Guild Wars 2

minbariguy.7504:

Galen Grey.4709:

Thats the deal with bonuses, you go out of your way (pre-purchase), they go out of their way (give you bonuses).

And that’s my problem. A character slot is required in order to access the new profession. It should not be considered a “bonus”.

I have absolutely no problem with them giving extra stuff to people willing to pre-purchase. But when they try to withhold something that should be a standard component of any expansion pack that features a new playable profession and try to pass it off like it’s some wonderful “extra”, I have a problem with that.

They could have given away a thousand extra bonuses and I would have been fine with that. But a character slot is something that I expect to receive when I pay for an expansion that features a new profession. And again, I’m not asking for a “free” character slot. If I’m paying fifty bucks, it should be included in that price.

exactly. a character slot is not a bonus, it is required in order to play a major part of the expac. existing character slots were part of the core game; they have been paid for.

I agree, it’s pretty bad value, especially when you consider you don’t even get a char slot to play the new class that comes with the expansion, essentially making it a $60 expansion.

i don’t think channelling anything for 5sec is going to fun, regardless of the outcome, leave aside the weak effects, punitive CD lockout, and silly-looking animations.

I think it’s all a lot simpler than that. Close range and support are both themes that have been done to death with Ele, so Tempest as a close-range support bot was a failed concept out of the gate.

Even if Overloads were instant-cast, Tempest would still have been poorly-received because of this basic failure to define a new Ele playstyle.

So they really have to go back to the drawingboard on this one, while also keeping most of the animations as they are, because they’ve left the customer feedback loop so late in the process.

My view is either the support has to go, or the close range has to go (or both). There’s a bunch of ways either of these things could be done while preserving art assets, eg: making overloads move as AOE fields/storms in the player’s direction after casting, effectively making them usable at close and medium range, bumping up the ranges on warhorn skills and re-coding some of the support skills.

surprisingly good actually

awesome thread, this

Pride.1734:

I played tempest longer than WP did :P
You have a crappy elite and your overloads are clunky. Numbers are tuned low to start off on all elites so thats a non issue. On the flipside pretty much all of your shouts are improved necro shouts. There is the viewpoint that the problem is less tempest being too bad in what he does but ele being too good in just about everything.

The necro shouts are pretty good actually.

If you read around this forum a bit, you’d see that quite a lot of Ele mains would be glad to have Tempest lose a lot of the group support in return for a new playstyle based around damage and/or control.

Tempest fails mainly because it’s no different than the D/D & D/F specs we’ve all been playing for the past 3 years. This is the core problem. Overloads being too slow, ineffectual, and overly punitive when interrupted is a different issue.

worst spec so far is an understatement, it’s the worst spec so far by far.

it’s a carbon copy of an existing role/playstyle, overloads are crap, shouts are crap, traits are crap, elite is crap, warhorn is boring. Even the animations are crap.

It wouldn’t matter how much they buff overloads, it’s still a D/D Ele in disguise. Duplicating an existing role is stupid.

assasin oates.3018:

Incoming Marvel Lawsuit (their lawyer will be Matt Murdock)

laugh out loud.

i like it.

melee train thief?

Tongku.5326:

Scapper.4236:

We all know that this trait is overpowered when coupled with PU, however I noticed while running with my focus party is if you stand in the blasted smoke field, and activate your The Prestige see the cooldown melt as 2 separate instance of stealth cuts it down massively, hopefully Anet will look into this but didn’t expect it to be used in this manner!

I would like to see it reverted back to its original 20% flat reduction instead. Problem is that if it gets nerfed on the reduction component, it will become about as useful as Chaotic Dampening, and we all know how that one turned out.

Prestige trait along with Chaotic Dampening just need to have those mechanics removed and be reverted back to flat values.

Also, while this may be OP at this moment, it may or may not remain so, remember, more specs / elites etc. are still coming, and A-Net has a better idea where this will fit into all those while we do not.

Agree, but 22sec of continuous stealth on my mesmer plus 20K bursts in 1sec from stealth makes my thief feel like a joke.

course, you could always argue that even a small amount of testing would have revealed that 22sec of continuous stealth might have balance issues…..

Agree the stealth from The Prestige is pretty OP. I don’t see the problem with just going back to 20% reduction as it was prior to the change.

Have they fixed this bug or is it still in game?

Noss.4105:

The raging outsider is right, PU is disgusting atm. I don’t think there’s any other trait in the game that is as overpowered as PU. Not only does it double your stealth uptime and stack you with boons, it also makes it a lot harder to counterplay the burst.

Revert it back to +1 second and it would still be perfectly viable grandmaster trait. Maybe put a super speed or something on it.

Agree. doubled stealth + PU is pretty ridiculous atm.

you must be talking about sPVP, cause in WVW, zerker mesmers just stealth up to you and insta-kill.

They don’t need to work with everything but they shouldn’t work with only 1 thing either. Especially when that one thing is a direct copy of an existing playstyle (D/D)

I think people are missing the biggest clue: the term “distracting”. Implies a new form of CC or some other new form of subterfuge.

Needs ranged options

Can i have your stuff anyway?

Sagat.3285:

scerevisiae.1972:

It’s not like it can be any worse than Tempest anyway…

This human habit needs to stop.

Best way to stop it is having an open discussion about where players would like to see their class go rather than go silent for 6 months and reveal something virtually everyone hates.

I still stand by the notion that if your product is good, you don’t need BS marketing hype.

Otiveht.5482:

I truly believe the “Pre-Purchase” idea has run its coarse and players should not fall in to this idea of marketing. Im not saying the GW2 expansion isnt worth it or isnt going to be good, i just believe people shouldnt pay for something that doesnt exist in the players hands yet.

Totally agree. Not to mention that by prepurchasing, you’re basically saying you’re happy paying for less content.

I think spammable stealth was a mistake but IMO thief is one of the better-designed classes in this game, so this one should be pretty interesting. The initiative mechanic gives them a pretty wide range of unique game play.

It’s not like it can be any worse than Tempest anyway…

Conncept.7638:

A specialization mechanic that the vanilla class mechanic can actually work with, whatever changes that may mean.

And note, I would welcome it if those changes were more to the core class than the tempest.

How the attunement system currently works, enforced swapping for survivability and DPS amp, has always been a terrible system that enforces the zero build diversity we’ve suffered through since launch. Swapping should be a matter of strategy, build choice, and live current in-combat need; not rote-memorized button pressing to maintain the boons and condition cleanse that are the only method for survival and decent DPS against classes with massive defensive and mechanical stat advantages they are not required to do anything to maintain.

agree, but in 3 years, Anet have been unable to really change the Ele meta away from water/arcane/cantrips in WVW/PVP, let alone introduce traits/mechanics that make attunement camping ever worthwhile. so not holding out much hope there.

then of course we have Tempest, which is a straight-up clone of D/D with no differentation whatsoever.

Jski.6180:

Grimreaper.5370:

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Grimreaper.5370:

Sword and mobile assassin like playstyle plz, thx

DD already could be played as a mobile assassin if only there was a way for eles to play anything else than celestial amulet and water+arcane+cantrips. A new traitline won’t fix the core ele problems of being forced into water+arcane+cantrips to have ANY defense at all (now that auras on signets are gone too…)

Zerker DD ele assassin (with signets and auras) hit-and-run style was SO MUCH FUN when the game was released, but sadly we were soon after nerfed into oblivion so only celestial brawlers survived (even zerker DD went arcane of course).

The one thing that made a hit-and-run playstyle possible on Eles? Ride the kittening Lightning on a reasonable cooldown (16 seconds at launch, 12 with the trait, none of that double cooldown nonsense). Mesmers and Thieves both have stealth and great in-combat mobility and escapes for defense. Eles had RTL to get in and out fast.

But now they only have boons for defense, which means celestial brawler.

The only problem RTL had was the buggy 1550 range which was too far. 16 seconds 1200 range would have been balanced from the get-go.

While I also miss old school rtl, d/d doesnt fulfil an assassin like role for me and reverting rtl back to the way it was wouldnt cut it either, although I wouldnt mind some nerfs in compensation for that old rtl cd.

An assassin like role = high risk for reward. I would have liked access to high mobility and evasive manuvers kind of like s/d theif playstyle while being punished hard for taking hits.

The thing is swords are more about leaps and blocking so more about war and chase down dagger are the main in and out weapons in GW2. If tempest got a sword it would be a war like ele class not a thf like ele class.

disagree, Ele doesn’t have the armour/HP to play like a warrior, so would have to be a high mobility/evade/subterfuge style of gameplay like thief, but without the backstab/heartseeker because of Ele’s sustain.

morrolan.9608:

Kidel.2057:

nope, ele is the core problem. You can’t add anything to a class that can already do everything.

There are areas we are deficient in, ranged single target damage as I keep saying.

Yep there are many other styles of gameplay they could have gone with. It’s just bizarre they went with a straight up D/D clone, just bizarre.

we can agree to disagree.

Xillllix.3485:

It convinced me that its the worse of the elite professions. It’s not made to work with staff and fast attunement swapping, 2 of the most important elements of the elementalist. And the elite “Rebound” is complete kitten, besides all the other issues.

I wished I had something positive to say about the overloads themselves but sadly I don’t. Unless they make it so that you do not have to camp an attunement and that they do not interrupt your skill flow I really do not see any advantages in using them.

Yep, this. The whole design was a complete miss on all fronts. The first major mistake being to try to clone D/D gameplay instead of trying to differentiate and give us something materially different than what we’ve already been playing for 3 years.

By far the worst elite spec, I hope they find a way to preserve most of their hard work but completely rework Overloads, the traits, and the elite. Ideally convert the warhorn into a main-hand, since that’s what we really needed, but now i’m dreaming.

Strongly agree, but i’d go further and make all the overloads but earth create storm AOEs that are summoned at point-blank range but then move in the direction they are cast, up to 900 range (so there’d be a mobile fire field, water field, lightning field).

At least then they can be used with all 3 weapons. I still think it’s appalling design that current Tempest only works with dagger mainhand.

with respect, these builds are horrible. condi builds with no sustain?

They also went a while without any reveals. The sooner they reveal, the sooner we can all avert major disappointments like Tempest.

• long duration channels at point-blank range is horrible design
• too much support (support on Ele already done to death)
• competes too heavily with D/D, no differentiation
• doesn’t work well with scepter and not at all with staff
• aura spam makes Powerful Aura redundant
• interrupts way too punitive

no way to sugar coat it, the whole design is just horrible. couldn’t have been worse.

poll result speaks for itself.

everything > fire overload.

given this is the lightest armoured & lowest HP class in the game, how is channelling for 5 straight seconds in point-blank range ever going to be fun & worthwhile?

leaving aside the other criticisms like 100% duplicating the existing role of D/D, or that overloads don’t synergise at all with 2 out of 3 main-handweapons.

it’s a mystery how it ever made it past the whiteboard stage.

Leo G.4501:

scerevisiae.1972:

Leo G.4501:

Laraley.7695:

Leo G.4501:

scerevisiae.1972:

I might add I think it’s pretty silly that warrior has more long range (1200) weapons than ele.

Warrior has 26 ranged skills in total. Ele has 55 not including utilities, transformations or downed skills.

Do you realize this has nothing to do with what the person posted?

Seems about as pertinent as mentioning amount of weapons in this context. So compare the number of 1200 range weapons (3 vs 2)? Why not the number of 1200 ranged attacks (17vs 34)?

Ele has 2x the number of weapon skills as part of its core mechanic…

You have to admit it’s a bit weird that the highest-armoured, highest HP class has 2 1200-range weapons while the lightest armoured, lowest HP class has only 1.

No, it doesn’t sound all that weird to me, primarily because the professions in question are the ones with a) the profession with the 2nd least amount of available weapons due to their profession mechanic and b) the profession with the 1st most amount of available weapons due to profession concept and core mechanics.

It’d be different if we were comparing classes that were suppose to be balanced in a similar fashion but you’re comparing this to Warrior, the profession whose concept is “Martial Master of the most weapons”.

highlighted the important parts there for you.

Alphard.6529:

Xillllix.3485:

Why would a staff elementalist choose to camp in an attunement and use a close-range overload? Makes absolutely no sense.

Well given that both in spvp and in pve (dungeons at least, and sometimes in the open world) staff is used as a close range weapon.. why not?

Staff is not a close range weapon unless you’re playing it badly. Staff + Tempest makes no sense at all.

thetwothousand.5049:

break bars.

Break bars on players are a bit silly IMO as they 100% overlap with the stability boon. Not a good design IMO.

Agree that overloads not being crap will largely make or break the spec, but there is also the argument that even with great overloads, Tempest fills the exact same role as existing D/D & D/F, and doesn’t synergise at all with either of the 2 existing ranged weapons, which is bad bad bad.

Leo G.4501:

it can be changed to make it better without being disrespectful and non-constructive.

nothing in this thread is disrespectful and most of it is constructive. speaking of respect, i think it’s important to recognise that some of us are passionate about the game/class and this is reflected in our feedback.

there is a large gap between impassioned, constructive feedback and disrespectful abuse. i see plenty of the former in this forum lately and not that much of the latter.

Killyox.3950:

Going to quote this because apparently people are incapable of reading more than 1 page of thread.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Not all feedback could be addressed this iteration in fair part due to time constraints on key members of our design team. That does not mean we are dismissing your feedback or that all the issues you’ve raised up to this point will go unchanged before expansion release.

This is a small set of changes from the first beta weekend event; we will continue to iterate on the specialization skills and mechanics and shall be listening for your constructive feedback.

We will be reviewing the Tempest traits along with casttimes vs. effects on overloads among several other aspects of the elite specialization.

The fact they spent time tweaking the numbers on all the skills strongly implies they’re not going to materially change anything, that’s why people are kittened off.

The core issue is that Tempest is just a reskinned D/D Ele, which we’ve already been playing for 3 years, there is nothing new or particularly interesting about yet another close range support role. WE ALREADY DO THAT IN SPADES.

Forgotten Legend.9281:

wow, this thread is more toxic than queensdale champ train map chat… come on guys, be respectful!

Feedback from BWE1 was close to 100% negative; it could hardly have been more negative. Yet here we are with a bunch of purely superficial changes that fail to address any of the key feedback points.

How is it possible to be both passionate about the game and not feel completely kittened off by this response?

nearlight.3064:

The changes are posted in the sticky above. Basically they gave us sandsquall as a blast finisher, and buffed the damage of a few warhorn skills considerably, buffed the damage of the overlaods considerably, and buffed the heal power scaling of water overload by 400%.

DAMAGE IS NOT THE CORE PROBLEM.

Argol Vazin.3061:

you know what sarcasm is right, and you understand that it is not a DPS thing, we aren’t asking for DPS you clod. we are asking for a new role

doesn’t even have to be a new role, just has to look and feel different than what we’ve already been playing for the past 3 years.

Tempest is just a re-skinned D/D Ele.

Buffing the numbers doesn’t change the fact that the design is not what we hoped for and almost every Ele here disliked it after trying it during BWE1.

xDudisx.5914:

So you don’t want support. What would you suggest? More flat dmg? Ele is already dripping raw dmg.

Well tempest is about storms, so storm AOEs and fields is an obvious direction to go. Tempest already leans in this direction a little but it could go further.

Control is another lever that could be pushed more; think hammer warrior.

Pair this with high mobility (instead of just boons) for defense (think sword thief/shiro sword playstyles) and you have an entirely new way to play Ele.

I disagree, scripting the effects of skills should be the easiest thing to change. Animations & particle effects take loads of time, changing skill effects is generally a case of modifying config files and high-level game script. If they have halfway decent tooling/APIs, they ought to be able iterate pretty quickly on skill effects.

The real question is whether they listen to the overwhlemingly negative feedback and actually try to fix things, or whether they keep just fiddling with numbers.

It’s a bit rich to say Overloads were well received; they were near universally panned. No matter how powerful you make them, noone wants to sit there channelling for 5 seconds, sorry but it’s just not good design nor fun.

Like others are saying, I don’t think bumping the numbers is good enough, the real problem is that Tempest completely duplicates the role D/D and D/F have filled for the past 3 kitten years.

One of the most disappointing aspects of Tempest for me is that it’s just more of the same stuff that D/D and D/F Ele already does well: short range support.

Overloads have been universally criticised as unusable, so I won’t recover that ground.

Maybe the best solution to making the Tempest more differentiated & interesting is just to remove the support aspect completely – make it all about control/damage/mobility in the 600-900 range.

In practise this would mean replacing the boon-y and/or crappy skills on warhorn (fire #4, earth #4, air #5) with more storms/control/mobility (which IMO would be good as warhorn is too similar to offhand dagger & focus as it is) and generally upping ranges, and making Overloads more storm-y (mobile storms/fields anyone?) and less punitive.

Bottom line: Ele is already dripping with support, there’s really no need to add more. The easiest way to differentiate Tempest is to push it in a different direction.

Zefrost.3425:

Water Overload – Absorb projectiles while channeling.
Earth Overload – Stability while channeling.
Air Overload – Lightning strikes inflict blind while channeling.
Fire Overload – Evade while channeling.

That would solve overload issues without making them broken by making them all grant stability. You can’t just add stability to everything.

Stab on everything would be fine, because the penalty for interruption is so high (20sec CD). I’d rather overloads were reduced down to something reasonable (eg: 1sec cast) with less punitive consequences for interruption, eg: 5sec CD.

Having to channel anything for 5sec in close range is not fun/engaging gameplay… especially when the rewards for channelling are so crap.

They can easily do a lot more than tweaking. Eg: removing the support aspect and making Tempest more about control and/or damage. At least that would differentiate it from effectively duplicating D/D & D/F as it does now.

Leo G.4501:

Laraley.7695:

Leo G.4501:

scerevisiae.1972:

I might add I think it’s pretty silly that warrior has more long range (1200) weapons than ele.

Warrior has 26 ranged skills in total. Ele has 55 not including utilities, transformations or downed skills.

Do you realize this has nothing to do with what the person posted?

Seems about as pertinent as mentioning amount of weapons in this context. So compare the number of 1200 range weapons (3 vs 2)? Why not the number of 1200 ranged attacks (17vs 34)?

Ele has 2x the number of weapon skills as part of its core mechanic…

You have to admit it’s a bit weird that the highest-armoured, highest HP class has 2 1200-range weapons while the lightest armoured, lowest HP class has only 1.

The Great Al.2546:

I think the real mistake was deciding on close range group support, since we already have that. Making this build ’on par
or even slightly better than the existing options will not really change the reception, because after 3 years we were actually hoping for (and promised) a new role.

Spot on. Current tempest targets the role that D/D and D/F already occupy. The whole concept of (yet another) close-range group support needs a rework.