Lalaboompoo.1289

I think it would be cool if they leaned more into caster oriented, with like magic circles or channels. Or they could lean into the underutilized arcane aspect of the elementalist, id be fine with anything as long as its more interesting than a bunch of passive dps boosts.

please no, its all we have left

ele has always been that way hasnt it, while most other classes want something strong or fun to play we always have to settle for something thats just fine.

a lot of content refers to pvp, wvw, and open world content. As well as some fractals. I was referring to the orb mechanic as wells so sorry if I offended you. And my apologies catalyst has a good amount of combo finishers so no issue there. As for the logs, the ones you posted are of a raid which again, huge hitboxes not a lot of movement on the bosses part. And I already mentioned before that the damage in raids are fine, the issue is that raids are the only content where catalyst is useful.

I never said it was more difficult than weaver and I have no idea where you got that impression, the issue is it seems to have a identity crisis and all of the balances are being made around the damage that it can do to an immobile golem. It is unusable in a lot of content and cant decide what kind of combat it wants to base on. The orbs are a mechanic in and of itself and its one of the first and only weapons to have a entirely unique mechanic to it, this also forces it into swapping elements very quickly which is why I am in support of increase duration, again no idea where you got the impression I was against that either. It has aura fields but no combo finishers, it has boons but their duration and traiting is horrible, hammer has 4 ranged skills and 16 melee and abilities that make you dash in unusual directions, like the air dash that makes you dash backwards, is it to use ranged attacks? why is it a combo finisher? every design choice they have made for this class is odd. Adding in redundant elites that step on the toes of the other utilities that exist doesnt help matters. By sustainable damage I mean you cant keep up the "insane op damage numbers" being advetised in the builds where you get to watch a guy wack at a golem for 3 minutes with the builds details floating across screen. Augments and wells need to be used in tandem to get use out of them which means both you and your enemy need to be standing inside them to get use out of them and if they walk out of it you lose a lot of damage. The orbs only work on enemies in a specific ranges from you so if the hitbox is large then it doesnt matter but if the enemy is player sized you cant use the orbs and attacks at the same time due to range issues. Yeah they are probably fine in raids, because again, big hitbox non movement enemies so they can unload all their abilities into the boss, im talking about the 90% of other players that havent even touched raids, is there a use for catalyst to them?

dont forget that your utilities compete with each other. Lets take the ice augment for example, after using it you have 5 seconds to land as many hits as possible using all your cooldowns and spamming as many as you can to get the most damage, or you could use any other damage ability. They were balanced around their maximum potential so you have to use them in the aura for them to be worth slotting. Its like instead of it being a bonus, they made the base ability and took some power from it and put that power into the synergy, its a bad balancing metric. Also I am getting a bit tired of the doing fine argument because its been the reason for ele being so bad for so long, if its usable changes aren't needed. That was the reasoning for staff staying how it is, dagger staying how it is, the core trait lines staying how it is, tempest having almost no boons despite being a support, being fine doesn't work when every other class is good or higher tier. Being able to do the content doesn't matter when no one will let you in the group for playing the meme class.

issue is you need a specific element of one orb in order to effectively use the augment skills, many of them are weaker at base then most of our other utilities and they barely compete when the bonus is accounted for, its too situational. Even in PvE bosses move, they dont sit there and let you place your aoes then activate your buffs that last for 5 seconds and then perform your orb combo which takes several seconds to get up and running and isnt sustainable damage for what it does.

most of its damage is against unmoving targets, if you entire kit can be countered by walking away, thats bad design. Not good for pvp, raids, wvw or anything that would involve something besides standing and hitting. Its aura mech is short duration and short range and your augments kind of suck unless in the correct element orb making them too conditional to be effective, the orbs only have 1 range they do anything, its not a beam or projectile but selects a small zone around you so if the enemy isnt in that specific zone thats a damage loss as well, their main forms of damage are auras and orbs and has very few defenses so all it takes is for your to be stunned or a enemy to have any form of mobility and that dps drops exponentially. Those numbers are not accurate at measuring combat effectiveness, they are only useful for measuring damage potential. Anything besides open world or metas and it just kind of sucks..

care to elaborate why you think that?

care to elaborate? I am aware that it can achieve high damage numbers on a golem, but those numbers are impossible to achieve outside of said golem as its damage is only good against non moving targets that dont fight back. So raids, meta events, pvp, and wvw are off the table. Its auras have small radius and short duration and its augments require you to be the right element and have the aura up and on top of that the hammer 3 only works at a very specific range, too close or too far and you wont do any damage, all it takes is the enemy walking away to negate the catalysts entire kit.

See the thing about elites is when you pick one, the best option and really main only option is to use the weapon they bring. Weavers always use swords, tempest always use warhorns, almost every build you can find for each spec it using their main weapon, this is true for all classes. Even if base staff and scepter were buffed to a point where it could be considered balanced, it would still be weaker than sword because of the buffs and balances for weaver are made around using a sword, the only way to be able to use ranged weapons effectively to match up against other players is to have a elite spec for it since we don't get weapon swap, so we only get one weapon loadout as opposed to other classes that can use their spec weapon and another of their choice.

doesnt it only have 4 ranged abilities though? Also its range is half that of a staff, ranged weapons have a range of 1200 and hammer reaches around 600 range, thats mid range at best, im sure its damage is fine, I just want to play as an actual caster for once.

staff catalyst prob for just a bit, see if its better than staff weaver. Dont really care either way anymore just kind of sad.

I plan to replace them all with berserker gear im just having difficulty getting them, after that ill put the rune onto the chest piece but im worried about putting too much effort into it when the results are so lackluster compared to the effort.

I have been playing the game for a while now but just recently decided I wanted to try and upgrade my gear and build to try out some of the harder content but have found that I can't get higher than 8k damage per second, I have been playing staff weaver which I know is the opposite of meta right now but I just want to see how far I can get with it, rather than taking on the highest content possible since I know thats not a pheasible goal. rn my build is berserkers hood all the way down to the boots excluding the chest piece which is wanderers with 5 scholar runes. My staff rn is diviners. My apparel are all ascended berserkers gear. For trait lines im going fire: 1-3-3 arcane: 3-3-1 and weaver: 1-2-3. I'm using signet of restoration, arcane wave, signet of fire, arcane shield, and glyph of elementals. I understand this build probably sucks since I just kind of threw it together with what felt best, I tried to use metabattle but there aren't any builds for staff besides tempest healer and im adamant on sticking with weaver staff. I understand its silly to be so stubborn on something likes this while also asking for help but I was hoping you guys might have some ideas. Thank you!