworking traits primarily, plus we already know that he knows to buff/rework earthen proxy and latent stamina. Really the minor traits and the middle line of the tempest traitline are the only things that need significant fixing. The warhorn is fine besides lightning orb and cooldowns, and I’ve come to terms with the strenghts and weaknesses of the overloads.

The air and earth overloads are in an amazing place for what they do, and I’m perfectly happy with them. Fire was nerfed for being too strong last time, and water is flawed since it got its cast time normalized with the others. You can use them as stunbreaks now, which gives them much more utility and purpose than they originally had. You can make a water/arcane/tempest build with d/d and cantrips and play it exactly the same, except you’ll either have much more sustain from auraheals, much more boon duration/protection from warhorn if you take that+imbued melodies, a possible 10% damage modifier to compensate for losing fire, earthen proxy, and best of all, situational extra stunbreaks that can do a lot of damage or a lot of support, and I think I’d be happy with that.

If they just remedy the traitline, tempest will fall into place.

Personally I think these One-Off reward tracks should give us a black lion ticket instead of a key if theres going to be so few of them. PvPers either have to grind tracks for months or play accounting simulator on the TP for a few days to get enough gold to get these black lion skins.

tl;dr- Give us the ticket, not the RNGKey!

Shogun.7401:

How is tempest? I am considering making one.

Tempest is really fun! To me it felt like a more necromancer-styled feel to playing elementalist because its a lot slower paced and requires careful timing and positioning in order to be effective, so it feels more strategic to play, whereas base elementalist tends to be a lot more fast paced and twitch and relies on comboing rotations of skills over and over again to get stronger while sustaining yourself and doing damage.

Since I main necro, the Tempest playstyle meshed with my interests more than base elementalist really does.

In general, its a ton of fun to play for me anyway. The warhorn isn’t my favorite part of the spec, and I don’t think its bad except for the skill Lightning Orb. The main strenght of the warhorn is boon-spam support through sand squall and heat sync, while most of the other skills are either slowly oozing out AoEs or AoE interrupts. I think its a lot better than most people give it credit for, its main problems though are simply long cooldowns relative to offensive offhand dagger or focus skills, and a lack of personal defense on it, which makes focus feel better in many tempest builds.

Arcane shield and blast are sometimes used by fresh air builds for active defense+free crit/fresh air proc respectively. Thats pretty much it in PvP.

In general though the elementalist has pretty poor utilities for PvP outside of cantrips. Signets are marginally useful because written in stone is really good, while glyphs are probably even worse than arcanes in how niche they are. And then we have the conjures, which are either completely overpowered in PvE or completely useless, the middle ground on elementalist utilities doesn’t exist.

Yeah so just to reiterate a few key points, I find that powerful auras should be folded in with elemental bastion for the sake of build diversity and synergy between traitlines, and that tempest needs condition removal on one of the shouts somewhere, preferably personal condition removal, but ally cleanse is good too.

I also think that the minor traits should be looked at and improved and that the stability stack from harmonious conduit be added to hardy conduit, and that the minor traits should do something supportive upon completing an overload successfully, such as giving allies super speed or stability for general support purposes, since I feel as though the biggest problem with the minor traits is that they’re selfish and don’t support allies like Tempest ideally is supposed to.

Other than that, I’m thrilled to play Tempest at launch, and I had so much fun playing it during the last beta!

Tempest is definitely viable, but as of now its not an optimal choice. I spent a lot of time with it in the beta and I think I can discuss it’s viability.

I do agree with your reasoning that arcane is likely the biggest reason why tempest isn’t optimal, but I don’t agree that strictly nerfing it is any solution at all to the problem for several reasons.

1. As it stands I believe that underperforming traits like imbued melodies and latent stamina were intended to substitute some of the utility of arcane (vigor, boon duration) but fail in practice. In particular imbued melodies’s boon duration is locked to a GM trait that necessitates the use of a weapon that generally underperforms except for one boon-sharing rotation. The restriction limits it severely.

2. Tempest minor traits are noncompetitive with arcane minor traits as they focus on making overloads easier to pull off, making them overly niche.

3. Nerfing arcane would require buffing in other areas, specifically in regards to condition removal. As it stands tempest can replicate the healing of evasive arcana with elemental bastion to a reasonable degree, but it can’t replicate the condition removal of evasice arcana itself or the cleansing water synergy supplied by elemental attunement in any capacity whatsoever. Your options for condition removal as a tempest are water overload, which is impractical to use purely for cleanse since you need cleanse on demand, not 5 seconds later, and its the riskiest overload to use compared to the others. Your other options are trait water+cantrips, particulary cleansing fire/ether renewal, or take shout runes to clear condis, which still makes you susceptible to condi-bursts even if you can support allies better, and diamond skin, which is difficult to maintain without traited cantrips.

This all being said, there are some tempest builds that really do work. The most notable one that drastically improves itself over its arcane-base ele counterpart is marauder S/F fresh air with air/earth/tempest, simply because air overload supplies the best damage and the best defense through shocking aura, and gives S/F ele a reliable source of AoE damage that is greatly enhanced by fresh air, while keeping things like one with air to be relatively mobile.

Besides that, various auramancy builds do work with celestial stats, but are held back by the overly spread distribution of aura traits, powerful auras+shout auras are unsynergistic with eachother, and the condition weakness that dropping arcane causes pigenonholes you into traiting cantrips, earth CDR for focus, and/or shoutrunes just to manage it at all, which makes achieving a jack of all trades role as a tempest harder to do than base elementalist.

You can also run a more standard arcane/water/tempest build with cantrips that plays like a normal D/X ele that only uses overloads rarely to either buff warhorn protection sharing with earth overload+heat sync, or as a stunbreak that lets them counterpressure the enemy. In this case they can either choose earthen proxy for more tankiness that simulates stone heart to an extent (this trait will be buffed though) or harmonious conduits to overload more reliably and gain a 10% damage modifier to partially make up for the one you lose by not going fire. In this case you can support/damage in teamfights a bit better than a normal elementalist, while your 1v1 potential will be a bit lower due to less damage from fire, forcing you to have to hold the point in a 1v1 rather than assault it against an enemy bruiser like D/D fire ele can do.

tl;dr- there are definitely viable things you can do in PvP with tempest, but unless the strengths of arcane-water synergy are more appropriately distributed between base class lines and tempest traits/skills, tempest will struggle to be an optimal pick over fire D/D ele in the coming meta.

For PvP, I found a couple builds that work, but are slightly held back by poor trait design of the Tempest traitline, which I believe is fixable, although I wish we had assurance that the devs will continually balance and revisit elite specs after launch, besides the obvious herald/chronomancer nerfs.

S/F fresh air benefits greatly from taking tempest over arcane since you can use air overload somewhat frequently for massive AoE damage. Additionally, celestial water/arcane/tempest can work, using overloads rarely, mainly as stunbreaks now that they break stun in order to counter pressure CC against them, and could potentially make use of traits like Earthen Proxy (or Harmonious Conduit for damage mod) pending traitline adjustments. Since the fire line is nerfed enough to be good, but not god-mode level, I think Tempest could be a fair substitute from it.

I also tried aura-heavy D/F earth builds with no arcane, and I was forced to run ether renewal and cleansing fire with the CDR trait to keep up with conditions, but a shout build with shout runes but lower damage could likely handle it better while being isolated to teamfights.

In general tempest is very strong in temfights when you’re not being focused, and my years of playing necromancer have taught me to play around that fact and still ultimately succeed with it.

Xillllix.3485:

i just don’t get it: Tempest is better on every other weapon set than warhorn and it seems nothing is being done about it.

It is by far the biggest issue. Traits and shout can be fixed after, but Warhorn still feels like it’s in alpha stage and it is far from being ready for the release of HoT.

I think traits should be prioritized over the warhorn. I mean when it comes to an elite spec, you’re forced to take the traits, but you’re not forced to take the warhorn, shouts, and in the tempest’s case, you don’t necessarily have to overload all the time if ever.

Still, I do totally think that everything should be worked on and improved, but I am firm in my belief that the traits should be the focus for tweaking, and post-launch buffs probably won’t happen for several months after launch, since the devs will probably focus instead on nerfing the imbalanced stuff that the expansion introduces across all elite specs, when it becomes apparent that the imbalances are clear.

Yeah your concept for Rebound would need a drastically higher cooldown (probably 120-180 seconds) if it were buffed that much. I do think the healing values should be raised, but not by an amount so great that it’d become broken hahaha.

And yeah I loved tempest too, and I think that all of the overloads save for water are in a good spot for the damage and support they put out.

PowerBottom.5796:

ReaperJr.5967:

Pvp wise.

I’ve tried tempest with different traitlines over the beta weekends extensively. Unfortunately, eles are still locked in water/arcana/cantrips builds. There wasn’t a decent build for tempest.

Tempest/water/arcana is nowhere as good as other elite specs, and sacrificing water or arcana leads to gimmicky builds. Cantrips are still essential and there was no room for shouts. Hugely disappointing.

When is this ever going to be fixed?

I think that you are mostly right, but I also feel that it has gotten a little bit better with tempest:

- Shouts+Soldier runes can be decent for survival/condi-cleanse. I’ve tried some hybrid-builds with 2 cantrips and 3 shouts and it kinda worked!
- Dropping water might also be a possibility, because with stuff like diamond skin, water overload, shouts+soldier runes, you can have pretty decent condi-cleanse and healing while not going into water.

Yeah, this actually works reasonably well if you run earth traits for elemental shielding and elemental bastion of course. I actually avoided shouts on my build because powerful auras not working with shouts feels really wasted, so finding the right synergy of trait balance is difficult. I ended up playing a build that used ether renewal and cleansing fire with powerful auras to spread auras when I overload to heal, but I’m starting to think that it’d be viable to drop water and not even bother with diamond skin at all if you went with shouts and trooper runes, but I still feel that one of the shouts should provide a cleanse of 3 conditions or so in the user to hold the playstyle together.

You also lose a ton of damage and mightsacks from not being able to run strength runes w/strength sigil, but I feel like thats a fair enough tradeoff to make.

I only use S/F in pvp, not WvW, but what I’d suggest based on my experiences is running earth instead of water to pick up written in stone and geomancer’s freedom, since written in stone gives you a good low CD heal that you can actually pop, and geomancer’s freedom gives you much lower CDs on your earth focus skills that are important in surviving.

Also One with Air is really nice with fresh air in order to kite and move around more effectively.

Yup, playing fresh air without tempest doesn’t even compare, I do so much less damage without overloads.

Personally I felt that trained ether renewal and stone heart felt overall better with powerful auras, although I’d do far less damage than he did without fresh air.

You can afford to drop arcane for sure with tempest. One build streamed by phantaram even took earth/air/tempest with celestial stats, but had to rely on diamond skin to deal with condis.

I mean I understand part of the problem is that the new shouts don’t offer condition removal unless speced for with runes (which I hope is added to one of the shouts), but I’m actually pleasantly surprised with how fun tempest was and how intrisically satisfying it was to make a build that didn’t have arcane and strict attunement rotations in it. The playstyle clicked for me in a way that normal D/D water/arcane/X ele doesn’t satisfy me, and to me that means that tempest has the potential to be something great for sure.

I just want to say that daredevil and tempest aren’t as bad as people are billing them out to be. Daredevil in particular raises thief’s 1v1 potential enormously due to interrupt spam, and tempest, now that its been considerably improved makes marauder builds much more powerful, while opening up celestial builds with arguably better teamfight potential than base ele that don’t rely on arcane, or even water to be effective.

While the other elite specs are stronger in comparison I’m not too concerned, since leagues seem to be indicative of slightly more frequent balance patches, and some of the elite specs will take a while to be figured out completely by the playerbase in terms of viability in an actual competitive scenario. Remember, and elite spec gives up a base traitline to be an elite spec, and in many cases existing builds can’t translate into the new playstyle very well since giving up a base-class traitline means giving up existing build synergies, and across the board things like the new weapons and new utility skills are widely considered to be the weakest component of each elite spec compared to new mechanics and traits, with a few exceptions like chronomancer.

Glenstorm.4059:

While I think it is too late in the HoT development cycle for Anet to a minor trait overhaul, I know that they are still looking to overhaul Latent Stamina and Earthen Proxy, so with hope, I suggest the following:

-Merge Harmonious Conduit AND Speedy Conduit into Hardy Conduit as the new Master minor trait. Call it Harmonious Conduit.

-New Master Major Trait:

Intensity: Overload charge-up time reduced to 2.5 seconds.

-New Grandmaster minor trait:

-Tempestuous Escalation: Remaining in a single Attunement grants you a stacking bonus for each second you remain in that Attunement:

Fire: +1% Damage (10% cap)
Air: +2.5% Critical chance (25% cap)
Water: +2% Outgoing healing affecting other allies (20% cap)
Earth: +1% Condition damage (10% cap)

This trait’s Attunement-specific bonuses end when switching Attunements, but the trait is always active. For example, when you switch to Water after being in Fire for 10 seconds, you would lose the 10% damage bonus but immediately start accumulating the 1% outgoing heal bonus.

This synergizes well with the theme of each Attunement and each Overload. Plus, the bonuses are not boons, so they can’t be abused by boon duration/boon share, nor can they be stripped. Most importantly, it incentivizes remaining in a single Attunement, which is a major change from the Attunement dance of the base Ele.

I like this idea, it’d open up crit subsitution builds and give us more incentive to stay in attunements for longer while improving build diversity all around.

Well if you have any better ideas, feel free to talk about them. I agree that its a problem, but I think we’re at the point where the overloads are almost good enough that the minor traits just need to give more utility, if anything, so that they feel like actual minor traits.

Humble.5627:

I heard that in the PVP side, it doesn’t sound good at all. Pretty much that Elementalists are pretty much going to die in a 1v1 situation. Is that basically the truth of it or is there a preferred build that would make it effective?

What? Elementalist sustain in PvP is among the best in the game, and their elite specialization potentially pushes that surviability further. Most specs in the game on other classes can’t kill an elementalist 1v1 unless he makes lots of mistakes, the only ones that really can are necromancers and mesmers if they get lucky with boon removal RNG.

Yeah I didn’t notice many berserker’s at all this beta, but when I did, I was gunflamed into downstate almost instantly.

What I said in the other thread on this very same topic:

“Speedy Conduits should give superspeed instead of swiftness for 4 seconds, like it was originally supposed to in the TTH.com interview that unveiled the spec.

The stack of stability on overload should be merged into hardy conduits while harmonious conduits keeps its 10% damage modifier and regains the overload cooldown function it originally had.

These changes would make overloads feel more complete in themselves, where we woulnd’t have to allocate our major trait options just to complete the mechanic"

I feel as though thats the most obvious change to improve the minor traits, but it still feels lacking even then, it just runs into the fundamental problem that we honestly need stability on a minor trait for the sake of tempest build diversity, while everything else takes a back seat that.

What if Speedy Conduits made overloads grant superspeed to allies (3 seconds) upon finishing an overload too? What if hardy conduits applied a stack of stability to allies upon completion of the overload too? However these ending ally effects would only effect the allies, not you. Then the minor traits would basically fit the theme of, “tools to help you channel the overload, finishing the overload helps allies”.

My suggestions that I’ve thought out:

Speedy Conduits should give superspeed instead of swiftness for 4 seconds, like it was originally supposed to in the TTH.com interview that unveiled the spec.

The stack of stability on overload should be merged into hardy conduits while harmonious conduits keeps its 10% damage modifier and regains the overload cooldown function it originally had.

These changes would make overloads feel more complete in themselves, where we woulnd’t have to allocate our major trait options just to complete the mechanic.

Geomancers training exists to cover the -33%impairing conditions. Plus eles have a 25% movement speed signet while mesmers do not. Finally, elementalists have many more sources of swiftness through traits and skills than mesmers ever have.

Simply because if you play pvp, you typically play fresh air with a marauder amulet, and you need the focus’s earth skills in order to have any shot of survival, which is why most fresh air builds trait into earth as well.

For D/D you would typically play with celestial, because you were tanky enough to not need focus and the fire traits, before last week gave you tons of free easy mightstacking, which is needed to play celestial builds effectively. Now that fire line mightstacking has been toned down in last weeks patch, I expect that earth builds will be a bit more popular.

I think it depends what traitlines you take up, but I think OH dagger would work best with fire for mightstacking purposes and OH focus would work best with earth traits.

Personally I used D/F for most of the cele builds I came up with, and I even tried to make a mightstacking-through-fireaurashare Fire/water/tempest build to work, but I felt that earth’s defense and sustain traits gave overall better support, but I think its a concept worth revisiting at launch. I’m also kind of unimpressed by fire in its nerfed state, but cantrip might was way too strong. Theres also water/arcane/tempest builds that could work with cantrips and overloading to do more damage with the damage mod, and play like standard D/D otherwise, but I didn’t try that really due to time restraints. I tried it with shouts/shoutrunes and it felt lacking. Overall I liked earth/water/tempest the best, but I did miss the cover boons from arcane and defaulted to traited cantrips with aurashare for that purpose.

I mean look at this way, the devs could be still hesitant about nerfing it considering all the feedback we gave them about Heat Sync. As of now its the only meaningful thing you really get from using warhorn over any other offhand. Plus boonshare mesmer can do a chaos storm, armor, phase retreat, ileap, Iswordsman rotation to keep protection up on allies for 100% of the time since they have two signet procs that share all boons on them, so its pretty much the same thing but easier on tempest.

Focus just held together Tempest builds so much better, whether they be marauder or celestial.

As far as Tempest goes, I had a ton of fun with it, and I think it could have a ton of potential should they clean up the traitline a tad further to offer a bit more than simply auramancy.

Don’t think about thief as killing everyone in sight. Thats the job of bruiser based classes that are tanky and can stack to 25 might in under 20 seconds.

Your job is primarily to use your unparalleled shortbow mobility to force decaps on side nodes first, and to use SR/SA traits to rez downed allies, since stealth prevents stomps, so unless they have very heavy cleave and see it coming they won’t be able to stop you.

As for actual fighting, have your team call targets for you so you can enter a fight after getting a decap and take down a target thats low and blew all of its cooldowns, while doing the same job of +1ing a 1v1 on a side node. Don’t 1v1 yourself unless its another thief, but you should be able to take on other zerker classes depending on their build, such as zerk staff ele, power engi/war, etc. Especially don’t 1v1 builds with high sustain or tons of active defense.

The augury change has made shouts feel a lot better across the board. I just feel as though Suffer could use some minor tweaks to make it more reliable at removing conditions against one target.

The GS is a really fun and interesting weapon but I fear it won’t be used outside of PvE, but I think I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that we’ll be using dagger/warhorn in PvP for the rest of this game’s life time. Its just too clunky and slow, even if it does hit like a truck, Reaper’s Shroud abilities are all the cleave we really need.

Xillllix.3485:

I think Warhorn is the biggest problem with Tempest, it is so week and ineffective.

Staff ele with Fire-Air-Tempest can stack a lot of might and still be strong. Similarly d/d and d/f are both better than d/w.

Warhorn should have been a ranged weapon, it’s a massive design flaw to have made it melee. Specially since the new WvW and HoT maps are mostly vertical instead of horizontal and the Elementalist already has good melee weapons.

Yeah, as an owner of howler it saddens me that warhorn ended up where it is. It’s honestly just all over the place. It’s main niche is fun protection stacking with earth overload, sand squall, and heat sync, which may get gutted if they go through with the proposed nerf. Even then though I feel as though focuses personal Sustain is just needed to hold pvp tempest builds together.

Herald seems to be what most disgruntled ele mains are bandwagoning too. I multiclass so I’m not particularly concerned about picking a new main, and I enjoy some of the tempest playstyle even though it does need some work.

The concept of main in this game doesn’t have to be as cut and dry as it sounds like it should be, it’s very easy to level and gear new classes and even learn them altogether.

rotten.9753:

Klaeljanus.7695:

It provides great staying power and group utility, while not increasing the solo abilities of an already too-powerful class.

It’s funny cause none of the teams that killed the raid boys used a single ele.

It should absolutely not get any more condi cleanse than it already has, as that would place it over the top.

Tempest doesn’t have any condition removal except water overload.

I think that might be a consequence of the high end PvE community being sick of playing ele all the time for everything and wanting to try something else.

And yeah, as I’ve been saying, Wash the Pain Away really needs to cleanse one condition per pulse to make it worth it.

The soldier runes shout-aura-heal builds are certainly interesting, but the trait synergy is off since you need Harmonious Conduits to be able to get auras from overloads reliably, while tempestuous arias is good support but can’t compete with harmonious conduits for the stability, in part because it doesn’t offer shout CDs like it should.

Really though harmonious conduit’s stability needs to be added to hardy conduit, and harmonious conduits could keep its 10% damage modifier and teh overload CD reduction from before. Just do that and suddenly the Tempest traitline would feel a lot less clunky, punishing, and un-synergistic to spec into.

Iohanna.4863:

For Bunker, I’d actually go Air spec instead of Earth – which sounds crazy at first right?

In PVP I find that Weakness is a far more valuable commodity than Protection, and Air just so happens to have a Grandmaster trait that applies Weakness whenever the Elementalist applies any sort of CC – including the stun from Shocking Aura, the Daze from Comet, the Knockdown from Gale, etc. Complimenting this would be a full bar of five Shouts – each of which apply Might, Weakness, and condition removal (Tempestuous Aria + Soldier Runes).

Harmonious Conduit is not that great in my opinion – mostly because it’s only 1 stack of Stability. Getting an Overload interrupted is no big deal – it just means that you are less likely to get the rest of your skills interrupted. Plus your Earth Overload innately possesses 3 stacks of Stability.

Here is my Bunker + Support Tempest: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAodn0XCNYi9XCWYCcYilHAzdyWZ/sEDhXQLQIAcAahA-TJxHwACOBA62fAwDAoYZAA

Performed quite exceptionally in the few matches I played. Just don’t duel – a Tempest’s greatest strength is in sharing stuff with nearby allies.

Sometimes in pvp you’ll have to 1v1. I don’t think a build is worth playing in conquest unless its good in both teamfights and in 1v1s. Even if you can’t kill anything in 1v1s, just being able to hold a point against someone is invaluably important.

Regarding Air, I tried a similar setup with fresh air but I didn’t like it. Earth is superior for giving protection uptime, and protection is better than weakness in my opinion, and besides, necromancers and revenants spam weakness much better than we can, but we can spam protection a lot better. The main driving point of earth on this build is that each aura, and each overload gives 4 seconds of -43% damage reduction allies, in addition to the 1.45K heal. With air, I can only pulse out -10% reduction from the aura, and the fury from the auras isn’t as strong.

Regarding harmonious conduits, I found it absolutely necessary. With harmonious conduits, and air/earth/fire overload could be completed 95% of the time, there were only a few situations where they broke through both the stack to interrupt it, and the level of counterplay felt mostly fair. With earth, it only got interrupted if a signet necro got luck with a corruption to convert the stability stacks to fear, which wasn’t very common either. I mean I’d like to experiment with shouts and tempestuous arias for sure, but without a 20% cooldown reduction I’m not really incentivized to give up stability to do so. I also feel as though the stack of stability on overload should be a minor trait, since playing tempest without it is way too punishing.

Thanks for your comments though. I might have an hour after I get back from class in which case I can do a bit more testing on beta characters. I’m going to try to revisit shoutrune builds for the AoE cleanse, but I’m afraid I might need arcane in order to handle conditions with evasive arcana. I wash the pain away was buffed to remove a condition each pulse I’d consider it with earth. And even then cantrips are still a bit better utility when holding a point in 1v1. Warhorn actually works mostly fine with these types of builds for heat sync alone, but focus helps with survivng spikes and rezzing people more than anything warhorn can do.

My thoughts on diamond skin: it was created long ago before resistance was introduced to the game. I see no reason why it shouldn’t give a reliable source of resistance instead of its current “all or nothing” effect.

OP, so Necromancer isn’t magical?

Yet they don’t have any invulnerability at all in any way.

After some more time playing celestial builds with Tempest in pvp and collecting my thoughts, I’m adding this to the feedback list, it mainly concerns traitlines.

I think that the stability stack from harmonious conduits should be made a minor trait, perhaps merged with hardy conduit, and Speedy conduit should give super speed on overload isntead of swiftness. The harmonious conduits could keep the cooldown reduction from the first iteration and the 10% bonus damage modifier.

Additionally Earthen Proxy, Latent Stamina, and Lucid Singularity are lacking and need either stronger effects or a generally rework. Tempestuous Arias needs to provide 20% cooldown reduction on shouts. Lucid Singularity isn’t very good in its current form because geomancer’s training exists, so theres no point. I think if it reduced the precharge time before an overload to 3 seconds down from 5, the overload cooldown itself, and/or cleansed 1 condition AoE per second of overloading, it would feel much more grandmaster worthy.

The warhorn skills are mostly decent, they just need shorter cast times across the board. Heat sync is fine spreading all boons and wildfire should have its boon removal back, albeit reduced from its first incarnation from the livestream. Lighting Orb should become a mobility based skill, such as “teleport to your target and release lighting orbs on them that damage and inflict vuln on nearby foes”. This would help with the frontline feel.

The utility shouts are niche, and I think Wash the Pain Away should heal a condition per-pulse on yourself and allies, since Tempest is forced to rely on cantrips/water traits for condition removal. Since the chronomancer well of eternity got reworked to clear conditions on self and allies, I don’t see why Wash the Pain Away shouldn’t, and it could possibly even free the need for water in every build a bit by giving more AoE cleanse from an active skill instead of passive water/arcane trait synergies that the base class has been brought up on. Since its cooldown is higher and its effect is less personal healing/more ally healing, I don’t think it would conflict with ether renewal for its role too much. Tempest could really use some more condition removal, since elementalist is a bit vulnerable to condition unless it devotes most of its build to removing conditions through regen/cantrips, and Tempest doesn’t want to go all out into regen/cantrips in order to survive since its trying to break the mold of arcane builds in pvp.

Overall, Tempest was a ton of fun to play and it really feels better, but still needs a bit of work.

I’m not sure if thats a genuine compliment or not, but thanks?

Yeah I mean it needs some tweakning. clearly armor of earth is the logical choice to take over air signet, but I was in yolo-mode and wanted to move around the map faster
I mean theres traveler runes too, but I prefer stacking on the healing.

And personally I find that 1 stack of stability is enough to get overloads off 95% percet of the time. You just have to be wise enough to not overload into obvious CC or use overloads other than earth when the entire enemy team if focusing you in a teamfight, which they won’t do that much since logic dictates that squishies get focused down first before the tanky eles.

Overall I think Chronomancer is in mostly a good place. I just think that Lost Time needs to apply stacks for non-crits as well (maybe raise ICD to 1/2 second to compensate) so that carrion or crusader (especially cursader due to to danger time synergy) builds can make use of it.

Shield is almost perfect, the phantasm just seems a bit slow and unreliable, but thats also every phantasm ever besides izerker, so yeah..