This build is an extension of the condition tempest build. With scepter benefiting from power damage increases, this condition build can scale with multiple stats, making it a great performer in doing multiple roles at once. While this build has a low skill floor, it does have a high toughness and players should be expected to tank. Swapping to water and air for CC is not detrimental compared to camping fire and is included as part of the rotation.

The nature of overloads reduce the physical intensity of the build but this is not a low cognition build. Spending more time exploring the class and reading through the tooltips and guides will help improve your play. The rotation is not hard to perform but the options available are not obvious to a new player. This guide will hence be longer and more detailed than others, with the main focus on a general well-rounded build, and options to scale defensively or offensively. The available choices are not limited to the options presented in this guide.

This build aims at achieving the following goals (in order of priority):

  1. Provide 100% Alacrity
  2. Provide necessary boons
  3. Provide adequate Heals
  4. Provide DPS that you can afford

Do attempt to provide 10k or more DPS or you might want to consider playing a pure heal setup instead

Gearing and Consumables

Equipment

Optimised loadout with infusions

EquipmentStatRune/Sigil
All ArmorCelestial Superior Rune of Divinity
Scepter (MH)Celestial Superior Sigil of Smoldering
Warhorn (OH)Celestial Superior Sigil of Water
All TrinketsCelestialN/A
Relic (Heal)N/A Relic of Karakosa
Relic (DPS)N/A Relic of the Fractal

Being cost-effective: Celestial stat is a good pick because it is a core stat and can be obtained from the Wizard's Vault. You may also just use  Level-80 Equipment Package gear. The default runes and sigils are low-cost. You may switch  Superior Sigil of Smoldering to  Superior Sigil of Transference if you need more heals.  Relic of the Flock is overrated and its purpose of converting extra heals into effective heals via barrier is negated by the fact "Wash the Pain Away!" already does so by triggering multiple heals

Food

 Spherified Oyster Soup with Mint Garnish OR  Feast of Delectable Birthday Cake (Budget/Free)

Utility

 Bountiful Maintenance Oil

Build

Hybrid DPS Alac

[&DQYfFRE+MC7HEnQAwxIcAXYS9gDLAOsAJgCWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACVgBnAAA=]


General House Rules

  1. Swapping traits and skills is a science and you must be knowledgeable on what you can afford to remove.
  2. Alacrity is your number 1 responsiblity, so use your overload skills first.
  3. Be prepared to tank as you have a relatively high toughness.
  4. Both water and air attunement offer CC, but you can bring more skills for CC.
  5. Hybrid builds have a lot of give and take and toe the line to bring 'just enough', so you need to adjust the build to the strengths of your team composition.

Basics of Healing

Alacrity Tempest

In order to provide alacrity, you will need to use Overloads. The overload skills used in this build are

  1. Overload Fire
  2. Overload Earth
  3. Overload Water (only as an emergency heal)

Overloads reduce the APM of the build greatly.

Healing Over Time

Tempest has reliable heal over time mechanics, primarily due to long lasting regeneration and soothing mist. In order to maintain soothing mist, water attunement must always be included as a bridge to swapping elements. Each time you swap into water, you provide 10s of soothing mist. Therefore a simplified elemental cycle will be:

  1. Overload Fire
  2. Water Attunement
  3. Earth Attunement

Providing Boons

Healers also need to provide boons but some healers are missing certain key boons eg. Scourge doesn’t have swiftness. There are two ways to provide swiftness,

  1. Cyclone (not 100% uptime)
  2. "Eye of the Storm!" (not 100% uptime)

Thus some players will squeeze air into the rotation.

Burst Heals

You have several options for burst heals:

  1.  Relic of Karakosa is the ideal pick that does a solid heal:

    • Part of your fire rotation as long as Wildfire (Fire WH5) is not on cooldown.
    • Use with water fields for a more potent area heal (this can be tricky, see point 2.)
    • Blasting fields provided by other allies
  2. Blasting Water fields (water 5)

    • Blasting Water fields gives an extremely strong triple heal effect. This is tricky because the Water Globe is fleeting and travels forward from your character.
    • Your potential timing may miss the blast finisher due to "Aftershock!" having a 1 second delay for its finisher
    • For other options you need to swap elements to access other blast abilities.
    • Running forward after casting may mitigate some of the quirks.
  3. "Wash the Pain Away!"

  4. Overload Water

Condi Cleanses

You need to bring 'enough' condi cleanses.

  1. Cleansing Wave (minor DPS loss)
  2. Cleansing Water (moderate healing loss)
  3. Smothering Auras (moderate DPS loss)
  4. Combo: Powerful Aura + Unstable Conduit + Smothering Auras

If you need anything more than this, Cele Scourge may be a better option.

Mastering the Elements

Elemental Cycle

Full Elemental rotation: Our rotation is simply just F1 F2 F3 F4, then F4 F3 F2 F1

F1-F4

  1. Overload Fire
  2. Water Attunement
  3. Air Attunement (optional)
  4. Earth Attunement

F4-F1 (reverse)

  1. Overload Earth
  2. Air Attunement (optional)
  3. Water Attunement
  4. Fire Attunement

Rotation

DPS Rotation

(Start in Fire) F1-F4

  1. F1 Overload Fire

  2. F2 Water Attunement

    • use Water 5/4/3 (1 skill if available)
  3. F3 Air Attunement (optional)

    • use Air 5/4/3 (1 skill if available)
  4. F4 Earth Attunement

    • use Earth 5 to 1 in descending order

F4-F1 (reverse)

  1. F4 Overload Earth

  2. F3 Air Attunement (optional)

    • use Air 5/4/3 (1 skill if available)
  3. F2 Water Attunement

    • use Water 5/4/3 (1 skill if available)
  4. F1 Fire Attunement

    • use Fire 5 to 1 in descending order

Crowd Control rotation

  1. Tidal Surge (Wh4 while attuned to water)

  2. Cyclone (Wh4 while attuned to air)

  3. Other soft CC skills

  4. Additional Adaptions for CC

    • Conjure Frost Bow -> Deep Freeze
    • Glyph of Elementals -> Crashing Waves (Also works as a spike heal)

Optimisation

Omitting Air

Air Attunement is always optional in the rotation. This can be omitted in order to speed up the elemental cycle for various reasons:

  1. You need to get access to water faster.
  2. You already have sufficient swiftness.
  3. You need to blast your water field.
  4. You need to reapply certain boons.

Check with your team regarding the boons that you need to cover.


Raid Ready

Pitfalls and Special Roles

  1. Just in case the other healer has 2k toughness and you are considering, Tempest in general does not perform as a better hand kite than other alternatives. You have to change a lot of things in the build which is outside the scope of this guide.
  2. You need to sacrifice a lot to be able do significant condi cleanses. It isn't a great performer on slothasor.
  3. The reflects on elementalist can be a little janky on Matthias. I recommend sticking to the tradition of using mesmers and guardians.

Videos

DPS benchmark (18k)

This bench is done with only birthday cake and Karakosa Relic and no infusions/utilities. You may use fractal relic, utilities and infusions to easily punch above 20k DPS.

OLC demo - Explanatory Video