So… Tempest Strike is great for proc-ing totems and getting back mana, but has anyone out there tried making it a viable primary skill? I’m just thinking… a ton of attack speed = a ton of penetration. I can’t find any builds doing this, so I assume TS still doesn’t cut it as a primary, but just curious if anyone has tried this.
“Modifiers to attack speed instead apply to physical, cold, and lightning penetration, for both the attack and spells.”
Tempest Strike is one of my favorites skills in the game and it does absolutely work as a primariy skills.
Without too much details, what I could do with it is basically:
I could never do a build that has really good clear, it always needed some support from secodnary skills for great clear.
All my builds that successfully build aroudn this, were before the latest change, that AS gives penetration, which should make it slightly better, but not insanely, since those buidls didn’t even focused on AS nor crit.
I don’t know how much details you would like to get, but I don’t like sharing fully fleshed out builds and would rather prefer to give some hints and inspirations.
So if you have specific questions, just feel free to ask, but I can certainly say, TS is a very good skill.
It’s not very popular, because regardless of how far you scale it, it will always feel very similar, and many people say, it feels sluggish.
Which never bothered me, because you could literally chunk away bosses with with it.
I’ll leave 2 general tips here.
Thanks!
I was thinking Beastmaster for the extra Shark aspect. but maybe Shaman is better for all the added elemental nodes?
To be honest, I would not care that much for the AS scaling, TS worked just fine while completely ignoring the AS scaling.
There might be some opportunities where some AS scaling is worth now, but it’s not mandatory, to make
One thing to note is, that negative AS does not have any negative effect. So playing a 2H with less than 1.00 AS, is great for the per hit damage, while not having the downside of “attack slow”, because TS already attacks the same with any weapon.
What do you think is the best way to scale TS? Spell and go all in on the procs or try to get decent base melee damage and scale both procs and hit with element based affixes?
Here’s my theorycraft for cold crit spell focused TS + Ice thorns -
idols are kinda borked cos idk how to remove idols in planner but basically either 4x ice thorns when hit+ spell dmg/cold dmg or two of these and two proc thorn totem on hit+cold dmg per totem.
With warcry and frenzy totem (and 6% off hand implicit) it should hit close to 100% spell crit chance. Cooldown recovery might beat spell dmg on helm cos better uptime of warcry. Also def want a +2 warcry on relic somehow too to get better crit chance and then focus more on crit multi from gear.
I was messing around with lightning blast on a char with spellquake too but lightning blast just didn’t feel too good and idk why but tempest(NW+LB) felt like it was doing more dmg so I just changed to get more NW proc chance. Maybe the helm mod is the clincher (I’ll try to get a good one and test).
I would say focus on one, maximum 2 damage types and then get thsi damage type as flat melee damage prefix on your weapon and get as much %inc. dmg as possible.
So simultaneously scale the melee and the spell portion.
Overall the spell portion will be stronger than the melee portion though, so you can also complete ignroe the melee portion too.
Especially with the Helmet affix Tempest Strike get enormous amounts of adpative spell damage.
Since TS’s speed is not affected by attack speed, it’s very nice to use a 2H weapon if you wanna go pure offensive and use a Staff or 2H Mace with the Ancestral Weaponary from the Primalist Passive Tree for 30 or 50 flat melee damage.
From all of my testing Northern Wind does decent damage, but Lightning Bolt does way more damage, since it’s single target and it also has way stronger nodes in the Skill Spec tree.
NW baseline has a AoE already and the skill tree does give it way more defensive/utility support, like freeze and chill.
I had gone with double hit and the flat dmg maxed but idk dmg felt better with tempest (skill proccing with LB+NW) even though tunk mentioned on discord it has only 9 flat cold, light + 90% added dmg effect (I have a nice amount of adaptive spell dmg). Though I only had t2 helm mod, Will make a t5 helm anyway to test this and the NW build when I get time.
What support skills you use for pure lightning ? (I went with the lightning proc skills from passive tree, maelstrom, tornado and triple hit Spellquake with lightning storms)
I did so many variations of Tempest Strike build, that all felt great.
My favorite and most successful so far was a hybrid build utilizing Storm Crows.
Dang I’ll definitely have to play around with crows soon I was thinking of combining them somehow with Vilteria’s int stack set but the helm is Mage specific 
If you wanna do some cool Int stacking, use Ucenui’s Sphere, you can get all the Int from just crows and counter-fit attunement via gear.
You could even use this with tempest strike using LB + NW, because Ucenui’s Sphere is also Lightning + Cold
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