Tornado

Level 82 Mana Stacking Spark Hiero using Tornado for bossing and some general clearing / scourge. Still early and I like the skill but it needs QoL badly.

Pros: Skill does great damage and feels relatively balanced in the damage department considering it's a slow skill for clearing. Very useful on bosses and tough elites as a fully properly powered up nado has killed everything almost instantly up to bosses in white maps.

Cons: a bit clunky (by nature of the game wanting you to move fast and you have to charge this skill up more or less.) Not being able to see how many hits it's absorbed or damage it's taken really sucks and would be helpful for maximizing builds around it. I am often not certain if I fully stacked the tornado or if the duration was just up. Movement speed is a bit on the slow side. I am using level 21 regular at the moment and will have to try the alt version with more speed because it could stand to move a bit faster at level 21.

Real Cons: Terrain - Terrain will limit the torando far too easily. Doorways, Stairs, trees, if there are objects or areas that are character width the tornado does not go through. This is doubly annoying because the pathing seems to literally just go straight at the nearest enemy. This can mean you drop sigil of power, activate arcane cloak, power up your tornado only to have it run backwards because there are enemies behind the wall behind you that you didn't see. Mechanically, because the skill takes so long to power up this feels insanely irritating.

Additionally - Scourge specific feedback: It's hypothetically fantastic for scourge on a squishy character like mine since it allows you to clear safely if you stand within it. Unfortunately Scourge mode adds even more terrain so I've already had a dozen times or more that my tornado is stuck on a new outcropping spawned in scourge and I either die or have to shift out as scourge enemies will tear me to pieces without the nado around.

TLDR: It's pretty decent, but really needs better AI and ability to traverse terrain. May also could use easy way to buff AoE or Speed more.

Currently playing an Assassin which uses tornado as its primary single target DPS skill. Haven't found any significant issues with the way the skill performs so far, but there are 2 definite things which should be changed:

1 - The second-stage Tornado needs the vacuum effect of Void Sphere. It's literally a tornado, if there's any skill in the entire game which should pull in enemies this is it.

2 - The Tornado skill gem description does not have the Area tag, even though it's quite clearly an AoE skill. The gem DOES have the tag mechanically programmed into it; it benefits from supports such as Conc Effect and gets +gem levels from "Socketed AoE gems" corruptions, it just needs the tag added to the written gem description.

It need one essential change:

Make it cast at mouse cursor and not front of player. it is too slow atm VS super quick mob and things that jump left and right.

If only I could target where I cast it, would be great

It functions very well as a replacement in my cast while damage taken setup linked with power charge on crit. with how many hits it does it gets me 3 charges instantly almost always on my crit build.

because it does hits it also proc's life gained on hit and Energy shield gained on hit. 4 per second per target which adds up to some good sustain.

its very strong in this area, unless you're cast on damage taken setup is procing too fast and keeping it in the dead zone.

with enough defense and Es or life on hit, you can afk with a couple monsters hitting you in a t16 and have your hp sustain indefinatly just from what the tornado cast on damage taken setup is giving you

this works too when you're in the dark in delve, if its going on a big pack of monsters with that kind of setup you get a lot of regen and are able to be much more comfy in the dark

Is it OK to mention here the horrible low FPS spikes I'm getting when using this skill? Especially when first used in a new zone.

Currently leveling a ranger using GMP+TS with the Tornado skill being triggered by Asenath's Chant Iron Circlet. It doesn't seem quite as bad when I self-cast Tornado.

(PS I think it should've been named "Summon Tornado" or something that doesn't clash with the name of existing skill "Tornado Shot". When searching you could then specify the phrase "Summon Tornado" to exclude at least some of the "Tornado Shot" matches.)

I was experimenting/theorycrafting with this skill on two different characters. One of them was an int stacking kinetic blast/power siphon deadeye wander.
My idea was to replace the spell sling hydrosphere and have projectiles hit twice again.

That didn't work how i expected it at all and I accepted that my use of the skill might not be within the skills scope.

My second attempt was on a frost blade raider. I figured maybe I can cast the tornado move behind my target with a movement skill and then increase my damage by a nice amount on single targets that way. This seemed like a fun and rewarding mechanic at first but i quickly realized that between a 0.75 second cast time and a 0.6 second additional attack time after using whirling blades. I'm left with 0.15 seconds to actually hit the tornado with projectiles. That's certainly not enough to create a Tornado with any meaningful reflected damage amounts. Then i figured maybe I can trigger tornado. Nope that wouldn't work either, the focus mod is clearly not within the scope for it.

So I guess my actual feedback for it is:

I expected this skill to be able to create fun and rewarding interactions with attack projectile builds. Even if I used flame dash I have 0.75 seconds to achieve the maximum potential of the skill even with perfect execution and assuming my time to first hit i'll get out 2 maybe 3 projectiles on the tornado at best.

Maybe giving the skill a cooldown and removing it's cast time would be a viable option here.

Or giving it a substantially longer primary duration. It's a cool skill but at least for the uses mentioned it seems pretty disappointing.

posted this maybe in the wrong thread earlier:
Tornado's movement speed needs a buff!


Build: Witch Elementalist, using Eye of Winter triggering Tornado
With the speed of everything moving so fast in this game nowadays and even hasted monsters being faster, using the new tornado skill gem even at 20% quality seems to be a bit too slow. I've had to remain a cold damage build just to make sure it hits things.

This is a problem and I think you should buff the speed. I did use enhance for a bit with it and it felt better but then the damage is more lackluster, and it was still slightly sluggish.

The reason this is an issue is that nobody will ever use the alt quality tornado gems if the only functional one is the normal one. Though I get that maybe the alt quality gems weren't very imaginative with the duration quality.

If I had to make a suggestion, I would say buff it at it's base by 20-30% and then it should feel right for the alt qualities with the lab enchant.



I would also say that, for me, the visual of the tornado was only usable as a cold damage tornado since the fire tornado and chaos tornado are too visually blocking that you can't see anything on the screen. Maybe make those 2 more transparent.

Many of the other issues people have mentioned are true but some are not. I don't think it needs a cooldown as I use it as a trigger.

Pretty happy using Tornado with Lightning Strike while leveling, both for clearing and bosses. Doesn't seem to work well with exploding projectiles, but when the main damage is on the projectile itself, it's pretty good, especially with piercing projectiles. Might be good with something like chaining Tornado Shot, as well.

That said, casting it is clunky, and the relatively long cast takes time away damage from the projectiles themselves. That might be the reason it's not being adopted more widely.

Ever since Tornado was released as a skill I've wanted to make a build centered around it as the primary source of damage. Unfortunately on it's own it doesn't deal enough damage to be competitive with other skill gems and because it moves so slowly the gameplay itself doesn't feel smooth. I always had to use corrupting fever as the real main damage.

I was wondering if now that transfigured skill gems are a thing if we could maybe get a transfigured version of tornado that removes it's initial duration (absorbing/reflecting projectiles) and instead have a max limit of 2 tornados.

I feel like most of the gameplay problems (at least for what I want out of tornado) would be solved by just having the ability of casting a second tornado without replacing the first. That way I could continue running past as the first tornado seeks out stragglers behind me and still be able to attack new enemies I bump into

Tornado of Elemental Turbulence could use an indicator of how many Tornadoes you have out. Something in the skill effects monitor like Brands get. Can be hard to tell how many are active when killing a boss and they're all on top of each other.