GUILDWARSINSIDER

After a fresh weekend of playing my two favorite professions, the Engineer and the Elementalist (as well as…a Thief… *Cringes*) I’ve come away with an awesome sense of where the two professions are and how awesome they’ll be at launch. The Elementalist didn’t have any groundbreaking changes from BWE2 to BWE3, so I’ve opted instead to focus on a very specific topic: Tornadoes.

The Tornado is an incredibly powerful skill, and one that I see used quite often well. I also see it used very badly too, so I’ve put together some thoughts on how one can get as much as possible out of one of my favorite skills in all of Guild Wars 2.

What does It Do?

The Tornado is a 15 second long skill with a 3 minute cooldown that transforms you into the kind of whirling terror that Dorothy has nightmares about every night. Your health pool is increased by 80%, nearly doubling your survivability. Tornadoes grant Stability, which means they can weeble and they can wobble, but they can’t be knocked down. Ramming into enemies knocks them away, and you can pin enemies to corners and such using it. There are three abilities, and the rest of your skills are locked. Each ability doesn’t have a cooldown, so make sure to always be casting one! These abilities are:

• Electrified Tornado – Deal lots of extra damage to all enemies around you.

• Dust Tornado – Deal moderate extra damage to all enemies around you while BLINDING them all.

• Debris Tornado – Deal low extra damage to all enemies around you while knocking them away from the center of the tornado. This is a ranged attack.

How and When to Get Tornado

While I believe that the Tornado is an absolutely must-have skill, it can wait depending on how you decided to play your Elementalist. If you level primarily through Dynamic Events and Personal Story, it might be a better idea to go with the Glyph of Elementals instead. Playing mostly WvW, on the other hand, may lead you to the Tornado as your first major purchase.

You: “One Tornado please!”

Jon Peters: “Paper or plastic?”

Anyways… the tactical advantages of having a tornado in WvW (which I’ll go into a little later) are great enough to warrant trying to pick up enough skill points to be able to purchase it right at level 30. Try to have enough skill points (30 at the time of this writing) to have a utility spell for each slot as well as the Tornado.

It was a weird grocery store.

Determining When to Use Tornado

So now you have your shiny new whirling dervish. I know you’re excited to use it at the first opportunity, but don’t just pop it on anything. Yes, I do know that those stupid Skales regenerate health constantly, and yes I do know that you haven’t trained any of your underwater combat skills yet so they’re impossible to kill! That just may be the only time it’s okay to use Tornado on regular enemies… Real mastery of the Tornado is half of how you use it, and half when you use it! So when are some good times to pop Tornado?

• When enemies are clumped together tightly. You would think that they’d start to learn after all the area of effect (AoE) that we throw at them…

• When you can use Debris Tornado to block access to something important. This is literally the #1 thing that I use Tornado for, and will be the bulk of my strategies I list later on.

• When you need to capture a point but there’s a lot of enemies standing there with you, canceling out your progress.

• When your team is getting crushed, but you think they could recover if they’d stop taking damage for 10-15 seconds…

• If you’re about to die, there’s no hope for survival, and you’re 3 minutes away from next contact with the enemy.

Techniques to Make the Most of the Time

Your path of destruction can be rather short if you don’t make the most of your 15 seconds. You need to have a plan before, during, and after the transformation lest you waste your cooldown and fail at whatever it is you were trying to achieve. I’m going to give you some general tips as well as some map-specific tricks that really helped me improve my destruction-to-time ratio while whirling around the battlefield. These are generally PvP tricks, as the Tornado is infinitely more useful in a situation against players than semi-intelligent trolls. Players require strategy, while trolls just need a fireball to the face.

 World Versus World

Firstly, check out my guide to taking and defending objectives in WvW if you’re really serious about making the most of your time. It is focused on Engineers, but that’s only because I wrote it for that column. And they’re better looking. Anywho, after refreshing ourselves on general WvW strategies, there are a few tips I can relate for battling in the Mists:

• Use the Tornado to block doorways after they’ve been broken down. Try to position yourself so that the top of the Tornado is hidden by the archway above, if possible. You will be a huge target like this, though, so alternating between Debris Tornado for the knockback and Dust Tornado for the AoE Blind is a good idea.

• When you’re a tornado, keep moving. I don’t know if it’s a glitch or not, but people who ran into me spun vehemently. They only got knocked back by the ram when I was…well…ramming them.

• WvW is one of the only times when using Electrified Tornado for extra damage is a good idea. If you’re okay with going on a suicide mission, you can be a serious detriment to a group attacking the gate of a structure. Try to have backup though, because you will die, and having no one around to clean up the low-health enemies makes your efforts futile. Pfft. As if a Tornado’s efforts could ever be futile!

• If you’re pushed back to the lord of a Tower, you can and should pop Tornado to keep people from reaching him while flinging people off the side of the tower. It’s a long fall!

The Battle of Khylo

The Battle of Khylo is a very vertical map that can be used to control players movements easily. There is often only one entry and exit point to an area, so you can lure enemies to an area for an ambush and then pop Tornado to keep them from retreating. As a side note: don’t bother trying to use the Tornado to keep enemies off of their Trebuchet. It’s not enough of a tactical advantage to use a 3-minute cooldown on, especially since you cannot knock enemies over the wooden paneling on the side of the plateau.

• Windmill

  • While going into whirly-swirly mode, bottle enemies into the little shack next to the capture point while your teammates take them down. The shack is large enough act like a nice big goalie net, but it’s small enough to keep people inside with the Tornado. Otherwise, the Windmill’s point is too open to really be of any use except as a way to keep them off of the capture area.

• Clocktower

  • The Clocktower has a lot of entrances and exits, but the opposing team is not capturing the point unless they’re on the circle in the middle. If you knock them off with Tornado, they have to run around the side and back up the smaller ramp (or the bigger ramp, if you get lucky with your throws) buying you about 5 more seconds of capture time.

• Mansion

  • There isn’t much you can do, except use Tornado to keep enemies knocked down and off the point. The Mansion is too open and there’s nowhere to corral enemies like there is at the Windmill.

The Forest of Niflhel  

Niflhel is also a rather vertical map, but in different ways. There are generally more entrances to an area and less exits. This makes “Operation: Knock Everyone Away with My Air-Condensed Awesomeness” slightly less useful, because if you knock someone away, they usually just have to get up and run at you again as opposed to being knocked over a ledge or something.

• Henge

  • Its not a good idea to use Tornado here. Just let the enemy take it if that’s what it comes down to. When you knock people away, they fly into walls just outside the capture point, so it’s a short walk with lots of entrances to choose from for a return.

• Keep

  • Knock people off of the stairs leading up to the keep. If possible, try knocking them over the wall so they take about 1/10 health in falling damage and have to run around to get back up.

• Mine

  • Try knocking people off of the northeast side of the point. It’s a little ledge that dumps out into a waterfall below – They’ll have a long run back while you cap the point!

• Svanir and the Chieftain

  • I didn’t have a chance to try to solo either of the boss mobs because teammates were nearby, but I’m confident that you could do it by rotating between each of the Tornado’s abilities. If you have tried and succeeded (or failed) tell me about it in the comments below!

Legacy of Foefire

I didn’t get much time to play the Legacy of Foefire over the weekend, so my tips and tricks for capturing points on this one will have to wait for a later column. I did notice that with the Guild Lord though, that the Tornado was great for distracting the NPC guards while my teammates took down the Guild Lord himself. This is an important note because when you’ve successfully invaded the enemy’s keep (which I only managed to do once, because we ignored the Guild Lord 90% of the time) the goal is to down the Guild Lord as quickly as possible. You don’t really have time to deal with the NPC guards. Also, just as you can effectively block paths in WvW, I would suggest popping Tornado to keep enemies outside your keep for an extra 15 seconds, if they manage to huff and puff enough to blow the door down.

The Tornado is an incredibly useful ability with a very low skill cap. The main thing you have to master with the Tornado is identifying the proper time and place to use the skill to the greatest effect. It’s a ludicrously powerful ability and if your team helps you when you pop it, you’ll tear through your enemies like a trailer park!

Okay, that’s enough Tornado jokes for now, I think. I’m going for a new style of presenting information here, and have changed my formula to 1 part Wiki-copy/paste and 2 parts analysis. Let me know if you like the change in the comments below! Did I get too specific? Even though I write it, this is your column guys, so let me know what you’d like to know. See you next week!