3 Major Flaws of Catalyst

[Kuma.1503]

I'll keep this brief. 

1. Garbage CC. 

One of our main CC tools (Air 5) is a key part of our rotation. We swap attunements frantically and spend very little time in air, so it's usually on CD when breakbars come up. Our only other hard CC knocks us back and can get us killed (I've knocked myself off twin largos platform more than once with it...) If air is off CD, swapping to it really kills the flow of our rotation and makes things awkward. 

2. Energy sucks

It really needs to go. It doesn't regen out of combat. If you go down for any reason you lose ALL of it and your boons/dps are both ruined. It makes an already punishing spec far more punishing than it needs to be. It makes any weapon without quick attacks cumbersome to use. It's just not a fun or engaging thing to manage, and the spec is difficult/balanced enough without it. It should go. 

3. The traits suck

They're very boring, and in some cases (like the -10% trade-off trait) laughably terrible. Evasive Empowerment is outclassed by the other traits in 90% of situations, and the power it gives you is very difficult to notice in the heat of combat even if you're paying attention to it. Empowered Empowerment is so strict that if you mess up even a little it ends up doing nothing. 

Elemental Empowerment stacks should refresh the duration of all existing stacks. We have a challenging rotaiton, squishy stats, low mobility, long cast times that cause us to lose damage if interrupted, are not great at dealing with mechanics compared to scourge, mech, or virtuoso. This spec is punishing enough without making this so painfully strict. 

 

The common thread with these issues is low usability and overly punishing design. These should be addressed and would go a long way towards making the spec more popular and more enjoyable to play. 

 

Edited September 27, 2022 by Kuma.1503

[Downstate.4697]

Yeah but quickness

[Newholiday.8103]

Energy definitely sucks.  Please make cata less complicated.  Ele is already one of the least accessible classes.

[Bakeneko.5826]

2 hours ago, thepolishman.2348 said:

Energy definitely sucks.  Please make cata less complicated.  Ele is already one of the least accessible classes.

Good, less people to pick up from the ground.

[crosknight.3041]

hammer and augments are also pretty boring too taking from other specs. mostly weaver.
hammer 3 is essentially weave self, and augments are essentially weaver stances. the class mechanic is also pretty boring too just being glorified wells.

[Zunki.3916]

23 hours ago, crosknight.3041 said:

hammer and augments are also pretty boring too taking from other specs. mostly weaver.
hammer 3 is essentially weave self, and augments are essentially weaver stances. the class mechanic is also pretty boring too just being glorified wells.

But they added F5 to make it different from how tempest does it without any benefit and only making the class kitten to play to begin with 🙂

There are so many more than 3 major problems here 🙂

[Jski.6180]

Could we tie on swaps effects to the F5 but make them only trigger at the F5? Kind of like overloads but for all swaps effects not just the hand full tempest gets.

[Sunshine.5014]

I'd rather the F5 be on F1-4 like Tempest. There is no reason you need a separate button when you can tap the same attunement button to drop a sphere. Then move the hammer #3 to the F5 button.

[Zunki.3916]

5 hours ago, Jski.6180 said:

Could we tie on swaps effects to the F5 but make them only trigger at the F5? Kind of like overloads but for all swaps effects not just the hand full tempest gets.

The F5 is horrible to reach and rebinding it is also hard, I have everything bound and set already for years now. I was thinking on makroing the F5 into the F1...F4 as a condition sequence just to come around that.

[the krytan assassin.9235]

On 9/27/2022 at 3:10 PM, crosknight.3041 said:

augments are essentially weaver stances.

I'd go even further and say all elite spec utilities and most of the core utilities feel the same. All are instant cast (or should be instant cast) with either a small damage or boon related effect. Sure there are some skills that feel abit different due to their group/personal support, but apart from that its all the same kitten. Only glyphs and conjure weapons are unique skills (except for GoEP). All other skills are basic skills that you could apply to any other profession without noticing. 

 

For example: why doesn't the elementalist get wells as utilities? Why is our only defiance break locked behind conjure skills which take way to long to cast? 

 

 

[draxynnic.3719]

12 hours ago, the krytan assassin.9235 said:

For example: why doesn't the elementalist get wells as utilities?

Bring back wards!

[The Boz.2038]

Six months came and went, energy is still in this spec.

smh

[Sporks.4395]

The Espec is really close. The hammer does way more damage than any other ele weapon by FAR. I think this is part of the issue. We lost 10% damage to take utility because of the crazy hammer damage. It would be better, IMO, to change the hammer damage output down, remove the -10%, and fix how the traits work. The aura line is fun, I like it. It adds a really selfish feel for damage increase and survivability. Those traits are not completely awful. The elemental empowerment traits are just bad. It is impossible to pull off in PvP and WvW. It is insanely hard to pull off in PvE. Even when you run with a tempest support spamming aura's in WvW and PvP, you will still almost never get value out of Empowered Empowerment. It's a bad trait. If you want to keep the mechanic, there are two options to me.

1. Make it so it refreshes the duration of active stacks when you add 1 stack. If you do this you might consider reducing Elemental Empowerment by 1. Then you can ramp up to Empowered Empowerment and make it worth while.

2. You can just remove the requirement for maximum stacks required to trigger Empowered Empowerment. If you do this, I would think you would want to reduce the max stacks to 5 and change the % multiplier to maybe 3% to ramp it up, keep it up, max is 30% instead of 40% to make up for it, and just make it easier to use and easier for the traits to feel impactful. 

The bottom line just sucks. All there is to it. It's almost there, but the way energy works is awful. Energized Elements is nice, but underwhelming. Fury is crazy short and mostly worthless because of it. I think it would be better if it granted 5 seconds of fury when swapping attunements, and also change the way the energy works. Make it so you can gain energy while in your jade sphere's. This is a good tradeoff. You can't take the damage increase or reduction traits to keep your energy up to spam boons when you need to, not just a mindless rotation because you have to use them all at once to keep them up. Good tradeoff. Drop the 10% off of spectacular sphere. With the changes made to Energized Elements, you are more likely to take less stat modification for damage in order to keep the right boons up at the right time. Sphere specialist is actually ok to me. It makes it so you can really play with your gear and rotation to get really sweaty in strikes, or just full cele/diviners to do an easy rotation for more open world chill. 

Again, core weapons need more help. Daggers feel decent right now, scepter and staff are slow and outdated for the game modes. Fix those, and we can actually have better build options other than just HaMmEr Go BrRrRr.

 

[LyraOrpheo.8450]

On 9/28/2022 at 10:40 AM, Sunshine.5014 said:

I'd rather the F5 be on F1-4 like Tempest. There is no reason you need a separate button when you can tap the same attunement button to drop a sphere. Then move the hammer #3 to the F5 button.

 

I really like this suggestion. I feel it also leaves the door open for potential further core spec functionality upgrades where re-attunement of the same element gives you something, then you trade it off for the stronger overloads, jade spheres or weaver trading them away for dual attacks. 

[Serephen.3420]

12 hours ago, Sporks.4395 said:

The Espec is really close. The hammer does way more damage than any other ele weapon by FAR. I think this is part of the issue. We lost 10% damage to take utility because of the crazy hammer damage. It would be better, IMO, to change the hammer damage output down, remove the -10%, and fix how the traits work. The aura line is fun, I like it. It adds a really selfish feel for damage increase and survivability. Those traits are not completely awful. The elemental empowerment traits are just bad. It is impossible to pull off in PvP and WvW. It is insanely hard to pull off in PvE. Even when you run with a tempest support spamming aura's in WvW and PvP, you will still almost never get value out of Empowered Empowerment. It's a bad trait. If you want to keep the mechanic, there are two options to me.

1. Make it so it refreshes the duration of active stacks when you add 1 stack. If you do this you might consider reducing Elemental Empowerment by 1. Then you can ramp up to Empowered Empowerment and make it worth while.

2. You can just remove the requirement for maximum stacks required to trigger Empowered Empowerment. If you do this, I would think you would want to reduce the max stacks to 5 and change the % multiplier to maybe 3% to ramp it up, keep it up, max is 30% instead of 40% to make up for it, and just make it easier to use and easier for the traits to feel impactful. 

The bottom line just sucks. All there is to it. It's almost there, but the way energy works is awful. Energized Elements is nice, but underwhelming. Fury is crazy short and mostly worthless because of it. I think it would be better if it granted 5 seconds of fury when swapping attunements, and also change the way the energy works. Make it so you can gain energy while in your jade sphere's. This is a good tradeoff. You can't take the damage increase or reduction traits to keep your energy up to spam boons when you need to, not just a mindless rotation because you have to use them all at once to keep them up. Good tradeoff. Drop the 10% off of spectacular sphere. With the changes made to Energized Elements, you are more likely to take less stat modification for damage in order to keep the right boons up at the right time. Sphere specialist is actually ok to me. It makes it so you can really play with your gear and rotation to get really sweaty in strikes, or just full cele/diviners to do an easy rotation for more open world chill. 

Again, core weapons need more help. Daggers feel decent right now, scepter and staff are slow and outdated for the game modes. Fix those, and we can actually have better build options other than just HaMmEr Go BrRrRr.

 

I'm sorry but scepter/focus condi weaver has a higher bench than power hammer catalyst. 

Sure core weapons could use more, but scepter is in a pretty good spot for condi or healing at the moment. Hammer should do great damage. Just like sword should for weaver*which it no longer does).

[Sporks.4395]

I'm sorry, but scepter/focus condi weaver has higher bench than power catalyst because the weaver has traits that work for damage dealing. You can't compare a spec that has useable traits to a spec that does not.  You put scepter/focus on a catalyst and the damage is thousands less per second than hammer for condi OR power. Then you toss a 10% damage reduction loss on top of that if you want to fit the group meta by providing boons, and you are really in a dismal spot for weapons outside of hammer. 

 

[Nephalem.8921]

Just bring back staff weaver at this point. Ele and gw2 as a whole do not have a regular mage spec anymore which is usually in every fantasy rpg.

They also call hammer midrange while its pure melee with some 600range skills. It fills the melee bruiser role like weaver and tempest.

The proper cata gameplay promotes full time in hitbox parking, guessing the exact 0.2sec window to use the f5 at exactly 20 energy to not slow down the rotation and not accidentally double firing 3. At least in raids where it can work sometimes. The whole profession mechanic is not working 9 out of 10 times in open world or fractals. Every invuln hitbox or reflect or projectile destruction field during the 20sec orb build up destroys grand finale and your entire energy regeneration.

Thats basically all of eod and every fractal encounter and all of wvw and probably all of spvp. I really like the resource management in other mmos but the cata energy regeneration is just WAY too inconsistent to add valuable gameplay. Feels just extremely punishing. Everything about this spec feels incredible punishing.

This is a nice breath of fresh air because ele did not have 2 other elite specs with incredible punishing mechanics /s. Weave self nobody likes. Tempest overloads feel at least rewarding. Grand finale just feels like a normal skill that does not work most of the time. And where is my magic artillery or king of aoe mage? Cata felt like it was good at aoe again for like 1month until they nerfed the wells.

[zeyeti.8347]

We can resume the Op post in 2words  : catalyst sucks.

It need so much rework , it will be better delete the e-scpec and start over a new whole one.

[keykey.9182]

Not anymore

 

 

Edited October 7, 2022 by keykey.9182

[tykel.6073]

I’d say hammer 3 is catalysts biggest failure, followed closely by the augments being kitten and the energy being beyond pointless. Hammer 3 takes up so much of the weapons design space as well as a usually pretty key spot on a weapon for rounding out its toolset. But instead we get trash spin orb buffs that do nothing to help the weapons kit.

 

The f5 is by far the most boring profession mechanic to date, which of course means it needs an energy bar? Truly bizarre. The orb would have been much better as various actually interesting wells for utilities (like what they almost did to gyros recently showing that wells aren’t that hard to make apparently). Augments are just as boring and uninspiring as the f5 that does no damage and pulses one boon. Could have just called them stances with a ~ at the end since that would be more fitting. 

[Axl.8924]

YEs please fix staff for ele make better.

[Axl.8924]

I want to ask something while i'm here is cata the top for ele specs in power now? or weaver or is it tempest?

I saw someone mentioning how hammer hits real hard.
 

Edited October 7, 2022 by Axl.8924

[the krytan assassin.9235]

47 minutes ago, Axl.8924 said:

I want to ask something while i'm here is cata the top for ele specs in power now? or weaver or is it tempest?

I saw someone mentioning how hammer hits real hard.

Hammer cata is currently the top performing Golem bench power spec. Catalyst simply provides the best raw dps boost % out of all ele specs. The only problem is that Catalyst only works properly for hammer (and works ok'ish for dagger/dagger). Staff/scepter builds either lack combo finishers per attunement, energy gain or have multiple attunements without any decent form of dps. 

 

That being said, most hammer Cata's perform worse then sword/dagger or staff weaver's due to its intricate rotations. 

[scerevisiae.1972]

let me have a go.

 

1) hammer sucks.
it's ok at PVE and bunkering PVP nodes but idc about PVE and nearly noone plays PVP in this game cause the format sucks and downed state exists

 

2) energy sucks
it's a stupid and annoying mechanic, and 95% could be replaced with regular CDs

 

3) catalyst as an elite spec brings nothing new to the table besides hammer, and hammer sucks
maybe its biggest problem, the spec itself is just... uninspired. it's a field, that's it. unlike weaver, which also came with a weapon that was very niche, weaver brought a new and interesting playstyle to all the existing weapons, exactly how a good e-spec should.

 

all in all, catalyst is 2-3/10 for me, and one of the main reasons i rarely play GW2 these days.

Edited October 7, 2022 by scerevisiae.1972

[ScottBroChill.3254]

Honestly hammer catalyst is probably my favorite build for ele but it is kinda the only way to play catalyst. The spec is built around the hammer so using anything else makes you wonder why you aren't playing tempest or weaver because the f5 isn't necessary outside of hammer's lack of fields, the added traits are nice and all but it's really only optimal with hammer's bruiser frontline playstyle. I mean you could use f5 for just the support boons with another weapon but why would you, tempest would be better for other weapons. Basically the espec concept is the hammer and not the profession mechanic or traits which is a real bummer for the people who don't like using the hammer.