Hammer is quite fun, the 3 skill is super cool conceptually but also fairly punishing with the slim margins due to duration vs. cooldowns.
Though the circling projectiles not having an icd that matches its rotation frequency makes its dps extremely volatile/inconsistent which might be hard to balance.
Air 4 looked cool in the trailer but feels pretty bad in game. Having such a large wind up where you’re stationary and locked into the animation kind of negates it’s disengage potential, and if you just want the cc you probably don’t want to be displaced so much. (I feel like other classes would have at least gotten aegis/barrier/stab/prot or *something* during the windup?)
I’m not sure I’m a fan of the extreme synergy with fire traitline and conjurer specifically (for a dps build), I don’t want to be incentivised to use the same utilities (and traits) I’ve used for years.
On that note, augments feel underwhelming and I don’t really like their interaction with the class mechanic. Utilities can usually round out the attunements, e.g. use lightning hammer in earth for damage, or use a defensive cd outside of earth/water. Then of course there’s glyphs which do depend on attunements but have situational uses in all attunements. By contrast the bonus effect on augments (while not essential) is gated behind having f5 active, being inside the field, *and* being in the correct attunements. That feels pretty bad for a utility.
The elite skill also feels lacklustre and seems to want to just force me back into fgs. While yes 8s cdr on all weapon skills is potentially a lot, getting that would actually require having all high impact skills on a 16s+ cd first, then using 8s to apply the cdr, and somehow cycling through all attunements fast enough to make use of it? Maybe I’m too uncreative, but it feels hard to come up with a usecase for it, especially given that hammer 3 and the grandmaster minor trait incentivise cycling through all attunements regularly (not too fast and not too slow but like every 4 seconds). Plus as mentioned above fgs was effectively buffed, so idk.
Also, this is kind of random but the air elemental stun not counting towards vicious empowerment feels really bad. I understand the stun comes from the elemental not the catalyst but it just feels like another strike against any non-fgs elite skills.
Having the jade sphere field stationary, gated behind cd and energy and cast time feels a bit much, especially since that’s the entirety of the class mechanic. I’m not saying it’s unbalanced per se, but it doesn’t particularly *feel* great. Also I personally haven’t tested catalyst in wvw but imagine it would be quite hard to play around such a stationary jade sphere.
Hammer having finishers in every attunement but no fields fits catalyst obviously but it still feels a bit weird, especially since you could of course use other weapons with the spec. But if it has to be either/or I do prefer having a finisher.
Overall I think catalyst is quite strong if played well, but has a really high skill floor (and ceiling probably). Especially because the cooldowns are so tight, that a max dps rotation just barely works with perfect timing and alacrity uptime. I feel like e.g. duration of the hammer 3 could be increased just slightly to make chaining projectiles a little bit more forgiving.
I don’t want this to sound too negative overall. Hammer is pretty great, I love having incentives to use all 4 attunements. The jade sphere animations are extremely beautiful, as are the circling projectiles. And the gameplay is super fast paced (which can be a pro and a con I suppose).
