Bambu.4270

The turtle is amazing and I really like the co-op possibility of it. My only concern is how it behaves underwater. The turtle just sinks very slowly and the movement is clunky. This just makes me want to dismount the moment I hit the water. I'm not expecting a skimmer speedy turtle but at least more user friendly turtle in the water.

Compared to previous beta, the Willbender felt more fluid to play with. Someone most likely tested this better with proper build, but the physical skills felt weak power damage wise. Currently, I do not see the point of using them to deal damage.

Specter got some weird targeting issues. I hope you check how it behaves on action camera because it is quite hard to play with that. Normal mode mouse clicking on targets and skills work just fine however not with keybinds.

I'll focus my feedback on user story because there are plenty of comments and suggestions on hammer, traits, utilities and F5. I am struggling to see what Catalyst is trying to accomplish in its current state. For background, I used berserker gear with traits air/arcane/catalyst (dps with attunement swapping) & also air/water/catalyst (quick access to air but to stay longer in other attunements). I went with hammer to roam to kill random monsters in pof maps. I encountered various mobs with the idea of stacking might on fire and then switching to air for stun and burst with F5. In a tough spot I would use earth (defense) and water (heal). What really happened was the following: I tried using some of the dps skills in some kind of rotation in mind (fire 5, 4, 2, 3, & air 3 2) but I always ended up in dodging stuff a lot and trying to toggle on earth's reflect aura and heal myself switching to water. So instead of using that precious time limited F5 field for killing mobs, I was wasting the F5 most of the time to keep myself alive in open-world content. I also tried staying in one element after getting some buffs (might, fury and quickness). After using all other skills than auto-attack, the fights became slow and I felt the spec was useless while auto-attacking. It also didn't help when F5 field was up. There I was forced to stay inside the F5 field while the mobs were outside of it. Most of the skills also felt slow to activate, leaving me vulnerable for too long period of time. Afterthoughts from posting this: I think what the spec really needs for hammer is more movement skills and a bit more of evading. Perhaps the underperforming utilities might help if they had evade and/or movement involved in them?

Virtuoso is clearly the winner of the 3 specs. Very fun to play and does damage as well. I tried both power and condi versions in PvE. For condi builds, the bloodsong stacks a blade every 5 bleeds applied. When running condi, you have always blades to use for bladesongs which makes Virtuoso fun. Condi is probably not that good in pve but with the condi output of torment and confusion through other core traits mixed with bladesongs, it will do well in pvp and wvw. I also find it nice that dagger works well both for power and condi builds. Power builds have less blade usage compared to condi but is still generally nice to play with. The skills also do damage well. Compared to willbender, I can't really say anything to improve the spec. It seems virtuoso got the most thought about it and is designed well. And the animations are amazing. Slightly sad incinerator legendary dagger ruins the dagger animations.

First impressions of the Willbender were excitement and flashy new skills with nice animations. However, in even basic PvE content, it is quite hard to get anything killed even if you are fully berserker geared. There are some extra mobility and shadowsteps to targets but it doesn't help when they just walk away slowly and you end up failing your own skills completely, leaving you standing there with skills on cooldown. Virtues Overall, I really do not like the current version of "activate a virtue and then hit 5 times" to gain something out of it. Especially in 1v1 combat this isn't rewarding enough because you can't hit so many times in limited time. Rushing Justice - Rushing to the target is nice but then there's this way too long animation to actually make the strike. If it fails, you end up with no Willbender flames. Flowing Resolve - Willbender flames placement seems a bit off for me. If you are reaching your target, the flames are behind you hitting nobody. If you are already at your target, you go through the target and there is no easy way to make the U-turn back to this target. This virtue isn't either made for running away since you need to hit targets to gain the health effect. In the end, I do not want to activate this virtue at all. Crashing Courage - AoE targeting on this skill makes it perfect and amazing to use. Perhaps making Justice and Resolve virtues similar with AoE circle targeting with shadowstep would make them better? Off-hand Sword Generally I would buff up the damage output on both skills, they feel weak compared to other weapon skills. Skill 4 - On functional level, this skill seems fine. At the moment, it just doesn't do great damage. Skill 5 - This is a good skill to reach your target but the 1s immobilize, at least for me, doesn't work enough. I would add either more immobilize duration or chill or cripple to this skill. Utilities Heal - This healing skill is underperforming a lot. In PvE setting, most of the time it even fails to block anything because enemies have such long attack pauses. This forces you to go in enemy AoEs in hopes of healing but then you just end up getting hit more than once and the healing is wasted. Flash Combo - This feels nice to use but the damage is lackluster. Whirling Light - This one I like the most. I think it's the best skill Willbender has. It also has nice animation. The damage is a bit low though. Roiling Light - This works quite well except the return skill Quick Retribution doesn't have enough range to go back to the target. There are several cases where you get knockbacked or feared. Jumping even further away and then pressing the skill to return just leaves you hanging. I would increase the range in the return skill. Heel Crack - I didn't play with this at all, so I can't really say much about it. I guess it's a nice CC skill. Elite - Seems okayish but I would improve it by giving it AoE targeting with shadowstep so it's similar to Warrior's Stomp skill. Traits Minor ones seems okay. I don't like any of the traits that reduce your stats. They aren't rewarding enough for the loss of stats. The Good traits are all in the middle column (Restorative virtues, Holy Reckoning, Vanguard Tactics) and Tyrant's Momentum. Phoenix Protocol - This first looked amazing but in reality it is quite weak. Perhaps it is because how it behaves with Virtue 2's hit 5 times to activate? Maybe the base alacrity needs longer duration. It is not shared with other players which leaves me ponder, why would I pick this option? Deathless Courage - Seems interesting but I can't think of a situation where you kill enemies constantly in such short time to keep it up. Extra edit: Can't use any utilities in underwater!