Hefty nerf on Catalyst again

[DaKillaOfHell.5907]

I just want to remind:
 

• Flame Wheel, Icy Coil, Crescent Wind, Rocky Loop: These skills now strike enemies once per second instead of using a projectile. Increased power coefficient from 0.001 to 0.25 in PvE only.

 

This was the first idea, then, they changed it to:

 

Flame Wheel, Icy Coil, Crescent Wind, Rocky Loop: These skills now strike enemies once per second instead of using a projectile. Increased power coefficient from 0.001 to 0.1 in PvE only.

 

Which is still a 100 times as before, okay.

Catalyst desperately needed a buff, because gameplay was underwhelming and the nerfs basically made catalyst the most useless spec in overall PvE.

And all of that only, because someone deemed it "meta-defining", to kill a Golem-like-boss faster than any other combination.

How great, that we have such a long history of golem-like-bosses as well as raids in gw2...

 

And now:

 

Flame Wheel, Icy Coil, Crescent Wind, and Rocky Loop: Reduced power coefficient from 0.1 to 0.001 in PvE only.

 

And the reason why: "The damage increase on the hammer's third-slot skills ended up being unnecessary alongside the improvements to both Empowering Auras and Stormsoul, so we're reducing the damage to where it was previously."

 

Could anybody please explain them that they totally misunderstood class mechanics?

 

[zeyeti.8347]

Nerf , unnerf , nerf , unnerf , nerf , unnerf , nerf , unnerf , nerf , unnerf 

prove once and for all anet is unable to balance that class , happy to have trained the rotation so much on the golem , wasnt reaching more than 32k anyway .

But now thief reach 40k easy , with a two button press ... to the garbage can elementalist !!!!!!!! so you guys won' bother nerfing unnerfing nerfing unnerfing it till the world ends ...

Edited December 13, 2022 by zeyeti.8347

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

You sort-of answered your own question.  Anet wasn't happy with DPS Cata benching 46k on the less-mobile bosses.  

[zeyeti.8347]

What they did mursaat overseer in 35 secondes ???? omg quicky nerf it !!!

I bet that 0,0001% of the community was able to reach that bench anyway , anet stated they will not look at benching golems anymore , more alook at what is the most played and why ...  oh my bad 3,2 % were playign it ! meta defining ! ... what a joke ...

Edited December 13, 2022 by zeyeti.8347

[soulknight.9620]

Cmon that was expected by 95% of ele players. Catalyst was overperforming by a lot. This change will net a 3-4k dps loss which would still put dps cata at 40-42k dps which is the same as every other dps spec out there (including power/condi weaver). 

[zeyeti.8347]

1 minute ago, soulknight.9620 said:

Cmon that was expected by 95% of ele players. Catalyst was overperforming by a lot. This change will net a 3-4k dps loss which would still put dps cata at 40-42k dps which is the same as every other dps spec out there (including power/condi weaver). 

Maybe , but tell me how many ppl were able to reach 46k ? Again anet is looking at the bench on snowcrow pinatas.

This class has been nerfed and unnerfed so many times in such a short period ... unable to workout her own creation....

 

[Chyro.1462]

Seems stupid that they do the damage nerf on something that's on skill-floor of the class rather than on skill-ceiling. It's the top tier players doing the 'too high' damage, so just nerf it where it hits mainly those (which I assume would be keeping up the max dmg buff stacks). But guess that requires someone on the balance team to have brains, to do a nerf that doesn't punish the casual playerbase for what the top percentile are able to accomplish.

[kurosy.1384]

46k was indeed unbelievably high bench and everyone was expecting a nerf.

BUT

I'm asking you guys to have a comparison. I'm not a dps player but i'm quite confident with ele specs. After few hours at the golem i could get 36k max from cata. In real scenarios tho my dps drops soooo much lower (18-28k lol). Is anyone else struggling to get (and keep) decent dps on this class?
I just wish the balance team themselves would spend few hours on the golem and in raid and see how the class feels 😕 cause i feel like they're just looking at numbers and not experiencing it in first person.

[Baseleader.4128]

19 minutes ago, zeyeti.8347 said:

prove once and for all anet is unable to balance that class , happy to have trained the rotation so much on the golem , wasnt reaching more than 32k anyway .

Sounds a bit like a you problem man, sorry to say. I've seen the rotation vids and it's really not that difficult to pull off. Just did a Sabetha where a Cata did 39k dps. It was a bit much and not only on MO

[zeyeti.8347]

3 minutes ago, kurosy.1384 said:

46k was indeed unbelievably high bench and everyone was expecting a nerf.

BUT

I'm asking you guys to have a comparison. I'm not a dps player but i'm quite confident with ele specs. After few hours at the golem i could get 36k max from cata. In real scenarios tho my dps drops soooo much lower (18-28k lol). Is anyone else struggling to get (and keep) decent dps on this class?
I just wish the balance team themselves would spend few hours on the golem and in raid and see how the class feels 😕 cause i feel like they're just looking at numbers and not experiencing it in first person.

Thats exactly what anet sounds like they would care more , look into class mechanic , what make them stronger , what make them weak , instead of just "hey look it does 46 k on the golem , thats op , it must do the same on regular encounters ..." well too bad you have to upkeep your EE stacks , on a moving target or in a fight with split mechanics it's impossible .

Edited December 13, 2022 by zeyeti.8347

[DaKillaOfHell.5907]

19 minutes ago, soulknight.9620 said:

Cmon that was expected by 95% of ele players. Catalyst was overperforming by a lot. This change will net a 3-4k dps loss which would still put dps cata at 40-42k dps which is the same as every other dps spec out there (including power/condi weaver). 

 

Ok, just to tell some things:

First of all, 44-46k is a perfect benchmark which barely anyone can even reach, and then again, under a lot of presumptions, such as perfect rotation, crit luck, not any unnecessary movement, nor dodge, and no striking back, no cc, not any kind of external factors.

 

Second of all, there is no class with a higher risk than Elementalist. 

 

A Catalyst could even do 50k dps, it wouldn't affect the statistics that much since barely anyone can play it properly without being downstated all the time. Maybe it would make difference for the 0,000001% of player population, while the rest still struggles at around 20k.

5 minutes ago, Baseleader.4128 said:

Sounds a bit like a you problem man, sorry to say. I've seen the rotation vids and it's really not that difficult to pull off. Just did a Sabetha where a Cata did 39k dps. It was a bit much and not only on MO

 

And we talk about...golem-like-boss again.

Thank you for proving my point exactly.

[zeyeti.8347]

8 minutes ago, Baseleader.4128 said:

Sounds a bit like a you problem man, sorry to say. I've seen the rotation vids and it's really not that difficult to pull off. Just did a Sabetha where a Cata did 39k dps. It was a bit much and not only on MO

And are YOU able to do so ? the class is overly complicated , i know ele mechanics very well , upkeep the EE stacks going trough fire and air first to upkeep the +10% crit and damage , use combo in sphere , use augments in the right sphere , there is much more to pull off than any other class (maybe holo) and you don't know it , so plz don't refer to a video .. if i look at snowcrow doing harvest temple challenge only , the fight seems pretty easy to me too...

you don't play it , you don't talk about it !

Edited December 13, 2022 by zeyeti.8347

[Hallow.7368]

36 minutes ago, zeyeti.8347 said:

Maybe , but tell me how many ppl were able to reach 46k ? Again anet is looking at the bench on snowcrow pinatas.

This class has been nerfed and unnerfed so many times in such a short period ... unable to workout her own creation....

 

why is that relevant again? hammer 3 is 20x more consistent now reaching the full benchmark for any class isn't realistic it's just a benchmark to compare numbers. cata will probably still be around untamed numbers

[the krytan assassin.9235]

tbh no real reason to play dps cata once again...  (atleast for me)

 

was able to bench ~39k on golem pre patch on cata

37k on BttH weaver

37.5k on condi weaver

 

now with the update i only reach 36k on golem so BttH weaver is outdpssing cata by 1k (for me) 

that being said, on actual boss encounters you'll struggle alot more to get a high efficiency on cata, so i'll probably outdps it on pweaver by 3-4k+

 

so for me (and i guess the average ele player) catalyst is more effort and has less CC and terrible access to it. Only advantages of playing power cata is the small amount of passive healing and condi cleanse you get from crashing font and cleansing typhoon. 

 

qcata has the same problem, benching around 26k on golem now, but that's with minimal room for error on quickness, so it gets outclassed by most other quick builds

only good thing about this nerf is that hammer is a slighty less overtuned weapon compared to its competitors. unfortunately that says more about the state of the other weapons and the lack of synergy between catalyst and any weapon besides hammer. 

P.S. i don't understand how a fcking piano 46k is a problem, but a 45k thief that presses 4 skills is totally fine >.<

Edited December 13, 2022 by the krytan assassin.9235

[Infusion.7149]

It was so meta defining obviously... /s

No elemental empowerment fixes so I guess they only want quickness catas except for hardcore players can maintain 10 stacks of EE?

 

edit: Oh and for some reason Unbroken lines on Firebrand was buffed. 🤣

Edited December 13, 2022 by Infusion.7149

[soulknight.9620]

1 hour ago, zeyeti.8347 said:

Maybe , but tell me how many ppl were able to reach 46k ? Again anet is looking at the bench on snowcrow pinatas.

This class has been nerfed and unnerfed so many times in such a short period ... unable to workout her own creation....

Same as with every other class. There is a minority of good players with 0 ping that get 95-100% of the bench on a constant basis. Average player is doing around 80-90% of the bench and that is acceptible. 80% of the bench is somewhat 36,8k dps which was doable by almost anyone on cata. After the last patch (the one with buffs) i picked up my power cata and went blind on the rotation on the golem. Did 39.7k dps. Again, no rotation, no practice, first try. Thats somewhat 85-88% of bench. After a bit of practice i was doing around 40-41k dps. And yes im no pro player by any standarts. Last time ive had such a result (i mean first try 90% of the bench) it was power engie with rifle after the rifle rework.

Its not just golem. Ive seen the same picture while doing hard content. While doing raids, fractal CMs and strikes for weeks i only saw someone perform on par with my catalyst twice and guess what, they were catalysts. Even in actual fights cata outperformed other dps by 10-15% constantly. 

No dps should do more than 40-41k dps. 

Not to mention that cata is not a pure dps spec, it is an offensive support by design, so its dps should be lower than lets say weaver which is a full glass cannon spec with no group support and limited selfsustain potential. Alongside the dps catalyst provides boon coverage, easy access to self healing skills on low cd, nice self condi cleanse, blocks, projectile denial and yes its bulky due to stat buffs from EE and hammer 3 sphere buffs. 

So the answer is simple - it needed a tone down. Now its on par with power weaver and condi weaver where it should have been from the start. All of them bench around 40k dps more or less. 

Does cata still has problems? Sure, fixes to stack uptime, hammer air 4 should be done asap. 

 

 

[Nymeria.1653]

40 minutes ago, the krytan assassin.9235 said:

tbh no real reason to play dps cata once again...  (atleast for me)

 

was able to bench ~39k on golem pre patch on cata

37k on BttH weaver

37.5k on condi weaver

 

now with the update i only reach 36k on golem so BttH weaver is outdpssing cata by 1k (for me) 

that being said, on actual boss encounters you'll struggle alot more to get a high efficiency on cata, so i'll probably outdps it on pweaver by 3-4k+

 

so for me (and i guess the average ele player) catalyst is more effort and has less CC and terrible access to it. Only advantages of playing power cata is the small amount of passive healing and condi cleanse you get from crashing font and cleansing typhoon. 

 

qcata has the same problem, benching around 26k on golem now, but that's with minimal room for error on quickness, so it gets outclassed by most other quick builds

only good thing about this nerf is that hammer is a slighty less overtuned weapon compared to its competitors. unfortunately that says more about the state of the other weapons and the lack of synergy between catalyst and any weapon besides hammer. 

P.S. i don't understand how a fcking piano 46k is a problem, but a 45k thief that presses 4 skills is totally fine >.<

I agree (except for the "no real reason to play dps cata once again... " at least for me hehe but I understand).

 

So, for me it's not a huuuge problem and I mean that I will still play cata dps and have fun, but!

I tend to agree with people saying that with thief it is always like ok and normal if they do 100000000000k and be like "aahahah the thief... what an adorable brat! *___* ", and with ele it's like the most terrible injustice ever, call the inquisition and so on xD Nothing against thief, in fact I think thief and ele share a lot, they are the two classes with the lowest base health for example.

So I think it could be ok if both these professions do a great amount of dps, since playing these classes almost everytime in combat it's something like "in 2 seconds you could kill or die".

But anyway, again, I will keep playing it (also because it's my main) and enjoy playing it!.... I never did 40k with golem anyway 😛

[Ivarss.7805]

The development team for Gw2 balance shows once again they are incapable of understanding the issue plagueing the class diversity.

Instead of keeping the buff to the orbs which would be healthy for lower end players to get into the class and have room to improve and instead tweak the numbers of other abilities of catalyst they instead nerf the orbs and thus making it harder again for low end players to at all be capable of using the class reliably.

[ArjukKagrim.6049]

So you nerf a class that is hard (but previously at least rewarding) to play that has no bust, no good/flexible utilities, and no CC. No we have a class that can still dish out sustained damage which is in-line with other options. However, cause of the tradeoffs all the aforementioned alternatives are far superior. If some skills at least got CC before the nerf one could at least justify to bring cata, but now the class got absolutely pointless again...

[thetwothousand.5049]

This is an interesting situation, but not an unexpected one. Catalyst was benching at 46K, well above anything else in the game. That said with how difficult it is to actually reach that 46K leaving it alone in the short term would not have been an issue in my opinion. In the few weeks we've had the patch now I've definitely seen a large increase in elementalist across the board. But Catalyst was still significantly less frequent than anything else that I was seeing which really hammers home the problem with Catalyst, pun intended.

 

Simply put Catalyst is a mess of a spec. It was obviously an attempt by Anet to give the profession a meta-viable support option, which at the time it did not have at all, but they failed at the implementation. Even at its most viable quickness Catalyst couldn't hold a candle to the other options in the games, and that was before it got nerfed into the ground. Even with the buffs/reverted nerfs Catalyst is still the worst quickness provider as new superior options have been added and old options were significantly buffed. Being less effective in that role just isn't an option, you can't be slacking in this space. A player on a barely viable DPS build can be carried by the group; a quickness provider that struggles tanks the entire team.

 

The only thing Catalyst has ever really been good is a very high skill ceiling DPS with variable levels of output, usually pretty high. Which isn't really desirable from a balance  or community perspective since Weaver was already successful in that space, while being considerably more fun to play. IMO Catalyst needs significant work to be a good spec and just tinkering with modifiers isn't going to provide the answer.

 

Anet needs to address the underlying mechanics of Catalyst and then can fine tune the numbers to a satisfactory performance, just like they've done with Firebrand this patch. What they need to deal with is energy, quickness delivery, DPS skill ceiling, and weapon options outside of hammer. Until those mechanics, or lack there of, are handled everything else is just window dressing that won't incentivize people to play the spec.

[Falson.5284]

3 hours ago, zeyeti.8347 said:

Maybe , but tell me how many ppl were able to reach 46k ? Again anet is looking at the bench on snowcrow pinatas.

This class has been nerfed and unnerfed so many times in such a short period ... unable to workout her own creation....

 

Honestly though this is really what I was worried about. Yes it's probably too high when the top players can reach 46k benches, but instead of targeting a nerf to the parts of the rotation that require high skill to pull off, effectively trimming dps off the ceiling, they decided to target the entire range and brought down the performance of every ele. They nerfed cata originally because the top 1% of players were doing too well, then told us that weren't going to do that again, only to do the same exact thing today. CMC and the balance team need to find a way to balance this class by trimming away the potential dps gains by the highest skilled players without neutering the class for everyone else. I'm just glad I haven't bothered to go collect any nice new skins for cata while it was briefly buffed.

[thetwothousand.5049]

2 hours ago, the krytan assassin.9235 said:

tbh no real reason to play dps cata once again...  (atleast for me)

 

was able to bench ~39k on golem pre patch on cata

37k on BttH weaver

37.5k on condi weaver

 

now with the update i only reach 36k on golem so BttH weaver is outdpssing cata by 1k (for me) 

that being said, on actual boss encounters you'll struggle alot more to get a high efficiency on cata, so i'll probably outdps it on pweaver by 3-4k+

 

so for me (and i guess the average ele player) catalyst is more effort and has less CC and terrible access to it. Only advantages of playing power cata is the small amount of passive healing and condi cleanse you get from crashing font and cleansing typhoon. 

 

qcata has the same problem, benching around 26k on golem now, but that's with minimal room for error on quickness, so it gets outclassed by most other quick builds

only good thing about this nerf is that hammer is a slighty less overtuned weapon compared to its competitors. unfortunately that says more about the state of the other weapons and the lack of synergy between catalyst and any weapon besides hammer. 

P.S. i don't understand how a fcking piano 46k is a problem, but a 45k thief that presses 4 skills is totally fine >.<

You make a point that I do in my own point, from a DPS perspective Weaver and Catalyst are both competing for the same space, a high skill-ceiling build that provides the highest DPS the game offers. Weaver simply does a better job of providing the mechanics for players to achieve that ceiling while also not completely failing off if you're not able to reach it.

 

Catalyst on the other hand is mechanically zero-sum; you can either reach the ceiling and are pumping or you don't and your DPS is in the dirt. I honestly think the answer is to lean into Catalyst tankier and easier rotation to create a spec similar to Reaper. Remove the limitations of energy and qualifiers on DPS traits while nerfing the benchmark down to ~37K. You'll be left with a build that is easy to play, and play well, that won't drop dead in the blink of an eye, and gives Weaver space to do it's thing.

 

P.S. I would strongly argue thief is fine as is. Daggers are pure single target, truly brings zero utility to the party to hit that number, and it is very difficult to maintain the conditions needed to hit that number, even if the rotation is very simple.

[Hedonismbot.3697]

I think this post, and with it some of y'all, are overreacting. it's just a number adjustment.

1) "funny number" is not the be all and end all of class viability. This fixation with arbitrary fairy-tale numbers and their supposed correlation to a class being "good" or "bad" is unhealthy

2) there is already too much damage in pve. 30k is A LOT... Content shouldn't be trivialized so easily

3) ONLY Hammer was nerfed, and that's okey. The rest of catalyst remains buffed

4) looking at firebrand changes, it is apparent, that tuning and tinkering are part of anets balancing process. This workflow is much preferable to how it was before and is a good approach

5) "but class X does more with less Y" is not an argument. What you want to say is: "according to your balance manifesto, this change makes sense/doesn't make sense"

6) catalyst should be played because its fun. not because it's "best in slot" according to some website

[Nup.4591]

hammer 3 has been awfully designed from the very beginning. but at the same time the weapon completely relies on it's mechanic. It's weird because if you remove skill 3, the hammer is very fun and intuitive to use. Magic hammer go bonk! 
so the question is, how do we fix this?
it's not easy, because this stupid skill has 3 incredibly important mechanics build in
- energy generation (messing up the orbs makes you lose a lot of energy and thus damage and boon uptime)
- burst damage ( the grand finale is a really big part of your damage and messing up the orbs makes it so you can't use it in your burst window, or you miss out on the burst altogether)
- buffs ( if you mess up an orb, you won't have a buff up during your rotation for a while, especially with how strong the air and fire orbs are, you are losing a lot of your damage)

this makes the weapon extremely punishing if you make a mistake. so we should split these mechanics and place them on other things on the weapon. make it so that skill 3 doesn't do all these things at once. place burst more on to the hard hitting skills of the weapon, like the nr 2 skills or the big nr 5 skills.
energy is an entire story altogether because other weapons also struggle with this (because they don't have hammer 3)
so they will have to rework the energy mechanic completely (being able to gain energy while a sphere is deployed already would help a ton)
If they do this, the orbs can then simply serve as a personal buff you can keep up to yourself. 

Catalyst has so many problems just from the traits alone... elemental empowerment stacks, energy, quickness, aura comboing... this class is weird. but it has some potential. 
it's just time to stop trying to tweak numbers and rework this thing. 

[Nup.4591]

ALSO, hammer 3 critting for 6 is just plain awkward