Skill rework: Tempest Shield

The Awakening has provided us with a great opportunity to take a look at Path of Exile as a whole, and make improvements to many areas, ensuring all the parts fit together nicely. Part of this has been a game-wide review of skills. One of the skills receiving a rework in the next Beta content update is Tempest Shield.

Tempest Shield was intended to enable a defensive shield-using spellcaster build, but supporting it with most damage increasing support gems increased the reservation cost. This made investment in the skill too expensive.

Here are some changes we're making to the skill:

• We've changed Tempest Shield to be a duration buff with a cast cost, rather than having permanent mana reservation. This should make the skill much easier to support with damage increasing support gems, and enables interesting synergies like Cast on Melee Kill.
• Tempest Shield's duration will be refreshed whenever you Block. This will mean that you'll only have to refresh the skill very occasionally if you've specialised in block.
• Tempest Shield now unleashes an arc-like beam at enemies you block. This will help the skill feel more active and let users know what they're damaging or why they're taking damage when facing enemies with the skill.
• The beam from Tempest Shield now chains once. This will help improve the skill when fighting groups of monsters, and give more opportunity for investment as you can further increase the chains with the Chain support gem.
• We've increased the damage, and added a very short cooldown on the damage trigger. This will make the skill more reliable, without being too powerful against very fast attacking monsters or players.

More changes may be coming, based on our continued testing, usage on beta and feedback from players using the skill.