skoda.4619

Same happened to me as well today and yesterday....didn't get the hero's choice chest first time failed then succeeded

This was already talked about before but as i sad in another post. There's another option. Add an ammo mechanic instead of energy, that way they can limit how many you can put down at any time. Energy mechanic is silly, since: main issue, you lose all your energy if you go downstate, so if you're low on hp you spam through attunements that you don't lose energy and miss out on quickness if you want to be a quickness support and you usually mess up your rotation you can't gain energy out of combat or anywhere there is no mobs you can't gain energy when the orb is down, so there are times where you must put down an orb to upkeep a boon some weapons for instance staff have problems generating energy

Theres another option. Add an ammo mechanic instead of energy, that way they can limit how many you can put down at any time. Energy mechanic is silly, since: main issue, you lose all your energy if you go downstate, so if you're low on hp you spam through attunements that you don't lose energy and miss out on quickness if you want to be a quickness support and you usually mess up your rotation you can't gain energy out of combat or anywhere there is no mobs you can't gain energy when the orb is down, so there are times where you must put down an orb to upkeep a boon some weapons for instance staff have problems generating energy

Spheres should if anything have an ammo mechanic, either per attunement or overall but just remove the energy it's useless and the longer the cooldown of spheres the more useless it is.... with the ammo mechanic we wouldn't have to deal with the silly cooldown, just tweak the ammo recharge duration and with the sphere being so long cooldown persisting flames is impossible to upkeep...just shows as many said if you're worried about quickalist being too strong dmg wise, just put quickness in the spectacular sphere trait...

After todays patch, i think it is time that i give up on catalyst

This is amazing now, sphere has small area and has 15s cooldown, so if you're giving quickness, beg people to stand in the field.....

i've forced myself to play catalyst in PvE, tho switching to weaver whenever i actually need to do decent dps the thing that i dislike the most with hammer is hammer 3, i feel like i have to keep the orbs up which means instead of using hammer skills i press whatever i can and then rush to other attunements to keep the orbs up...and the best thing in PvE ye orbs are instant cast but knockdowns in PvE are very long up to 5s which is the same as orb duration, so in a lot of cases orbs run out if you get knocked down as you can't swap attunements.... and when it comes to Jade Spheres, i tried quickness Catalyst in strikes and i really don't like how you can't generate energy while the orb is down it feels so unrewarding and on top of that if you get downed well tough luck now all of your energy is gone so good luck giving boons...another amazing thing on bosses like mai trin who moves a lot too many times i placed hammer air 2 and she moved so i was very low on energy more often then not...i don't know why you don't just make this an ammo skill with cooldown and be done with it if you're worried about energy generation, or just let us generate energy always even when the orb is down, but also please give us full energy when we get out of combat so we don't need to generate energy before giving out boons...

It is a bit hard to say what to do in this case, but it also feels bad having to go into water just for that trait when you have other options in other core trait line like in earth give protection to allies you apply aura to or air apply fury and swiftness to allies you apply aura to or fire which cleanses condis so you are tied to water if you want to do either of those which just feels bad as you're very limited to what you can do and tied to water, since ele has quite a bit of healing as is... But as you said at the end of the day it might just be that core ele needs a revamp. And when it comes to tempest originally my suggestion on this topic was giving tempest quickness... What our suggestions usually are sth that would take the least amount of work so we might actually see them one day, cause unfortunately i've lost hope for a large ele revamp...

Giving tempest alacrity on aura application with the aura share it already has in one of it's grandmasters would be amazing. But i'd take powerful auras from water grandmaster and make it baseline when using tempest and put elemental bastion from tempest to water instead of powerful auras, that makes water really about healing and leaves grandmaster in tempest for alacrity.

After trying to get to grips with Catalyst dps rotations a few things always came up and it was the same issues we were all talking about during betas and nothing changed. give the hammer 3 at least 1-2s longer duration so we don't have to feel like we have to race through the attunements, i had to skip a few skills in the rotation whenever i pressed 3 a bit too soon which always feelt bad. give grand finale a 1 or 0.5s cooldown after skill 3 has been pressed so we don't accidentally activate it...yes i know you should use hammer 3 during long animations to avoid this, but this is a workaround and it still happens that you activate it by mistake. If you mess up either of previous steps so orbs run out or you accidentally press grand finale when you didn't mean to, your rotation is screwed up and you lose quite a lot of dps due to that small mistake. Even weaver was more lenient that this. Not sure what to do here, at least give us changes from previous 2 points and then we can go from there. Every class that gives quickness can do so at the start of the fight, but due to energy not being full when entering combat you have to wait a few secs before giving quickness, all that would need to be done is make it so if you go out of combat your energy resets to full. Not being able to generate energy when an orb is down doesn't feel fun, on top of juggling the orbs you have to make sure to pay attention how much energy you have on that small icon. Give us ability to generate energy always and put the energy status above the health bar or over the weapon skills similar to how weavers element bar was.

I've read through most of the feedback and here are a few changes i think would help improve catalyst at least to some degree. Hammer 3 orbs: This from when i first played Catalyst seemed like it should be a class mechanic and not hammer only mechanic, it also proves that with to how much of a DPS increase it is. Even when i tested it back to back to other weapons it proved it as i was able to achieve similar dmg numbers on hammer without using skill 3 as other weapons. So suggestion, make this one of the Catalysts mechanics. Option 1, gain orb when you do a combo in a specific jade sphere. Duration is increased by doing combos in specific sphere, for instance if you do a combo in fire sphere you gain only 5% dmg buff and more combos you do the longer the duration is, but to a certain cap, for instance up to 20s and then tune how many of these buffs you can get so it's not too strong. Option 2, gain orb when you place down a jade sphere, putting down another Jade sphere while the orb is still active refresh duration or increase duration. Jade sphere: Remove the 1.5s cooldown on swapping attunements. Make the energy UI more readable, maybe put it where the weaver element bar is and make it so it has notches based on energy needed to spawn a jade sphere. Maybe remove the energy and make it a ammo mechanic with 5s cooldown as it has now and tune how fast ammo is replenished. Make ammo either per attunement or overall, depending on how strong it'd be. Possibly thing about increasing the radius of the jade sphere. Move place jade sphere onto F1-F4 just like we have with overloads. Add some damage to it in pvp and wvw so it has some area denial aspect to it. Elemental Celerity Elite: As some said this skill has use in some scenarios, but in most cases you're better off using other elites. Let's compare it to Bladesworn elite Tactical Reload, that skill has 30s cooldown to refresh 1 ammo to all your skills both utilities, weapon , anything. The longest cooldown for any ammo skill is i think 40s and shortest 10s. Elementalist skills have in majority low cooldown with exception of skills 4 and 5 which longest cooldown is 50s for obsidian flesh but majority is between 20s and 30s and unlike Bladesworn we only refresh 1 attunement on 90s cooldown of which only 2 skills actually might benefit from it but we're also incentivized to not camp an attunement so in most cases it is better to take FGS or Glyph of Elementals. Option 1, make this skill affect all attunements so you in a way get a reset of the situation. Option 2, lower the cooldown massively. Option 3, change this elite either for sth more useful like deploying all hammer 3 orbs for a period of time and getting grand finale to shoot them. Hammer: Damage on quite a few abilities should be buffed, especially auto attacks, honestly using fire auto feels just as bad as using fire auto on scepter. As some said you'd want to pressure people even from range, but currently it doesn't feel like you can. Earth auto should have bleeding added to it. Give hammer more finishers, possibly make the fire and air projectile finishers or at least 20% chance projectile finishers like Ranger longbow. Make Hurricane of Pain and Whirling Stones whirl finishers Skill 3 should be replaced with more finishers, fields or engages/disengages, which would make it more useful. This would also allow you to use all skills more effectively and not just rush to use whatever is the most effective skill in that attunement and switching to not lose the orbs, since they're so significant. If you keep skill 3 on hammer, which i hope you don't and make it an elite spec mechanic, add a small cooldown as many suggested so you don't accidentally do a grand finale by mistake. There's probably quite a bit i missed that could get more improvements.

I've played with Catalyst quite a bit and yes the spec is better than it was previous beta but it's still not in a good place. Hammer: Hammer 3 makes catalyst gameplay feel hectic and unfun, you can see how many builds use weave self which is pretty much hammer 3 skill. Firstly why rehash sth that weaver has for an elite for a gimmick on a weapon. Secondly we already have to juggle elements due to low amount of long cooldown combo finishers which would generate elemental empowerment, empowered aura and hardened aura buffs to keep those up, now we also need to constantly cycle attunement to keep the orbs up and to get the most out of the augments. From my testing which i have to admit was not well done and dps is low i lost more than 33% of my dps if i didn't use skill 3. This feels horrible, weaver had element weaving that was rewarding, this just feels hectic and unfun. In all honesty just remove skill 3 and give us sth that is actually usefull, like a field or some gap closers that this weapon needs if you want catalyst to be a bruiser. You do realize that most classes have tons of movement and you gave catalyst on hammer almost none while it has lowest HP and lowest armor...and on top of that the one leap engage that it has is also a heal which it needs to survive not to catch opponents... Hammer damage feels weak outside air and especially in fire....sth needs to be done...here i'm excluding damage from skill 3 because in most cases it won't help...it's melee and if you want to be a bruised while in fire or air at range it'll do 0 damage anyway. Damage output, no i'm not snowcrows but it still shows the difference...30k+ was with hammer 3 and 20k+ was without hammer 3, everything else was the same...i don't like this at all https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/482867360412467200/916623892569784330/unknown.png I really hoped for hammer ele to be this slow moving kitten playstyle where you'd want to make sure you're nowhere near them or you'll take massive damage, like in a way with how you presented reaper but the way it turned out it's not that special...With how combo centric catalyst is it really feels like hammer isn't the right weapon for the spec, i honestly feel a ranged projectile weapon would fit a lot more with shooting through the field to generate combos like longbow, shortbow, pistols.... One last thing about hammer 3, i don't like having +7% critical chance as a buff on air if it's so hard to upkeep, as if we don't consider it when making a build we'll overcap with critical chance and if we do and we don't have the buff we won't be at 100% crit chance if the orb isn't up...if you keep it, which i hope you don't at least not in current iteration make it critical damage or sth else. Jade spheres: Energy can't be generated while a jade sphere is up, this feels extremely unrewarding, since you have to juggle attunements to keep all the buffs up, which leads it having to stay in an element to get enough energy to get a sphere up which then breaks hammer 3 due to its duration which then leads to big damage loss... Let us generate energy even when the jade sphere is up Cooldown on the sphere when you enter an attunement is bad, again here one reason being hammer 3 and second reason if let's say quickness is running out and you want to quickly refresh it by jumping into air, well tough luck 1.5s cooldown. This also makes using augments more annoying as you at times have to wait to use them because you have the 1.5s sphere cooldown on attunement swapping, which again you have to do to keep all the buffs and orbs from hammer 3 up. Please remove this cooldown Do we really need a 1.5s cooldown on attunement swap, 5s cooldown on placing the sphere and no energy generation while the sphere is down. You need to at least remove the 1.5s cooldown on attunement swap and no energy generation while jade sphere is down. Make the area of the sphere at least 360 radius. Elite skill: When used with hammer this elite is really not useful, there's so much element juggling going on that you don't really get a good time to use it as you're never in an element long enough for it to be useful It recharging only one element isn't actually good, most times all you get is maybe another use of obsidian flesh or meteor shower and not all the skills as most are on long cooldown anyway, on top of elementalists aren't really meant to camp one element This just leads to us using FGS again which a lot of us don't like due to how clunky it is to use. Change this skill so it recharges all elements or utilities or put hammer 3 onto this elite and give hammer 3 sth else that is actually usefull or make all spheres spawn at once when you use the elite so you can use any augment and get all the buffs or sth.

I've had a bit of a think about the hammer and I'm not sure if it's just me but these skills seem a better fit for a greatsword than a hammer. Weapon lacks cc's, it has whirls and water has an attack similar to hundred blades which fit more on a greatsword, only 2 skills that are more hammer oriented are fire and earth 5... I know especially elementalist could use weapons a lot differently than a melee class even tho you can't spell melee without ele but it still feels a bit off...

Hammer number 3 skill in air has same animation as casting it standing still while moving, other skills work properly only top part of the body moves.

So i've take a bit more time to think about Catalyst and still i have trouble figuring out what the elite specialization is. Bruiser spec: What i'm struggling with is if you want a bruiser spec you go and take weaver, it's a lot better at that gameplay with all the evades on sword and barrier, the augments and F5 ability don't really work for that kind of gameplay. Hammer as many people pointed out just doesn't work with all the buffs you have in the traitlines as you need auras for which you don't have any fields on hammer so if F5 is not up which in most cases it is not you will have a hard time maintaining them so you rely on other people which isn't really how bruising spec works and just to mention Persisting flames grandmaster doesn't work with hammer at all.... Support spec: And if you want a support spec you have tempest, which is much better at being an auramancer than catalyst. I know this is a Catalyst thread but please consider giving us TEMPEST as our support spec as it is so close to being amazing, it only struggles due to not having either alacrity or quickness, which can easily be added if you make powerful auras baseline, moving elemental bastion to grandmaster water instead of it and putting alacrity or quickness when you grant an aura to allies as tempest grandmaster. Other traitlines already sinergise well with aura application, if you go fire you get condi removal on aura application, if you go earth you get protection on aura application, if you go air you get fury and swiftness on aura application. As well as being more reactive with insta cast shouts, saving people with rebound, 5 target stun break of eye of the storm, projectile reflect of aftershocks magnetic aura and so on.... With the above fix to tempest can make Catalyst be more free to what it could be and not be shoehorned into being a supportish bruiser spec that you're trying to make it, as it will never be as good as the likes of firebrand even if you implement all the fixed others are here suggesting.