[PvP Flamethrower nerf]

The damage wouldn't be a problem if it had more counterplay. The auto's multi hits counters both blind and confusion and  can hit through walls, kinda insane for an auto attack. 

[crashing waves]

It heals you from 1200 range? I never noticed, most of the times I make sure i'm close to the elemental to get the heal. I always thought that the range refered to the distance the elemental can take actions away from you.

[Catalyst Feedback Thread]

6 hours ago, Rodril.1385 said:

Offtopic, but...

Could staff water 1 be changed similar to specter's scepeter 1 - to be able to have ally as target?

+1 for this change, for both staff's water auto and frost bow auto. Make it so we can target either an enemy or an ally 🙏

[Catalyst Feedback Thread]

First of all, I love how Catalyst made staff much more viable in general content, self access to stability and quickness was much needed to improve staff's experience with the long cast times that it has. I even managed to play staff in sPvP and get much better results than with core/tempest/weaver, it's so much easier to pull off and catalyst features make it much stronger, especially when paired with the augments utilities.

AUGMENTS

I know it can be an unpopular opinion, but I absolutely love all the augments. Although they lack interesting animations, they're still great utilities to catalyst kit. It's still hard to combo them with the Jade Sphere fields, but now at least you still get most value out of them even if you cast them by themselves. I only wish that Relentless Fire and Shattering Ice had clearer animations on our hits, if you're not paying attention to the buff bar, it's hard to tell that you're getting those aditional hits. I think it can improve counterplay in competitive modes if they get a bigger tell.

I think the elite one is in a weird position right now, it's definitely good, but maybe WAY too good in certain situations and I don't know how to balance that without making it useless. It's so much fun and allows a lot for a lot of plays! I read some criticism in this topic from people claiming it's useless because it only resets one attunement weapon skills. I definetely do not agree, Elemental Celerity can turn the tides of catalyst encounters, exactly because we have a long range of weapon skills, we just have to be in the right attunement for the right situation (and that's intricate to Ele's gameplay).

HAMMER

The hammer is much better than beta 1 and i'm having a blast playing it, but I do agree it needs more work in the following skills:

Surging Flames- needs more damage

Molten End- Could get the Untamed treatment and don't lock you in place, so you can move while casting it.

Rain of Blows - This skills has the shortest range and hitbox from all hammer skills and it's damage does not correspond to the range, air #2 does MUCH more damage and from range. It needs either more damage or extra chill.

Wind Storm - This needs to stop throwing us into the void, it's sad how many times it gets you stuck in the walls or in areas of the map you're not supposed to be (i've managed to die from fall damage in old skyhammer's manner and got lauched into the waters of the Capricorn, not being able to return to the map lol). If it was more like burning retreat it could be better. Also, it will help with hammer's mobility if it could apply either swiftness or superspeed.

Immutable Stone - This skill is still underwhelming, it's better than it was now that it applies barrier, but 1 block is still not enough. I suggest either give it more block stacks (much like Guardian's Shield of Wrath and Arcane Shield) or increase the amout of barrier/make it pulse.

And althought I like the orbs and find them quite fun, I do agree that having 4 different skills could be healthier DPS wise and provide utilities hammer currently lacks, mainly: mobility, damage denial and hard CC (it's quite odd that only 2 skills in the whole hammer kit are hard CC's, and it gets worse when you realize one of them is  Wind Storm. This weapon could have much more potential in LR builds, right now D/D and D/F completely outshines hammer in hard CC access and it just don't feel right)

TRAITS

I don't mind the traits, I think they're all useful, just boring. Weaver and Tempest have much more synergies with core traitlines. (From the top of my mind I can think of Woven Stride and  Cleansing Water; Elemental Bastion and Powerful Aura; Transcendent Tempest and Fresh Air; Superior Elements and Lightning Rod) From Catalys we get Vicious Empowerment and Elemental Surge, it just don't make the cut... Again, all the traits work, they're just not much fun to craft around.

SPHERE

The sphere is also much better, I don't mind the energy cost and I can see it's related to balance, it only hurts in PvP... If it could be better if we started the matches with some energy (1/3 is enough).

 But PLEASE get rid of the attunement swap cooldown. It hurts the flow BADLY and feels unjustified.

Other than that, I'm pretty much satisfied with Catalyst, great job listening to our feedback from last beta, I hope it'll be even better post EoD release.

[Catalyst Feedback Thread]

2 hours ago, Cegolex.8702 said:

Utility Skills: I like

I dont know too much what to do with the other two they might have some use in PVP but i kind of doubt that, so they kind of seem a bit useless to me in their current state(maybe make the superspeed aoe for the team?). Fortified Earth seems like a worse arcane shield to me but maybe im wrong i dont have pvp nor roaming experience with catalyst yet._________________

And if quickness double meteor shower in wvw is too strong please nerf the elite and not meteor shower since other ele specs want to play staff too. (DON'T RUIN STAFF IN THE LAST GAME MODE WHERE I CAN STILL PLAY STAFF AS A DPS).

Actually, the Air and Earth augments are really strong in PvP. 5sec superspeed + 100% endurance regeneration are HUGE, and 3sec block + 3k barrier is a LOT better than arcane shield's 3 blocks

You should try play staff Catalyst in PvP! I've had great results with it,  running Berserker's Amulet + Divinity's rune, Fire/Air/Catalyst (just like WvW, but with Aura Cleansing traits), with all augments (except fire) as utilities. It felt viable and I provided a lot of value to teamfights. I've played around 10 matches last night with it, and there was not a single time I wasn't either top damage or top kills (mostly both). It felt very different from Staff Core/Tempest/Weaver in PvP, which are extremely hard to pull out. Elemental celerity's double meteor shower felt incredible strong and the Water Augment's chill paired with Lava Font is amazing to fight at points. Air and Earth augments helped a lot with survivability and mobility. Overall i'm very excited with catalyst in PvP, it's not a better duelist than weaver, but it's sure better at teamfights.

The Elite skill is AMAZING in competitive modes. It's fine in PvE though, so if there's a nerf comming, I'm hoping it's in PvP/WvW only, but I don't know how they plan to balance it, but just like you, I hope they look at the elite and not at meteor shower lol

_____

I'll comeback to write a complete review after playing some more, there's some tuning left to do (mostly on hammer) but I do think a lot of the criticism and feedbacks feels biased and do not correspond with the reality. Catalyst is strong and in a much better state than the first beta.

[How to work with sword power weaver in open world solo PvE?]

I think you're having a hard time because you're missing Protection application in your current setup, since you're not running Arcane Traitline,  try to run Glyphs with Inscription (casting them on earth att) or Armor of Earth cantrip, it sure will help with your sustain. Protection makes a huge difference against power damage that you can't avoid.

If you're struggling with conditions, you'll also need a better access to cleanses. You're running Water traitline, which means you can get  lots of cleansings by running Cleansing Water alongside  Woven Stride and  Swift Revenge ( Zephyr's Boon also sinergizes, if you're willing to generate your auras leaping through your fire fields)

Master's Fortitude, Bolstered Elements and Invigorating Strikes can help with you sustain as well, the extra barrier is super helpful to mitigate some damage, take your time to try them out. 

Other than that, you don't want to split up enemies when AoEing with sword, you can usually melt everything down as long as the enemies are grouped together. You'll have a harder time fighting separated enemies since Sword's attack range is quite limited.

[Catalyst update for beta 4.]

8 minutes ago, Mattmatt.4962 said:

i heard it's 10cs PER ATTUNEMENT, cant confirm myself tho

it is.

[Catalyst update for beta 4.]

25 minutes ago, Kain Francois.4328 said:

There is no Water Aura.

Also the fields have a limited duration (5s?) on a limiting cooldown (15s?), making it a VERY tight duration to actually get the aura by the time you manage to switch elements and leap finisher.

Your options here are to go Fire or Air then swap to fire, in order to get an aura from leap.

but there's frost aura, which you get by comboing when attuned to water.

the fields are 5sec duration and 5sec cooldown in PvE by the time of this Beta, as stated by cmc.

in PvP is 15sec cooldown, which can indeed get in the way of hammer combos, but we'll see for sure during this beta.

5seconds duration is the same as most of staff's fields and we can still confortably combo them while swapping attunements

 

 

 

[Catalyst update for beta 4.]

13 hours ago, Kain Francois.4328 said:

Is Grand Finale cd shared between elements? If so, you can't just say each element has 2 finishers. It's a poorly judged technicality which downplays a major issue.

and what's the major issue? cooldown management? if you're used to elementalist, that's not a trouble at all, 15sec cooldown is not punishing when you still have access to another finisher in each attunement. You just need to be smart with your rotations

If you still thinks thats not enough, you can always run Arcane utilities, Conjured weapons or fire trait line to make sure you can upkeep the auras.

[Catalyst update for beta 4.]

10 minutes ago, Obtena.7952 said:

Listen, we are talking SPECIFICALLY about Catalyst here and anyone up on their knowledge of the spec knows finishing a field gives an aura due to that trait ... and water has a finisher with Grande Finale. I'm not arguing to argue.  The poster said it was 'annoying' to combo in water because it doesn't aura  in the context of the thread which is about Catalyst (and his post even REFERS to Jade Spheres) ... therefore, he's WRONG. 

 Hammer's Water Attunement actually has 3 finishers now 😄

Projectile, Leap and Whirl - #3, #4 and #5

Fire, Air and Earth now have 2 finishers each - #3 and #5, projectile and blast respectively.

With the changes to jade sphere, I agree that hammer got it's Aura Generation fixed , and it's now the first Ele's weapon to cover all types of finishers

[Catalyst update for beta 4.]

2 hours ago, Kain Francois.4328 said:

Mind if I ask how you sustain Auras on Hammer?

They added two new sources of Finishers, in Water #5 and Grand Finalle. Now that we can cast our jade Fields more reliably, we could possibly circle through attunements and combo to get the auras.

We'll see if that's enough, but we'll probably be running  Fire trait line too in that case, for the extra aurawhen attuning to fire, and Conjurer trait + Earth shield to get at least two additional auras in the rotation (four if you pick the weapon of the ground after Earth Shield #3 refreshes)

[Catalyst Feedback Thread]

5 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

I wouldn't say 'pushing' but more like 'testing' to fix it.  .... 

 

They didn't get the Elemental Empowerment buff's stacks during the stream. I wonder if they got rid of it

[Returning Elementalist]

I would also reccomend the Celestial Gear, it's a Jack of All trades kind of stat that can be used with almost any build. Just be mindful that might generation is very important for this kind of gear and that you'll ALWAYS do hybrid damage. You can focus on power or condi via traits, but overall those damage types complement each other on your final DPS output.

Celestial also allows you to build for support and still have relevant damage, you'll not heal as much as a dedicated healer, but you can provide a nice sustain and  defensive boons to your group when paired with Water and Arcane trait lines, respectively.

[Untamed Feedback Thread]

I love it overall!

I just think the name contradicts the concept in regards of how much you can command your pet, can we have the name changed? 

I'll try to keep short on the feedback :I think Untamed  tryes to fixes the Pet interactions to make them more reliable and have more damage, but it does nothing for it's defenses (and a dead pet still equals to no Pet at all).

To correct that, the Cantrips (and maybe some traits) could affect your pet as well: maybe the cleansing one could cleanse the pet too; and the healing one give it invulnerability, block stacks or barrier instead of choping it's health; The elite could share the damage reduction to your pet and so on.

I feel the Pet damage is still lacking in PvE, but I'm still getting pretty crazy numbers in PvP (8k Bird Swoop - 11k Drake Tail Swipe - 24k(!!) Jacaranda Call Lightning ), with sick'en alone lol 

So maybe, tune down a bit in PvP and buff it in PvE?

 

About the hammer: props to the Art and Animation team! It's beautiful! and it feels heavy and powerful. Other players already pointed out what it's missing in the game play, but I give my praises to the team for the visuals! GORG!  💙

[Catalyst Bug Thread]

The combo indicator icons are not appearing when you combo a field with Fire 5, Air 5 or  Water 4, the aura pops up but you don't get the indicator. Earth 5 works fine.

[Catalyst Bug Thread]

sometimes my circling spheres from hammer 3 keep up endlessly when I get downed with them active (new downed dps rotation?)

And air 4 just lauched me in Tarir and I got stuck INSIDE a pillar 🤣

[Catalyst Feedback Thread]

Here are my impressions so far:

 

HAMMER

Is a fun weapon, I'm enjoying using it, but I think it could use some fine tuning. First of all, it's missing a field on the weapon set. It has a lot of finishers, but we can only combo them with our sphere field, which isn't up most of the time. D/D, Staff, S/F and S/D feel better than hammer in that regard. A fire or ice field could do wonders for the weapon.

Second of all, Earth skill 2 needs to be a little bit faster so we can keep the momentum of our skill 3 stack. Right now it feels like a trap skill, which will lock you in teh animation for too long and it's not possible to cancel it by casting a new skill, so everytime I accidentaly use it in the rotation, I lose all my stacks of the skill 3 unless I dodge to cancel. It feels unrewarding and counter intuitive to use it, both water 2 and air 2 fits the time window to keep the momentum. I know earth is supposed to be slow casting, but this hurts a lot the flow of the wapon.

And the third and last thing is: Hammer have a hard time sticking to targets. It's by far our most kiteable weapon, it's even worse than sword in that aspect and we can't even use off hand dagger to make it better. If we could get another leap in fire or earth, it could make for great QoL.

 

SPHERE

I'm having a hard time with this mechanic, in PvE it works just fine, but in a PvP environment sometime it doest feel worthy to use it. The energy cost should be rethought, it's fun to juggle attunements to keep getting energy, but if you're not running the trait for it, it depletes too soon and it's the worst feeling trying to cast it just to have it insta cancelled because you don't have enough energy. It feels very celestial avatar in that regards, which all druid know it's not much reliable. 

It's also kinda clunky right now to cast it, it seems really easy to accidentaly interrupt (unlike Hammer Earth 2 lol), by either hitting it twice, casting another skill while the sphere isn't yet on the battlefied or swapping attunements in the middle of the cast. I also don't understand why does it have a 1sec cooldown to cast it after swapping attunements, it breaks the flow and it's hard to use it on a emergency.

Also, the UI for the sphere should be larger and the energy bar more evident (it's too small right now) and it would be a nice QoL to be able to move the sphere to a new location(maybe instead of cancelling it on double tap, make it consume some energy to move it to a new location?)

 

TRAITS

The middle Line and the Bottom line are great and fits the class mechanic very well, it's only Spectacular Sphere that feels a little undewhelming because you can't frequently activate your sphere. It would be much better if it pulsed boons instead.

 The upper trait line looks like it should belong to CORE. all of these 3 traits looks like something core ele should have base line, Hardened Auras and Staunch Auras would've made a lot more sense in the Earth Trait line. Auras ARE a Core mechanic afterall. In my opinion, this trait line is the reason why Catalys feels so Core 2.0. It doesn't add much to the class indentity mechanic and feels like a band-aid to core issues. These traits could be replaced with something that add to the Sphere or to the Elemental Empowerment mechanic, to make the class Indentity more clear. 

 

UTILITIES/AUGMENTS

I think these can be improved, the Augment combo with the Sphere sometimes feels like too much an effort to think about for not that good of reward, it could be better if we could combo the Augments with general combo fields instead of sphere-only. 

The healing skill is good overall, is just the cleansing that's not much reliable.

The Fire and the Water should have a shorter cast (close to instant, really) time to fit in burst windows.

The air one is okayish, the edurance regeneration feels really good in some situations and the Earth one is a nice block, but we already have Mist Form and Earth Shield so it feels a bit redundant, but it could be better if the barrier was more reliable. The sphere uptime is a issue with these

And the Elite one feels baaaad... it needs a close look, right now it feels liek an improvisation.

 

 

That's all for now, i'l update if its needed 😄

[Catalyst concerns]

10 minutes ago, Demented Yak.6105 said:

I'm very glad you wrote this. You wrapped up 90% of my problems.

I've been misunderstanding the trait or not reading it properly. I missed the "Once PER ATTUNEMENT per interval". I kept assuming you could only proc the trait every 10 seconds across all attunements.

But now I have a new question. Let's say you do use burning speed on dagger into your fire field and proc the trait at the same time. You get two fire auras? One is wasted? What happens?

So it seems I spent a good half hour today writing kitten. I will leave my post unedited as a testament to my stupidity.

Thanks.

if you're refering to using a Leap finisher on a Fire Field, in that case I think you'll get 2 auras, but one will overwrite the other  and you'll get 2 stacks of the new trait buff, but they probably won't stack duration (just like aura durations don't stack). 

EDIT: if you run the stability on aura trait, you'll get 2 stacks of stab

[Catalyst concerns]

I think you should probably wait until to play it on beta to point out your concerns, and preferably in the BETA Feedback thread, so they'll actually read.

Aura generation looks fine, you gotta remember Fire Traits that give you an aura on Fire Attunement and casting and picking up conjured weapons. Earth shield will be amazing with that build, it's 3  extra auras to pop and help you keep the momentum. There's also arcane wave to help with blast finishers.

About the survivability, it's not just the aura traits that reduce your received damage, the +%stats one also reduce damage and make you more bulky via toughness, vitality, healing power and concentration buffs. We got a new block utility and access to perma stability too.

[Does the Catalyst UI seem a bit lacklustre?]

They could've made our Sphere Energy bar more like Druids, my only concern is that is looks too small and we already have multiple things to visually track in our AI. But other than that, we don't need much more complexity anyway.

And as a side note, at least our new skill icons are GORGEOUS, I loved them all! thankfully they didn't get the Hargbinger's Elixirs treatment 🙏

[Credits where credits due: CATALYST IS AWESOME!]

Guy, this spec is everything I've wanted since I've returned to the game.

It rewards both D/D and Staff gameplay SO MUCH. Stability, Quickness, Fury, the +%stat on aura use, it's clear how they've built for Catalyst whith the last balance patches. Celestial is going to be beast and combo fields are extremely relevant to this gameplay. It brings me joy ❤️ Old D/D vibes all over it!

PLUS THE UNBLOCKABLE GUYS!!!

and the Water Augment that will make staff's AoE hard hitters again

The stab on auras could def be a pain to tempest role, but I think tempest will still be better at overall group sustain with all the burst healing and vigor output.

[New Elementalist Elite Spec: The Catalyst]

After some time to digest, I gotta say I'm hyped lol

The self quickness access by itself already makes staff more viable as a ranged option, because the cast times and projectile speed are the main problems with staff design. At least with this boon we can land our hits.

and if the wells have good defensive tools, such as projectile hate tools and stability/prot/healing sources, we'll have a lot of AoE control to go along with it, covering another of staff's weakeness which is how vulnerable we're while using it.

It's nothing as a NEW ranged weapon, but It's definetely something.

Really looking forward to the traits reveal.

 

EDIT:  I've just read the press release, Alac confirmed??

"Augments are the utility skill type of the catalyst. These augments empower the player for a duration oftime with a wide range of effects, including damage bonuses, defense, healing, and even cooldownreduction. Each augment is also associated with an element and can draw power from the Jade Sphere,gaining a bonus effect when used in the area of a matching-element sphere"

[New Elementalist Elite Spec: The Catalyst]

I love the wells!!! Really excited about them, they could be fun to use with staff and D/D as well

The animations look so good too! The cardinal theme is awesome.

Didn't want it to be fully melee, but the video only one ranged skill, which is probably the elite, so I don't know how to feel about that.

 

But dangg, Ele does look cool using hammer 🤩

[Hammer Ele confirmed]

For me, that silhoutte glipmses ranged attacks and I'm looking forward to find out what our new mechanic will be.

Also, hammer is a cool weapon, I'm glad it's getting some love in this expansion. 

 

[[Suggestions]QoL (Quality of Life) Ideas [Merged]]

Can we make it so our Lesser Elementals don't die when we mount?