BlackBeard.2873

I.havent played in a while, but Stone Heart has never been an issue, it's a L2P issue. Here is a thought, stop focusing a support ele with burst while camping earth, they are doing exactly nothing for their team. They are just surviving and their team is getting no real heals, boons, or peels. As soon as the ele swaps out of earth (due to condi pressure, sustained damage, or needing to actually, you know, do something useful for the team) them go ahead and go HAM. Support tempest has at most 1 stunbreak, so just cc them and call it a day . Yes, you need to wear down the cds in a 1v1 or teamfight (shocking aura, earth shield, frost aura, wash the pain away), but much like a guardian you eventually will. Similarly, the damage and healing are too low to hold a long time against a competent brawler. It literally plays a lot like a support guard, why is there so much crying, because people have to think before spamming their burst? There are tons of openings vs a support ele to focus them, and a few times not to. Stop complaining about the few good mechanics that make you engage your brain and get better. Get a little bit of patience and be strategic to bait them out of earth (eles really can't sit long in earth against sustained pressure) rather than predictably leading with your full-burst and waste all your cooldows, then cry because your predictable burst got outplayed.

In pvp, catalyst is meant to be played as a semi-selfish auramancer that spams auras for sustain. Do not use hammer or any catalyst utilities. Even the block isn't that great as it isn't a stunbreak. My best spec so far: D/D with Fire (3/2/1), Arcana (3/2/1), and Catalyst (2/2/1) with Sage amulet. I have tested a few, and rune of the forge seems to work pretty well. Utilities:, signet of restoration, cantrips and stunbreaks. Do a rotation that generally goes: fire (drop fire 4 before leaving)-->water (blast + a couple heals as needed)-->earth (EA dodge, use a blast if you want, then end with a cast-swap of either 3-4-5 so that the combo executes in air giving you shocking aura. Cast some air skills as appropriate, then head back to fire The F5 is there to fill in when you miss you fire field (helps reset the rotation), or to act as a water field so you can do an earth blast-swap followed by water-3 blast to get your health back up. This is basically a d/d auramancer ele. It is more selfish than tempest and doesn't provide as much healing, but auras help it have reasonable matchups in 1v1's (good cleanses, good prot uptime, good reflect and stab uptime) and have good kiting potential in 2v1's. This build also does pretty well in teamfights thanks to you blasting those fields + boon-share from elemental attunement + cleanses from a transmute in air and water as-needed. It feels like a pretty good bruiser fighting at mid-close range, which is what I think they were going for. S/D also kinda works, but doesn't work as well due to having 1 less weapon-skill aura, and the blasting-order requires finisher-swaps into both water and air for auras making the rotation more rigid b/c you always have to go from fire/earth into water/air to keep your auras up. The extra finishers on earth 1/2 are nice though for completing auras.

But you have long cast times and delays on the skills to allow them to have such big effects and do such big damage, err... so that you can have a high skill floor and feel accomplished when you land them. That being said, I support SOME of the skills having instant casts, especially hammer 3, which feels a lot like an aura. Dragon's tooth should have a 0.25s cast time to make it an easier to use area-denial skill b/c it never hits a competent player. Lightning orb has never seemed like a problem to me, it does quite a bit of damage. Meteor shower needs a shorter cast AND to allow you to move while casting since they nerfed the damage so that it is pretty pedestrian. The cast time on the F5 doesn't bother me, it is everything else about it that does.

If you want to sit in fire on staff, take Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave. However, staff is one of the few weapons with no death of finishers, they just aren't in fire. You have Water 2, Earth 1, Earth 2, Earth 3 (detonate), Earth 5.

I've always wanted an elite signet (we don't have one) that has: Signet of Arcana Passive: Increase attunement recharge rate Active: Instantly refresh all Attunements (unravel) The other alternative is being able to take another utility skill, as most are just better than what is available in the elite slot. Like honestly, even if something like signet of air was an elite skill, it would be slotted like 90% of the time.

At the risk of treading on scepter playstyle, I will say auto-attacks at 900 range would be good, especially if you can continue to cast them behind you while running (that will probably get patched out, because it is fun). However, there are other things that need to be fixed. Fire 5 needs to be ranged - it is awkward to use while the rest of fire is ranged. Also, most of the damage on hammer comes from the rotating orbs, which are melee, so I'm not sure how much this will help. However, at least giving 900 range would make this weapon useable in open-world where you often have to switch between ranges relatively quickly.

Hammer Air 5 does 9 damage in pvp. I know they nerfed damage on cc skills, but this feels like the same damage reduction of the F5 skill was applied to an actual weapon-skill which is supposed to be a relatively heavy hitter.

I have tried playing catalyst with aura-spam as a means to survive, and I think it can actually work decently. The best combination I have found is fire/arcana/catalyst with D/D and S/D as a side-noder. Fire traitline (1/2/1) gives you: an aura on-swap, every aura cleanses, fire fields last longer (really important for comboing), and shorter CD on your fire field. (In fact, not having access to the lower-CD and longer-duration fire field felt bad on every other weapon-set I tried.) Arcana (2,2,1) gives you: protection, blast on earth-dodge (for comboing and getting an aura), and the normal goodies. Catalyst gives you: aura on combo-ing, 20% stats by taking the whole middle-line OR stab on aura. (Note: don't take the first 2 traits in the top line of catalyst, as they give shorter duration 10% damage reduction and increase, when you can get 20% ALL STATS on the middle line and they last longer than 6s to refresh all your aura stacks. You never want the aura buffs if you have more room for additional stacks of empowerment, because they are both just +stats so one line is always better no matter how they balance it) Taking sage amulet and dolyak runes you can keep yourself rolling at 1600 toughness and 600 healing power and feel a bit like glory-days d/d ele (with the 20% stat increase, which only works on amulet/weapon stats, not inherent stats like your baseline 1000 toughness) It is relatively easy to keep an aura-train going without using F5, and with time F5 can serve 2 purposes: a secondary field if your fire field gets interrupted, a source of quickness for quick bursts after burning your enemy's CD's a bit. Both S/D and D/D have plenty of finishers to make sure one procs in air almost every rotation, and I had been taking arcane blast (the projectile finisher) for good measure to fill in any gaps in water/air attunements.

The reason you get this jumbled mess is because they are tacked onto a class that has underlying issues. So they come up with reasonable traits, like the old arcana fury trait, but it still isn't enough, so they tack something extra onto it, like energy gain. When that still isn't enough, they will take something else onto it until eventually it "sort of" makes up for all the downsides of being on a squishy class and not rewarding the risks you take. It is also why the whole spec just feels like a jumbled mess - their straightforward vision of what to make was either confused from the start or had inherent flaws.

It is awful to balance around raw, top-end, idealized numbers on an oversized golem that doesn't move out of your stack of 5 slow-ticking fields, don't pressure back (to interrupt long attack chains), and doesn't walk away from your conjures which are a necessary part of your rotation. Also, not taking into account what else the spec brings in terms of external support or buffs, or how forgiving the class is.

I use it occasionally in pvp as a combo field when fire field is off-CD and I need a field to keep my aura-spam via combo train going on my d/d or d/f builds. I don't really care which field it is, at the end of the day it could just be "nameless combo field" that allows me to blast/leap/projectile finisher on. I guess the boons to dropping it on-point are a nice addition to what elemental attunement gives.

D/D or S/D with Catalyst makes a pretty good auramancer, and CAN be competitive with tempest, but maybe that matters more in pvp.

Profession mechanic: The Jade sphere seems just like a combo field that you can lay down every ~30s. The boons are good in air (quickness) and earth (prot), but the other two just feel like a waste to get. It feels bad to be getting some might or resolution, when ele already has plenty ways to get might, and resolution seems useless (condis are either super-long and have to be cleansed anyway, or ele is fragile and needs to cleanse anyway). Hammer: This one feels bad overall. There really isn't a big burst, there aren't a lot of control, mobility, or condi options, making me think this is supposed to just be a sustained damage weapon. However, the sustained damage isn't that great, and there aren't really important variation from 1 skill to the other. Like sure, I can cycle through all my skills and attunements and auto-attacks which looks neat, but the end result is only visual without any actual variation - no big skills to hit or avoid, just a steady line of "meh" effect. Being melee and mid-range also doesn't really work, as the sustained damage from mid-range is pretty pathetic. The only way to get decent dps is to cycle the spinning orbs to keep them ticking while plunking away, but this keeps you at 200 range. The profession really wants to focus on fields and finishers, yet Hammer has no fields (meaning you rely on your 30s sphere cooldown) and long CD's on finishers, making it anti-synergistic with its own trait line. Compare the play-style to the other melee/midrange options, scepter/dagger and scepter/warhorn, which at least feels good in that there is decent ranged damage, then a reason to pop in, get off some combos/heavy hitters/overloads, then get back out. The mid-range option (dagger/dagger, for instance), not only has better consistent damage, but also a whole bunch of control abilities (cc's, chills, shocking/frost aura, etc), so hammer doesn't fill that niche either. Finally, for essentially being a melee-range spec, there are no proper defensive skills to allow you stay there effectively. Overall, Hammer has an identity crisis in that it doesn't know what role it wants to fill, and doesn't fill ANY roles that other sets don't already. Some specifics: - Orbs don't last long enough, and feel really bad b/c while it says they are a 0.25s cast, they seem to take about 1s to cast, giving you realistically 4s to cast the next one or else you lose them mid-cast - Being able to cast fire and air backwards is the most interesting interaction, so you can continue to dps while running away. I know this will be nerfed though - Triple Sear - this needs almost pixel-perfect to get more than 2 procs, feels bad - Molten End - this should be ranged as there is no disengage or engage in fire, so you are stuck slowly plodding toward your enemy or else stuck in melee on your "ranged" set - Water: one leap and no other way to stay ontop of an enemy for your other skills, feels bad - Shock blast does actually 0 damage in pvp. The projectile tickles the enemy, then the field does 9 damage with a zerker amulet. Maybe this is a bug, or this big slow-moving thing really just a slower, crappier comet on focus? Utilities: every utility feels like a worse version of something else we already have. The triple-conditional (1. In range of the spehere, 2. Sphere is off-cd and up, 3. You are in the correct attunement) makes them even more useless. Utilities on eles are almost always reactive (especially the heal, the air and earth utilities here), and having them time-gated for proper use makes them unable to fill that role. Thematically, these feel like you just made stances again, but couldn't give ele the same mechanic utility type AGAIN so put some weird conditionals and made them bad enough that nobody will ever use them. - The earth block not being a stunbreak makes this just a worse earth-sheild. This should also be a stunbreak if you want it to ever be used. - The fire and water utilities are both just there for more damage, so only 1 will EVER be taken, and honestly, you are better off just taking other utilities. You would be better off either giving something else, like a field to combo, or some leaps for mobility/finishers. - The elite does nothing, and the boons ontop aren't even worth worrying about the triple-conditional hoops. Traits: This is what I think is the most important aspect of any spec, as traits open up all new options for how you play. The minor traits here are pretty decent, especially the GM minor, turning this into an auramancer focused on combos. There is then nothing that in any way helps combos anywhere else in the kit - what? Also, tempest is already an auramancer, so why do we have ANOTHER auramancer? Outside of Staunch auras (stab on aura - which is good), both the top and middle line focus on just raw stat increases via effects that need to be constantly refreshed. That doesn't really make them all that interesting, you just pick whichever one gives you more stat impact. None of them impact the way you play or open up new styles, you just end up trying to spam auras to get stats. The bottom line, aside from the old arcana trait for fury (which is a bit of a slap in the face), don't really do anything b/c the jade orb is so bad. Spectacular sphere gives me boons approx once every 30s in durations that are pathetic compared to something like elemental attunement. Sphere specialist is useless b/c the sphere is immobile and you miss out on the one boon you really care about (quickness) if you have to change attunements. Overall: The spec just feels really unfocused. Outside of spamming auras, it doesn't really try to do anything else well. Hammer's playstyle competes with other weapons by just doing things they already do, and synergizes poorly with the traits due to lack of fields/finishers. The sphere is really just an extra combo field with a lot of hoops to jump through. Catalyst felt best to play with X/D with fire traitline (to make fields last longer for combos, plus a free aura, and all auras cleanse) to me, due to the long-duration, short CD fire field. There are some interesting build-craft avenues, but only around auramancy, as the rest of the traits, skills, and utilities don't offer new options and don't do anything that well.

The tradeoff is that you are still an ele. 😂

Yes, you can use conjures, but not while also practicing ranged combat. I also could use a long channel, bit the precise reason I want quickness is for those channels, so I need to build it up ahead of time. Perhaps you can proc it mid cast, but the point still stands - I finish my meteor shower cast and have built up.4s of quickness, that won't last me very long for the 10s after I leave air and doesn't do as much while locked out of fire.