Catalyst and Dagger/Staff?

[fuzzyp.6295]

Hi friendly eles. I've seen alot of feed back for Hammer and the Jade Sphere. Unfortunately I wont be able to play this beta test my laptop has gone to the mists. I'm curious how Catalyst feels with other weapons, particularly dagger since it offers a lot of fields.. seems most players are critiquing hammer so I'm wondering if anyone has tried other weapons.

 

...Yes I could look through the feedback thread but I'm lazy.🤭

Edited September 22, 2021 by fuzzyp.6295

[Ptolomy.6984]

Good news: d/d catalyst seems to hardly have any problems on cata. It preformed well for me in pvp

Bad news: its basically core ele with an f5

[fuzzyp.6295]

14 minutes ago, Ptolomy.6984 said:

Good news: d/d catalyst seems to hardly have any problems on cata. It preformed well for me in pvp

Bad news: its basically core ele with an f5

Sounds about what I expected. I'm wondering if itll feel a bit better in WvW with the more flexible stat spreads to capitalize on those increases stats. I wish I could give it a spin.

 

Thank you

Edited September 22, 2021 by fuzzyp.6295

[scerevisiae.1972]

23 minutes ago, Ptolomy.6984 said:

Good news: d/d catalyst seems to hardly have any problems on cata. It preformed well for me in pvp

Bad news: its basically core ele with an f5

^ this. Catalyst is clearly better with D/D but even then it's only on par with core ele.

[lLobo.7960]

Seems that staff is the best weapon to get energy for your sphere.

You gain energy per hit, and with staff having multiple AoE and lasting fields, the energy gain is quite high.
You can probably keep the sphere up through the whole fight using staff and fresh air...

[fuzzyp.6295]

24 minutes ago, lLobo.7960 said:

Seems that staff is the best weapon to get energy for your sphere.

You gain energy per hit, and with staff having multiple AoE and lasting fields, the energy gain is quite high.
You can probably keep the sphere up through the whole fight using staff and fresh air...

Interesting, seems like this spec might be the one to breathe new life into Staff after all. Exciting.

[moony.5780]

I think scepter focus is the best combo. Especially with freshair (without shampoo)

Edited September 22, 2021 by moony.5780

[Sunshine.5014]

DDCat is just core Ele with an F5. Instead of running Fire/Water/Arcane. Now you swap Arcane or Water for Catalyst. It's a bit more squishy, but the combo and everything is the same.

It's viable, but 100% no where near any meta. It can't hold side nodes against any class. It dies kinda fast in team fight. It does OK when +1, but it doesn't have the mobility of Thief or Willbender.

Basically, better than Hammer but still junk grade in PvP.

Staff in PvP? Only when you want to make win-trading less obvious. "I'm not win-trading! I try as hard as I could!" 

[dtox.8397]

Ive only tested Cata with staff. I have to say that quickness+meteor shower is pretty huge. The meteors drop very quickly. The glyph of the torm (lightning) is very good to get energy aswell, since its like 36 hits in a few seconds. I thought the water augment would be kinda of OP, but it lasts for so little, the dmg is not high and it doesnt proc multiple times at the same time (ICD), so u gotta manage to do many consecutive hits. Works kinda well with lighting storm glyph, but thats 2 utility slots that u use tgt just for a meh result.

With the extra fields and finishers (you can use earth 1 as finisher aswell!) you can get many auras however its not enough to get max stacks consistently. They last for a few seconds only, forcing you to focus specifically in granting auras, making u put ur "job" in second place.

 

In conclusion id say when/if they buff/tweak the catalyst is going to be a 'good' (not terrible) spot for a offensive staff build. On top of that i also expect some Staff buffs/tweaks aswell, altho i guess its only happening after EoD release.

Edited September 22, 2021 by dtox.8397

[BlackBeard.2873]

I have tried playing catalyst with aura-spam as a means to survive, and I think it can actually work decently. The best combination I have found is fire/arcana/catalyst with D/D and S/D as a side-noder.

Fire traitline (1/2/1) gives you: an aura on-swap, every aura cleanses, fire fields last longer (really important for comboing), and shorter CD on your fire field. (In fact, not having access to the lower-CD and longer-duration fire field felt bad on every other weapon-set I tried.)

Arcana (2,2,1) gives you: protection, blast on earth-dodge (for comboing and getting an aura), and the normal goodies.

Catalyst gives you: aura on combo-ing, 20% stats by taking the whole middle-line OR stab on aura.

(Note: don't take the first 2 traits in the top line of catalyst, as they give shorter duration 10% damage reduction and increase, when you can get 20% ALL STATS on the middle line and they last longer than 6s to refresh all your aura stacks. You never want the aura buffs if you have more room for additional stacks of empowerment, because they are both just +stats so one line is always better no matter how they balance it)

Taking sage amulet and dolyak runes you can keep yourself rolling at 1600 toughness and 600 healing power and feel a bit like glory-days d/d ele (with the 20% stat increase, which only works on amulet/weapon stats, not inherent stats like your baseline 1000 toughness)

It is relatively easy to keep an aura-train going without using F5, and with time F5 can serve 2 purposes: a secondary field if your fire field gets interrupted, a source of quickness for quick bursts after burning your enemy's CD's a bit. Both S/D and D/D have plenty of finishers to make sure one procs in air almost every rotation, and I had been taking arcane blast (the projectile finisher) for good measure to fill in any gaps in water/air attunements.

Edited September 22, 2021 by BlackBeard.2873

[ClickToKill.8473]

I was running around with d/d, but I was core ele with the Elemental Empowerment trait line.  It worked like it should. 

[Liewec.2896]

ele is just sorely lacking the combo finishers to actually use catalyst.

staff for example i tried to play fire catalyst but fire has no combo finishers.

[BlackBeard.2873]

4 hours ago, Liewec.2896 said:

ele is just sorely lacking the combo finishers to actually use catalyst.

staff for example i tried to play fire catalyst but fire has no combo finishers.

If you want to sit in fire on staff, take Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave. However, staff is one of the few weapons with no death of finishers, they just aren't in fire. You have Water 2, Earth 1, Earth 2, Earth 3 (detonate), Earth 5.

[Zunki.3916]

On 9/23/2021 at 6:34 PM, BlackBeard.2873 said:

If you want to sit in fire on staff, take Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave. However, staff is one of the few weapons with no death of finishers, they just aren't in fire. You have Water 2, Earth 1, Earth 2, Earth 3 (detonate), Earth 5.

Imho they should make fire staff 1 a projectile finisher to fit catalyst a bit more. Would it become op or worse feeling to play it? no. So just do it.

[nucklepuckk.1805]

On 9/1/2022 at 9:01 AM, Zunki.3916 said:

Imho they should make fire staff 1 a projectile finisher to fit catalyst a bit more. Would it become op or worse feeling to play it? no. So just do it.

Holy necro batman. This thread was one year old before you replied lol.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

Well the big problem is that without hammer, Catalyst is far inferior to Tempest. They just get so much of their buffs from the orbs, and you can literally feel them missing on staff. If the orb mechanic had been an automatic proc from attuning on Catalyst, it'd be a completely different story.

 

Its only boon is the ability to still bring Quickness, right? Except remember how the staff has the absolute worst skills in air attunement, so your entire rotation involves waiting for full energy before going into air just so you can get out of it as fast as possible and go back to actually doing damage or healing..

 

Why they put a damage boon on a control-oriented attunement I'll never understand.

Edited September 3, 2022 by Mariyuuna.6508

[draxynnic.3719]

7 hours ago, Mariyuuna.6508 said:

Well the big problem is that without hammer, Catalyst is far inferior to Tempest. They just get so much of their buffs from the orbs, and you can literally feel them missing on staff. If the orb mechanic had been an automatic proc from attuning on Catalyst, it'd be a completely different story.

 

Its only boon is the ability to still bring Quickness, right? Except remember how the staff has the absolute worst skills in air attunement, so your entire rotation involves waiting for full energy before going into air just so you can get out of it as fast as possible and go back to actually doing damage or healing..

 

Why they put a damage boon on a control-oriented attunement I'll never understand.

Because on any weapon set apart from staff, air is a power damage attunement. 

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

42 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Because on any weapon set apart from staff, air is a power damage attunement. 

Air damage on dagger is only acceptible, even on full Berserker, and air damage on sceptor is non-existant, as its a weaker version of Mesmer greatsword without the massive burst.

 

It does good damage on Weaver, but only when paired with other attunements, as the full kit is still primarily about movement and control (you can't use it with warhorn). No version of air in any subclass or weapon combination resembles what a damage kit looks like on most other professions, so its like saying "Guardian hammer is a power damage weapon",

 

Overload Air is the only significantly consistent damage source from air attunement.

Edited September 4, 2022 by Mariyuuna.6508

[draxynnic.3719]

Air damage on sceptre is a bit weird since the autoattack is pretty weak, but what works is building around skill 2, Fresh Air, and the lightning strike that triggers off switching back to air attunement. On a catalyst, the auto would also, at least in theory, charge energy quickly.

It's been nerfed quite a bit since its heyday, but that's still its intended purpose even if it's not performing so well any more.

Dagger air has historically been known as the best autoattack on dagger, especially from a power perspective, which means that there air tended to be the default attunement you kept going back to.

Sword doesn't apply in a catalyst context, since catalyst doesn't use sword.

For hammer, all the attunements are damage attunements, and you'll cycle through air long enough to deploy the sphere.

There's a degree to which all the core elementalist weapons are doing poorly on power atm, but that doesn't say anything about what air attunement as a whole is intended to do. You can see how the skills are structured, and how it has functioned in the past. Sceptre and dagger both use air as, at least, a significant component of their power damage. Staff is the exception because the only things staff has that do damage are the first two skills and they don't really compete.

You can also look at how the traits and utilities are set up. The air attunement traitline has the most "take this to increase power damage" traits, although it is worth noting that every traitline has at least one. Glyphs have the air attunement version as the most power-oriented one in each case, with vulnerability being the main condition linked to glyphs. The intent is pretty clearly that air is generally a power-oriented (and ferocity-oriented) attunement, it's just that balancing has let it down.

And yeah, I WOULD say that guardian hammer is a power weapon. However, it is more of a defensive and supportive power weapon than a full on max DPS weapon.