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Catalyst Feedback Thread


Fire Attunement.9835

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17 minutes ago, Rider.6024 said:

First of all I would like to apologize to all the people who worked on the new spec for all of the rude comments flooding this thread, everyone about to reply please remember this a beta, and don't get personal or emotional with your feedback.

Catalyst is incredibly fun and I personally think hammer is by far the most fun weapon for ele. I think the only suggestion I have for the hammer is to add some kind of attack chain to air #1.

The traits are pretty straight forward and seem to allow for build diversity, the only suggestion for the traits would be to swap the "2% of all stats" traits to instead be "3-4% of power, precision, condi dmge, ferocity" for pvp only as there is no access to celestial stats in pvp.

The utilities are again all straight forward and allow for great build diversity, my only suggestion would be to add reflect on top of the block from the earth option.

Thanks again and I am so excited for ele hammer time come EoD!

I actually think that an overwhelmingly high percentage of the feedback has been respectful and constructive. 

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I'm not an elementalist main and I'm a more casual player, but here are my impressions:

 

-Jade Sphere doesn't last long enough. The benefits it provides are neat, but not so overwhelming that it needs to disappear so fast. Energy takes a long time to charge up and then the well disappears in seconds. I hardly get a chance to really utilize it during hectic combat before it's gone. The spec would feel so much better if the Jade Sphere were a more permanent presence. Let us really bunker by setting up the well immediately and hanging out in it for the whole battle. We already get punished for being outside the well, so it seems really lame to also make the well hard to maintain. At this point the benefits are mild enough that it feels like you should just get rid of the energy buildup and make the Jade Sphere permanent once cast, and allow it to be moved on a cooldown. This would make the spec FEEL so much better and right now I don't even think it would be OP. It feels like you want us to anchor down and sacrifice mobility in exchange for power, so... just let us do that, I guess? I would love the dynamic of having to fleetingly leave the well with a leapback occasionally to avoid attacks, firing off a few projectiles into the well, then crashing back in with a leap/blast finisher.  Enemies should be AFRAID to step into your well, or even be close enough to catch your projectiles coming out of it. Diving in and out of the well to constantly combo and deny the well area to enemies *seems* like what you're going for, but the well is so hard to maintain that this playstyle just never emerges.

 

-It feels like we're supposed to take advantage of the jade sphere and pump out combo finishers, but the hammer surprisingly only has one blast skill per attunement on a long cooldown. Give us combos to use with our well! Hammer projectiles, hammer blasts, hammer leaps. If the entire spec is going to be oriented around a well, let us USE it!

 

These are the main things. A couple of little things:

 

-The hammer 3 skills don't last long enough to really set up more than one element during a battle, especially for us casual players that aren't blazing quick with rotations and are trying to use other skills in between to stay alive. Which feels disppointing, since it's just screaming for an Avatar-style combo.

-I think the utilities are okay, except that the well is never around enough to take advantage of them. Maybe a little boring, but not a huge problem if the well became more permanent.

Edited by Perihen the Thawk.9527
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I think they are doing a bit too much with the specialization.

They will never do this but I would...

Get rid of the Jade Sphere and Energy part altogether.

Make hammer 3 the attunement swap mechanic. F1-F4 creates an elemental orb that creates a combo field around you and damages enemies. F5 shoots the elemental orbs. Let the combo fields stack and let us combo off all of them at the same time. Make the spec about swapping attunements to maintain/manage the stack of orbs instead of building energy to drop a stationary well.

Change hammer 3 to something else... perhaps blast finishers that interact with the combo fields.

The utility skills are boring AF. Ditch them and maybe give wells that grant different combo fields than the ones given by the orb. They could use the Jade Sphere animations for the wells so the work that went into them doesn't go to waste. Basically turn the spec into a combo field monster.

Edited by Will.9785
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4 minutes ago, Will.9785 said:

I think they are doing a bit too much with the specialization.

They will never do this but I would...

Get rid of the Jade Sphere and Energy part altogether.

Make hammer 3 the attunement swap mechanic. Make F5 shoot the elemental orbs and have the orbs create a combo field around you. Let the combo fields stack and let us combo off all of them at the same time. Make the spec about swapping attunements to maintain/manage the stack of orbs instead of building energy to drop a stationary well.

The utility skills are boring AF. Ditch them and maybe give wells that grant different combo fields than the ones given by the orb. Basically turn the spec into a combo field monster.

i dont quite get ur idea about the orbs and F5. If F5 shoot the orbs, then how about the other weapons?

Anyway, utility could grant some fields and/or finishers, since the spec is all about it (i dont know how they didnt think of it honestly). 

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3 minutes ago, dtox.8397 said:

i dont quite get ur idea about the orbs and F5. If F5 shoot the orbs, then how about the other weapons?

Anyway, utility could grant some fields and/or finishers, since the spec is all about it (i dont know how they didnt think of it honestly). 

 

F1-F4 would generate the orbs - not hammer.  All weapons would have access to orbs.  Hammer 3 would change to something else.

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After roaming and dueling in my celestial gear dmg feels so underwhelming. Cele weaver have better sustain and burst than this. Hammer skills feel so slow and do no dmg except air 2. 

 

Earth 2 should do more dmg being so slow.

Water 2 should have some evade.

Air 5 need to be at least faster or increase its radius.

All #3 skills should have 10 sec duration.

F5 need to be instant, no draining outside of combat and better charging energy.

 

Tried marauder gear and dmg is even worse.

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27 minutes ago, Dragon Dude.7832 said:

Once again, you've got Elementalist trying to do WAY too many things and from experience, we all know this ends badly, whether it be broken op, or broken crap, weak. 

as far as i can tell its Susposed to be a Brawler with Some Utility... what other roles do we think this is susposed to be?

28 minutes ago, Dragon Dude.7832 said:

My personal take is that Catalyst shouldn't try to be Celestial, Zerker, Auramancy, and a Steady Presence as well.

except it doesnt.

I think u've mixed perception up with reality,. Celestial. sure, but Zerker? Not rly. Its defintly not filling a zerker role.. Core and weaver are FAR more zerker then it will ever be.. it just functionally doesnt work in that fashion

37 minutes ago, sos.6510 said:

All other spec lose something to gain access to their new mechanic, you even updated HoT ones for this reason. Yet Catalyst lose nothing, thus provide a very mediocre mechanic. 

the issue is.. Core ele has nothing currently.. which can be taken away for Speccs as of right now effectively.. however for example.. to think catalyst doesnt trade anything off for not being weaver is insane realistically.

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2 minutes ago, Will.9785 said:

I think they are doing a bit too much with the specialization.

They will never do this but I would...

Get rid of the Jade Sphere and Energy part altogether.

Make hammer 3 the attunement swap mechanic. Make F5 shoot the elemental orbs and have the orbs create a combo field around you. Let the combo fields stack and let us combo off all of them at the same time. Make the spec about swapping attunements to maintain/manage the stack of orbs instead of building energy to drop a stationary well.

The utility skills are boring AF. Ditch them and maybe give wells that grant different combo fields than the ones given by the orb. Basically turn the spec into a combo field monster.

This is actually a cool idea. They could re-use the F5 animations for wells as utilities, they would just need to add 2 more and, since they are based on celestials, they could make an ice combo field with a tiger that pulses resolution (and let the water kirin become the healing skill and pulse some heals and regen instead of damage), and for the elite skill they could maybe summon some light/ethereal circle of the 12 zodiac ones pulsing alacrity or something ¿?

 

I personally LOVE the animations of these celestial creatures pulsing boons, but sadly at this moment, they're so difficult to maintain it's not worth it...

6 minutes ago, dtox.8397 said:

i dont quite get ur idea about the orbs and F5. If F5 shoot the orbs, then how about the other weapons?

Anyway, utility could grant some fields and/or finishers, since the spec is all about it (i dont know how they didnt think of it honestly). 

I think he is suggesting to move every third skill from hammer to the F5, while replacing those skills in hammer with other things (ideally, some combo fields to blast and leap into). So your F5 in fire attunement would become Flame Wheel, and after casting it it would become Grand Finale, but if you attune to water, it becomes Icy Coil, and if you cast Icy Coil and then Grand Finale, it shoots both the fire and water orb at the enemy, etc.

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As it pertains to the sphere/sphere-related traits specifically, I have some suggestions for how to improve them:

 

Jade Sphere

  • Eliminate sphere cooldown
  • Reduce energy drain to 1 per sec
  • Casting the sphere flips the skill over to Recall Jade Sphere

 

Recall Jade Sphere

Recall the Jade Sphere to the caster's current location. 600 (900?) range

10 sec cooldown

Energy cost: 10

 

Traits

  • Spectacular sphere: This trait additionally increases the radius of the sphere by 25%
  • Sphere Specialist: This trait additionally grants an attunement-based effect that triggers once the sphere expires.

 

This would allow the sphere to become a more present part of the Catalyst's gameplay while giving the ability to strategically reposition it at a significant energy cost. The new additions to the traits would help smooth out and enhance gameplay interactions for all builds looking to maximize the sphere's potential.

 

Bonus: All augments should become blast finishers for added synergy with the mechanic/traits.

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After playing around with it a little bit, I don't mind the spec in general. It's nice to have a slower paced weapon while maintaining the complexity of elementalist mechanics. That being said, there are a couple of things I noticed that i'm sure many others have said above:

 

- the projectile '3' skill doesn't fit anywhere due to its duration, there was no rotation I used that made it feel worthwhile, unless i cycled through immediately, which just felt wrong

- jade sphere doesn't bother me as much, although with it changing attunement with PC, it defeats object of casting on self for utility benefits in ranged vs. melee attunements. I suppose casting the sphere on self/mob will be situational. Having the sphere follow the player like many have said may be a big improvement

- Fire skill 5 seems a bit odd, considering it's a mid-range skillset with a close range slam; suppose it acts as bridge to switching to a melee attunement, but regardless, feels a bit off

- Utilities didn't have any noticeable animations or effects which is very disappointing; having the double strikes water utility having watery images of the PC performing the extra strikes would be cool as an example. Otherwise they don't feel good to use

 

I'm still unsure what I think on a whole; it's very different and will take some getting used to. Admittedly, at the minute the hammer or utilities don't feel good to use (numbers aside). But perhaps this is because of the comparison between this and the fast paced / fluid nature of weaver and tempest, and will just take some getting used to. I can see this spec being challengingly enjoyable once I get to grips with it (all from PvE perspective).

Edited by Milumeo Rinku.7583
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1)  The Hammer damage sucks.  Pretty much a given for Hammer skills on every class, but usually that's because they bring really good CC and they can't also do high damage without being OP.  Elementalist has 20 hammer skills and somehow manages to only have 1 stun, 1 knockdown, and 1 immobilize while simultaneously dealing awful damage.

2) Extremely dull and uninspired utilities and elite.  A staple of Elemental elite specs but still worth pointing out.  Even if these skills were OP (they're anything but) I still wouldn't actually want to use them because of how boring they are.

3) The #3 skill is one of the more interesting things about the Catalyst but the duration is so low you can't really play with it the way you'd want to.  I wish you'd drastically increase how long the elements orbit.  

4) The Jade Sphere take forever to charge up and punishes you for ending it early.  It also needs significant UI improvements because it's way too small right now to be able to easily see the bar.

5) The traits are really boring.   There's nothing in there that jumps out at me and makes me want to craft a build around it.  You made a trait revolving around auras and combo fields but only gave 4 combo finishers across 20 skills.  At the very least shouldn't Hammer's Air 2 and Earth 2 be whirl finishers at your location? 

6) Tempest supports its allies with boons and auras.  Weaver can be a tanky hybrid bruiser.  Why is Catalyst trying (and failing) to do both of these things instead of establishing its own niche? 

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HAMMER :

Too slow, too long cast, too long after-cast, it feels were playing with a marshmallow Hammer.  The skill earth #2 is the perfect example of what you should not do : slow animation + poor effect, this is really depressing to watch. It's just not fun at all.

Why is there no more combo finishers ?  Projectil on fire #2, air #1, whirl on earth and air #2, water #5 ?

Some weird set-up between differents skills with different ranges. Amation not coresponding with range.

It lacks mobility. Some dash skills in fire, superspeed or swiftness on Air skills would really be appreciated. May be some immob/cripple at range too (Make Earth AA a chain, with range, with cripple).

 

The orbs don't stay enough time. I don't really feel rewarded by switching rapidly to all attunements and trying to fill with other weapon skills, while I could do stronger rotation or just spam AA. Plus, orbs don't touch the target if it comes to melee ?? There is an issue of range and hitbox.

 

JADE SPHERE :

Too slow to build energy with hammer. Unless you go air and spam #2. We can't even keep energy out of combat. 

But anyway with so few finishers, or with so long CD, what the point to maintain field ??

 

There is better mechanic to install.

For example why not use the energy mechanic from revenant ? You have 50% energy, you earn  (1/s)energy in fight, you lose (2/s) when the field is active, and you can refill to 50% or +25% energy when you swap attunement !

Or why not add an effect when the field expires ? Like AURA-TRANSMUTATION

 

AUGMENTS :

No stability ?

No group support option ?

Too restrictive. I get the point to reward player if he uses it with the field; but already it's too hard to maintain the field and the secondary effect isn't worth to stay in field + swap attunement anyway.

 

I think you should only keep one or two : keep the first effect, but add differents effects depending on the field, like you do with the elite skill. For example the block : after the block, if you're on the fire field you gain a fire aura; if you're on the air field, gain superspeed; on earth, a barrier etc.

 

TRAITS

No group support option ?

Traits on aura : why not but ... why can't we share them ?  Please Anet. Quickness we can't even maintain will never be enough to be a viable option in Pve. We need to share uniques BUFFS, and this is it, you have them right there.

Elemental Empowerment : Unless we play Arcane Surge + earth + arcane powers + alacrity, I'm pretty sure we can't maintain the 10 stacks. Not with hammer. Plus a full line only to help pile them up ? This is sad.

Spectacular Sphere : Alacrity rather than fury please !!

 

In summary,
Hammer too weak, too slow, spec with no sustain, no group support, clunky mechanics with sphere and augments. I see no reason, no situation, to play catalyst rather than tempest or  weaver. Even with core elem, at least I'm not stuck with traitlane only good to pile up random selfish buffs.
This is really bad actually.

Edited by Zhaid Zhem.6508
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I played it for 20 minutes and was like why would I play this over the other elites and logged back to my tempest lol...even compared to core?? The utility is very boring...the f5 skill is soo???? Unforgiving, demanding and restricting for what exactly looks fancy thats sbout it?? Hammer is...like.......I wouldve prefered an off hand with the orbs/whatever is cool in hammer being more of a mechanic then hammer overall...I dunno has such a weird ranges and no rhyme or reason. The talents? this whole you get more damage/defense/stats is extremley boring I like talents that changes how you play with your skills. Overall boring not exciting.

 

I duno I dont't get the flow of this spec like..?? What is the theme exactly, what like I am sitting on a node in pvp itll be good or?.  It's called a catalyst because??...just a cool name what is the fantasy?? Just slapping some skills around ow they have auras ow ok??

Edited by aetemes.2603
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Catalyst is an awesome spec, I've been hyped for it since I heard they were getting hammer. It has great potential and, to me, it feels unique. However, it falls short of what it could be and doesn't deliver.

 

Here's some ideas of what could be done with catalyst:


1 - Reverse the Energy thing. Rather than losing energy when the sphere is active they build it up. Maybe getting stronger somehow as Energy increases. This is also nice since deactivating just expends all energy anyways, as well as going down. You can reasonably increase the cool down with this change.


2 - Move the Hammer 3 skills and buffs and add them onto the the F5 skill. This let's us use more weapons with it and provides more payoff in general. So long as the jade sphere is active, the user keeps the buffs and the rotating orbs.


3 - Recasting or reaching max Energy uses the second part of the Hammer skills where you shoot the orbs, the higher the Energy the more damage they do. The buffs stay active on the player until 5 seconds after the jade sphere is expended.


4 - Make the jade sphere follow the user like on scrapper. Honestly it should already. The way it works right now is just too awkward to dynamically fight and try and use combos in the fields. You have to fight for a good 10 seconds before even getting the sphere and it can only be used in one spot. Places like WvW it's just completely useless unless fighting a lord.  Then deactivating it just expends all your energy for some reason so you can't just reposition.

 

5 - The above change would already make augments better, however there should be an effect depending on which type of well you're in, like the elite skill augment. Maybe rework the elite skill a bit to be a little more elite.

 

6 - As other people have mentioned, a lot of these weapon abilities have too long of cast times, especially when trying to keep up Hammer 3 orbs and buffs. 

 

7 - Water 5 and Earth 2 should be Whirl combos.  Fire 4 should be a fire field. Air 2 should either be a Whirl combo around the user or an electric field in the tornado, or both which would be awesome, but you can't have everything. 

 

8 - As far as traits go, I think most of them are great. The biggest downside is that there's a lack of fields to combo auras with to really stack elemental power. I get that the jade sphere is supposed to provide these fields but it's too finicky in its current state. The above changes could fix that.

 

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Some preliminary thoughts.

Things that I very much like:
- I can move while using pretty much all of my abilities.
- The block utility skill is actually very useful.
- It's nice to have quickness, might generation and it makes some of the animations funny.

- Hammer is just fun, I can just go wheeeeee! And spin around the battlefield.

What I don't like.
- Might generation without a fire spec is bad and seem to disappear really quick so you kind of want to always go from any other element to fire element to refresh your stacks that you lose REALLY fast.
- F5 the jade sphere is punishing if you screw up even a little. You CANNOT reposition it so if the enemy moves your well is useless unless you're just gonna sit in it and get your might stacks and then move on.
- I can't see it under all the color vomit. So I don't at times know where to bloody stand if I want to use the fun movement stuff on the hammer.
- A couple of moves hurl you out of the way so you can pretty easily lose sight of your circle.
- I need to dodge roll to get out of most hammer 2 abilities. I'd like to cancel all of them with something. Some actually might benefit from cancelling as well like Air Hammer 2.
- When you switch from one buff to another you can't keep the other up, like I'd love to be able to have quickness up while I use fire skills to generate more might, but I guess I can't have everything.
- I can't use any of the 3 skills for hammer when I'm stuck in a long animation. It'd be great if these abilities were insta cast at any time.
- I can't utility block and rez at the same time. This would be a perfect niche for it.
- Hammer 2, is so slooooooooow. So slow in fact I don't think I can keep up might stacks for it with just full berserkers. 

I feel like the animations need some speed or fluidity where you can flow from one ability to the next and can use the hammer 3 skill at any time like Air Scepter 2 and 3. I also think that Earth needs more impact and speed, especially the hammer 2 skill.  Earth hammer 4 is interesting but getting any other buff other than earth is clunky as you need to quickly press 4 change attunement and hopefully get hit during the duration.

It's generally very unforgiving as a spec and someone will eventually optimize the ability rotation because it feels like it needs a specific rotation to function properly.

Also Air Hammer 4 keeps getting me stuck in walls.

Edited by Ziegrif.5964
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Sorry guys but overall it's bad, really bad.  Slow, clunky and short range on a low HP/armour class was a mistake but there are some other glaring problems. 

* the F5 is really bad. it's just a combo field! other weapons sets have numerous combo fields but hammer has only 1, yet have 1/3rd of its traits based around combo fields. 
* i hate how slow and lumbering hammer feels.
* mixed range is fine but i really hate the inconsistency of melee range only for earth and water. i REALLY wish there was at least 1 900+ range skill per element.  
* the #3 spinning skills are cool but the duration is really short, feels not worth the opportunity cost of casting & switching attunements to use. I don't even use these skills except to precast before an encounter. The range on the finisher is too short.
* I dislike that all of the #2s don't require targeting but air does.
* the aura traits are good but as before there's only 1 combo field in the entire kit!!!!


Really disappointing sorry. IF i could change just 1 thing it would be to make all the 600 range skills 900 range, and 300 as the min range for all skills except the #5s. The next thing would be remove/replace the F5.

 

Edited by scerevisiae.1972
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The elite is par for the course for elementalist elites. Long cooldown, does little to nothing, cannot be reduced with traits.

Spinny hammer 3 things reactivation is too kitten long for what it does.

Spinny hammer 3 does way too little for how much it requires you to put at least 1 more attunement on cooldown.

Lots of hammer abilities have long cooldowns with pathetic damage. Like look at hammer rev. Long windup timers but can nuke for 8k damage or higher if you get hit. On a good day, air 2, earth 5, fire 5 will do 5k damage.

Augments should be instant to activate. The fact they have a 0.75 cast time is puzzling.

THREE aura oriented traits with minimal rewards when the Hammer can only use 1 from weapon skills and situationally.

Same goes to the "elemental empowerment" traits. They seem boring and unimpactful.

The Jade Sphere should be an instant cast and have a bigger AoE depending on energy levels.

Overall the hammer abilities look fine visually, and the jade sphere abilities are incredibly lacking for a profession oriented mechanic. They do no damage and provide minuscule buffs in a tiny aoe.

Edited by Razor.6392
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overall it has lower damage, lower survivability, lower mobility than weaver.


the F5 is useless. a simple boon AOE that stay in place and change element with the caster.. good luck maintaining one specific buff when you have to switch elements often.

 

trait line is just some stats buff, damage redution or few boons. nothing original enough that would push players using the new specialisatio if not playing with hammer.

 

hammer 3 is difficult to set up with all elements since alot of hammer skills are slow.

too many slow hammer skills. if only it could deal more damage..

 

bad synergy between hammer skills. you have a cool cc on air element you cannot properly use to combo with the tornado because of the range. and when you do, you are stuck in its animation when your opponent just walked away from the tiny aoe.

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First of all the animations look pretty cool. Sadly thats the only thing that really impressed me. I tried to make hammer work in PVP but it has alot of issues.

These suggestions are based on PVP 

Hammer

 

Fire

Skill1: bump up the damage.

Skill 2: also needs bump in damage and maybe add an effect when under an aura or in jade sphere like double the burning or something

Skill 3: the skill 3 of all the elements are fine just the duration needs to significantly increased and it might be me but sometimes the effects disappear. make each individual sphere circle for 10 sec at minimum. Grandfnale interacts weird it misses sometimes for no reason and is totally not worth the effort damage wise.

Skill 4: just make it a fire field already

Skill 5: for how slow it is it surely doesnt hit for much..

Water

Skill 1: I would go for consistency and make every attunement have same range. Eles already have to jump through many hoops to get stuff done.

Skill 2: Increase damage and make it a ranged skill.

Skill 4: I actually like this skill it just misses evasion frames and make the heal for 1 target struck baseline and keep the increases healing per targets struck. 

Skill 5: Sems bit bland, add a pushback and whirl finisher on it. Some regeneration on this skill or any other water skill would be nice

Air

Skill 1: bump up damage

Skill 2: add whirl finisher or maybe make it center it on your target and make it follow the target altho slowly so that it still can be avoided but gets some hits in

Skill 4: looks fine to me, maybe add swiftness

Skill  5: looks fine to me

Earth

Skill 1: make ranged maybe like using the hammer to shoot rocks forward shotgun style

Skill 2: could make it a ring of rocks cascading outwards that block projectiles, current version is quite bland and slow

Skill 4: add small barrier when block fails, big barrier when it succeeds

Skill 5: bump up damage

 

Traits

Hardened auras and empowered auras could be merged to make 1 trait. might have to move it to GM tier.

Vicious empowerment: Add chill and cripple, give 1 stack of empowerment instead of 2

Energized element: increase energy gain or remove energy system completely and add more than just fury on swap maybe 2-3 sec self alacrity?

Elemental empowerment: Increase stat gain to 2% per stack, give 2 stacks when in combat, alternatively just give us 150 or 200 vit and remove all the stacks coz i might be wrong but most ele players would like to have a more flexible health pool than stacks that are more micromanaging.

Evasive empowerment: Add a special effect when jade sphere is up

Spectacular sphere: uts current version is bad, if uptime and ease of summoning the sphere is improved it could work altho it pulsing those additional boons would be more impactful

Elemental Epitome: looks fine

Staunch Auras: move this to a core ele line and maybe make this a trait that gives auras on attunementswap and auras transmute on expire.

Empowered empowerment: remove and replace with hardened aura+viscious aura merge

Sphere specialist: add that the sphere actually does respectable damage

 

Now there are 2 new slots for traits open and these could be used to make the traitline more unique.

These are just suggestions for traits but most of them seem bland and dont do enough for a class that needs heavy stat investment to be functional

 

Utilities

Tbh id scrap the utilities and make something that synergises well. In pvp cantrips are used alots either offer offensive utilities that makes it worth dropping those or offer something that can compete with them in defensive capabilities. Augments give bonusses when used in jade spheres so perhaps make 2 utilities that have an offensive properties and 2 with defensive properties and when used in water/earth reduces effectiveness of the offensive property but adds a defensive ones and for the defensive ones reduces defensive property but adds an offensive one in fire/air. Its just an idea. 

 

Edited by Ptolomy.6984
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12 minutes ago, Kidel.2057 said:

It seems Cata and BS are mostly decent with minor things to tweak. Vindicator is a total mess with clunky movement, 2/3 useless dodges and a total crap F2/Legend. 

its mechanic is Non-existant lol how can we say cata will be decent with minor things to tweak?.. vindicator if anything has been said to be a heap stronger effectively then both of these speccs ur comparing them to.

Litterally in a PvP Situation theres no point to actually play Cata above any of the others because it plays identically to Core Ele, Weaver plays both a Ranged and Melee role just better then it. Why wuldnt u run freshair Weaver instead of Freshair Cata, because of cata mechanically. the hammer has to be extremely good to even make the specc worthwhile using.. and its just fundamentally not.

6 minutes ago, Razor.6392 said:

The elite is par for the course for elementalist elites. Long cooldown, does little to nothing, cannot be reduced with traits.

not even remotely close, weave self and Fiery greatsword are both fundamentally better

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Jade sphere

-Needs to follow caster

-Eliminate energy requirement

-Make it impactful. If not using hammer you're basically playing core ele with a f5 as combo field.

-Make player choose to flip element of the sphere by "double attuning" if in water attunement and uses water attunement again flips field to water ect.

-Some have suggested to make it possible to keep the sphere up as long as possible by attacking and building energy, if so eliminate the cooldown and make energy easier to build or reduce decay speed

-Needs moer interaction with weapon skills and utilities overall, there are many utilities that are elemental themed make it interact with those so that you dont miss out if you dont use augments

-1 boonpulse + field sounds bland for a class mechanic, looking at all other classes they get way more out of theirs. Make it that players actually want to use it because its beneficial

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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 😄

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1 minute ago, Daddy.8125 said:

its mechanic is Non-existant lol how can we say cata will be decent with minor things to tweak?.. vindicator if anything has been said to be a heap stronger effectively then both of these speccs ur comparing them to.

Litterally in a PvP Situation theres no point to actually play Cata above any of the others because it plays identically to Core Ele, Weaver plays both a Ranged and Melee role just better then it. Why wuldnt u run freshair Weaver instead of Freshair Cata, because of cata mechanically. the hammer has to be extremely good to even make the specc worthwhile using.. and its just fundamentally not.

not even remotely close, weave self and Fiery greatsword are both fundamentally better

Then we have rebound lol.

The main point is that it's impossible to reduce their cd and it's far too long. Shouts, conjures, stances and now augments.

Fgs could see a 150s reduc, weave self 80s for the nature of its duration and this new one needs to be scrapped entirely or get rid of the "1 second" interval.

I tried to aoe golems with meteor shower hoping I'd get at least 2 meteor showers off in quick succession but no, interval lmao. It's an ELITE SKILL for crying out loud, it gives you a pitiful boon and 8 seconds cd reduction. That won't be enough to refresh any ability from the 3-5 slots lol.

Anyway sorry for the rant XD

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Well, I've tried out the Catalyst for a few hours and although I really like it, there are several opportunities for improvements.

 

1.  The jade sphere mechanic takes way too long to charge and doesn't stay long enough in battle to reap any lasting benefit.  

     Improvement:  Reduce the amount needed for the sphere to charge.  And once charged, the skill is available whenever the player wants to use it.  Remove the mechanic where the charge decrements over time.

2.  The augments are interesting but need to be more synergized with the sphere more.  I found myself not using the augments as much as I expected.

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