Easy Fix for Tempest's Heat Sync (Warhorn Fire 4)

Have it give 15 seconds of fury in a group, or 10 and lower it's cooldown a little to match.

Currently offering 3 might and NO fury on activation, this skill is basically just a bad blast finisher that happens to copy some boons over. All while ignoring +boon duration benefits from your gear...

On the other hand, Fury is something that support Tempests are sorely lacking good access to and this, rather underwhelming, skill is the perfect place for it. It would be a small buff in order to help bring Tempest up to par with their superior counterparts, the Boonbot Druids, at least with regards to the non-class specific buffs.

But this is just one idea, what other ways would you guys change Heat Sync (or the other Warhorn skills)?

Fury on aura, ez.

We already have that, but it's in the air tree for some silly reason. It's not very good, because you have to take an entire trait-line for one rather minor buff, forcing you to give up Water for the CC cleanse and group Auras or Arcane and lose the speed Rez, Concentration bonus, and CC cleanse/blast finisher on dodge.

And it doesn't the change main fact that Heat Sync is incredibly underwhelming as a skill.

For comparison: check out Ranger's Call of the Wild, which is more or less the same skill, but actually useful in that it gives 15 seconds of Might, Swiftness and Fury. Not to mention it's a blast finisher that makes all your attacks unblockable on top of it.

Heat Sync on the other hand? +3 might and if you happen to have fury from another source (that somehow your party missed out on...) you can copy it over. Same cooldown too. Two similar skills, but one is garbage.

It would be nice if it would share quickness as well.

@NaturallyNick.4058 said:We already have that, but it's in the air tree for some silly reason. It's not very good, because you have to take an entire trait-line for one rather minor buff, forcing you to give up Water for the CC cleanse and group Auras or Arcane and lose the speed Rez, Concentration bonus, and CC cleanse/blast finisher on dodge.

Choices. You want to cover fury? You take Air. You want to cover prot? You take Earth. You don't want either? You take Arcane.

@NaturallyNick.4058 said:And it doesn't the change main fact that Heat Sync is incredibly underwhelming as a skill.

For comparison: check out Ranger's Call of the Wild, which is more or less the same skill, but actually useful in that it gives 15 seconds of Might, Swiftness and Fury. Not to mention it's a blast finisher that makes all your attacks unblockable on top of it.

Heat Sync on the other hand? +3 might and if you happen to have fury from another source (that somehow your party missed out on...) you can copy it over. Same cooldown too. Two similar skills, but one is garbage.

I disagree. Where CotW gives flat 3 might, HS copies as much as you have. It's a strong skill what allows easy might uptime. The problem is, might is usually covered and you don't need a tempest for it. It doesn't make the skill garbage though.

@Jski.6180 said:It would be nice if it would share quickness as well.

Since the class has zero access to quickness to begin with, I find it highly unlikely.

It seems disingenuous to pretend that we're comparing Tempest builds in a vacuum. There are quite a few other specs it has to compete with. For example, what choices does a druid have to make? You want to cover fury and protection, as well as provide damage buffs? The spirits make it easy and don't need you to choose between specs, allowing Druids to take the speed rez and whatever else they'd like. In the meantime, support Tempest is like trying to play twister with your specs, while never getting much out of it in the end.

"Easy might uptime" isn't particularly strong. Nowadays, it's just assumed that you'll have 25 might from some combo of warrior, druid/tempest, mes and DPS Ele all pitching in. Half of which can already stack 25 might on a full party by themselves. Adding Fury to the Warhorn would at least give us some more build flexibility for both PvE and WvW. At worst, it'd just bring it slightly more in line the other support specs.

@Feanor.2358 said:

@Jski.6180 said:It would be nice if it would share quickness as well.

This would be balancing of the effect and other classes who lack one boon or another can still boon share them out just the same.

@"NaturallyNick.4058" said:It seems disingenuous to pretend that we're comparing Tempest builds in a vacuum. There are quite a few other specs it has to compete with. For example, what choices does a druid have to make? You want to cover fury and protection, as well as provide damage buffs? The spirits make it easy and don't need you to choose between specs, allowing Druids to take the speed rez and whatever else they'd like. In the meantime, support Tempest is like trying to play twister with your specs, while never getting much out of it in the end.

"Easy might uptime" isn't particularly strong. Nowadays, it's just assumed that you'll have 25 might from some combo of warrior, druid/tempest, mes and DPS Ele all pitching in. Half of which can already stack 25 might on a full party by themselves. Adding Fury to the Warhorn would at least give us some more build flexibility for both PvE and WvW. At worst, it'd just bring it slightly more in line the other support specs.

Speaking of PvE - no, it wouldn't. Fury is just as covered as 25 might, so support Tempest is largely irrelevant because it lacks offensive support. A change like this would only matter if the current supports suddenly lost all their access to Fury, something I don't see happening. It's not that I think the skill would become overpowered, I just don't see this making any difference.

In the pvp game modes - maybe. Boon coverage and fast access to boon sharing is more important there, so it might count for something.

@"Feanor.2358" said:It's not that I think the skill would become overpowered, I just don't see this making any difference.In the pvp game modes - maybe. Boon coverage and fast access to boon sharing is more important there, so it might count for something.

One step at a time. The title isn't "Complete rework of one skill transforms Ele into Druid replacement!"Druids have a number of things that currently secure their spot as the best support, easy access to all of these particular boons is one of them and the offensive support skills (spirits, etc) being another. The offensive skills discussion really deserves its own thread, spirits are that big of a problem. And fury has far less uptime than you'd think, especially since the vast majority comes from the druid we'd be replacing. There aren't many sources for it either, so seeding it to your Chrono (if you even have one) won't always work.

Anyways, the point of my post wasn't a complete overhaul to bring Tempest up to the Druid standard by tweaking a single skill, (as any such skill would quickly become a contender for most bloated instance of powercreep to date), but to give Tempests a small buff when it comes to selecting builds. The ability to more freely choose our traits would allow us to focus on specific niches when we create builds for WvW and PvE (Fractals in particular). Ideally it would be the first of many small buffs that eventually bring it up to par with Druids, but that's a bit more than I meant to cover with this post.

I think reducing the cast to 1/2s would be a welcome change.

I’d rather see changes to the other war horn skills to be more supportive and to grant fury so it synergises better with heat sync. The biggest issue with war horn is that focus is just better to survive with because of obsidian flesh, magnetic wave and to a lesser extent swirling winds.

Maybe if lightning orb was changed entirely to crit immunity for 5s while giving 5s fury to allies it might help war horn be used a bit more while funnelling into heat sync being a better skill. Focus still remains stronger but it would open up a niche for warhorn to give more support while not being extremely vulnerable to being focused down.

@Feanor.2358 said:

@"NaturallyNick.4058" said:It seems disingenuous to pretend that we're comparing Tempest builds in a vacuum. There are quite a few other specs it has to compete with. For example, what choices does a druid have to make? You want to cover fury and protection, as well as provide damage buffs? The spirits make it easy and don't need you to choose between specs, allowing Druids to take the speed rez and whatever else they'd like. In the meantime, support Tempest is like trying to play twister with your specs, while never getting much out of it in the end.

"Easy might uptime" isn't particularly strong. Nowadays, it's just assumed that you'll have 25 might from some combo of warrior, druid/tempest, mes and DPS Ele all pitching in. Half of which can already stack 25 might on a full party by themselves. Adding Fury to the Warhorn would at least give us some more build flexibility for both PvE and WvW. At worst, it'd just bring it slightly more in line the other support specs.

Most classes are able to run passive effects that give perma fury or even rune sets that give out large amounts of fury. Fury use to be a hard to get boon much like protection but now every class gets it and often in aoe version making any type of boons ele is putting out pointless. You could even say vigor is to easy to get build into classes that realty all the boons you build for on tempest are more for the tempest then any thing else.

Heat sync needs means of giving out powerful boons like quickness why not even put quickness on the skill say 1 sec as well as fury 5 sec.