delriaan.7854

Short-bow skills 1,2, and 4 are also good at adding pressure to enemy groups: Trick Shot can damage unseen enemies (e.g., to the side of an open gate) Cluster Bomb has decent damage when bursting close to an area Choking Gas is great for reducing passive healing and interrupting the flow of combat/movement I think a worthwhile consideration regarding group play with Thief is to take an "attack of opportunity" mindset and find ways to leverage stealth and mobility to benefit the group. Death by a thousand papercuts still equals dead. At least, that's the way I play the profession.

Hmmm, PvP: I hadn't considered that. I haven't done any PvP, but I'd imagine that competitive mode does reduce a lot of the combat variables that can diffuse the effectiveness of skills and timing.

Yup: after about 10 minutes of testing Catalyst out in The Silverwastes, I switched back to Tempest to compare the experiences. Under the former, I barely held on during camp raids, whereas with the latter, I had no real issues handling multiple wave with little to no assistance. The combat was just far too quick and volatile for the Catalyst to keep up.

In a nutshell, I did not enjoy the Catalyst ... at all. The gameplay just wasn't there: the flow was off ... awkward, even. The current iteration feels lost, in a way, almost like the elements are sidekicks to a melee class.

Wholeheartedly agree. I'd much prefer to see some exploration with a mechanic similar to the Necro's "life force" that opens up tiered skills by element or perhaps a different mechanic that allows for using fields that can be transmuted for secondary effect (e.g., water field to heal allies -> ice field to slow enemies; static field -> collapse to lightning strike).

My two cents on what the Elementalist needs: In-combat weapon swap. From the wiki: "Elementalists can adapt to any situation by attuning to one of the four elements ... depending on the elementalist's equipped weapon set, and essentially gives the elementalist more skills to use than any other profession." Here's the big issue I have with the claim: "...depending on the elementalist's equipped weapon set ..." Not having in-combat weapon swap makes "having more skills ... than any other profession." a moot, though technically accurate, point. In-combat weapon swap would be a step in the right direction to balance some of the nerfdom that has plagued the profession. Elemental rotation across weapon sets would also allow for responding to situational combat in a more natural way as well as make it easier to skill-combo in meaningful ways (as opposed to accidentally or only with pre-combat prep). And for the "but that would make the class unbalanced" crowd, there would be inherent balance when you consider the inertia introduced due to activation time + recharge + attunement recharge + swap recharge. The high-damage nature of the class (esp. PBAoE) isn't a factor right now. Going into combat hoping I picked the right weapon set is like the old D&D spellcaster worrying if the right spells were prepared at the beginning of the day =/

Weaponless, in the traditional sense. IMHO, traditional weapons for one that manipulates the elements seems limiting from a role-playing perspective, though I readily acknowledge it fits the specifics of the overall game mechanics. Anyway, building on the Tempest and Weaver: 1 True elemental synergy across skill slots 1-5, in the spirit of dual-attack for Tempest2 Use the ammo system to charge certain skills to enhance or alter. For example, expanding radius at the cost of recharge time, or morphing a PBAoE into a directional when combined with another element while charging3 Cross-element skill chaining while switching to different elements at the cost of charge and cool-down penalty for each point in the chain (self-terminating chain based on chain progression timeout vs. coolzdown/charge cost)Cheers!