Quick cata excells at nothing. Here's how to improve it.

[Kuma.1503]

1. Energy needs to be axed. 

Every element's sphere has it's own cooldown. That's enough. Energy just makes an already punishing and unrewarding spec more punishing while limiting weapon versatility. I'd love to play a staff qheal catalyst but I can't do that because staff has zero energy gen. 

2. Augments need improvements. 

. Cata provides very little utility to its group outside of its boons, and herald does that better.  Give it some worthwhile utility that isn't tied to being in a specific element. Speaking of. 

3. Take aegis off of earth sphere. 

We are forced to burn our only aegis skill on CD during our rotation. We cannot use it reactively. Put this aegis somewhere else where we can reliably access it. Consider putting it on one of our augments. Maybe give conjure earth shield AoE stab/aegis. 

4. Rework Cata's traits

Here are a few examples

Elemental Epitome - Gain an aura and elemental empowerment when you combo. 10sec ICD on the aura, but not on the elemental empowerment stacks. 

Sphere Specialist - Doubles duration of boons on jade sphere. Additionally gives augment skills bonus supportive effects when used under any sphere. 

Evasive Empowerment - Honestly just scrap this. It's a PvP trait that isn't even used in PvP. It's useless in PvE. 

Energized Elements - No longer gives fury. Instead, When you combo, gain superspeed. (Making cata less immobile while playing more into combo synergy. Ele has plenty of fury from other sources)

 

 

And last bot not least... 

Hurricane of pain has a melee hitbox. Damage does not stack with ranged hitbox. 

Whirling stones is a whirl finisher. 

 

If you got this far, thank you for reading my wall of text. 

 

Edited June 9 by Kuma.1503
Tooltip bug

[luigrein.8514]

Not saying  I wouldn't appreciate some love to the spec because I absolutely would.

However unless I'm mixing up my bugs I believe sphere specialist does boost quick duration, just the tooltip is bugged.

Also cata does have the rare but not unique ability to boon the group from off the stack. Sure it's not generally a big deal since you usually want to be in the stack too, but it's nice to be able to run out for a mechanic or kite and still boon the group. You know,  assuming that doesn't destroy your energy regen.

Spoiler

 

 

[Kuma.1503]

You are right. 

Looks like the tooltip is just bugged. Edited the OP. 

[Chyro.1462]

Please copy/paste in plain text. The light grey text is hard to read.

[Atoclone.4810]

I think there's a typo in the op. You put excel when it should be succeed 

[ZephidelGRS.9520]

I’ll never understand why Catalyst needed 3 separated unique combat buffs, and 2 different traits just give Quickness. All that work and it could barely keep Quickness up.

It simply proves Catalyst is as barebone as a concept as it gets that they don’t know what to fill with the traits.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

12 hours ago, ZephidelGRS.9520 said:

I’ll never understand why Catalyst needed 3 separated unique combat buffs, and 2 different traits just give Quickness. All that work and it could barely keep Quickness up.

It simply proves Catalyst is as barebone as a concept as it gets that they don’t know what to fill with the traits.

Theming mostly.  The initial idea behind the spec was to build energy like warriors build adrenaline or necromancers build life force.  Playing hammer catalyst very much has a feel of momentum, wherein once it gets going it can be very powerful, but it needs to actually get going force.

Of course, all of this was nerfed after we discovered that the best comp in the game was to stack catalysts, since their auras would proc each other's traits.  Anet's been trying to keep a careful balance on the spec since, for fear that we'll enter into another cata-stacking meta.  

Edited May 18 by Blood Red Arachnid.2493

[rotten.9753]

3 hours ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

Anet's been trying to keep a careful balance on the spec since, for fear that we'll enter into another cata-stacking meta.  

Good thing we have virt-stacking meta.

[draxynnic.3719]

9 hours ago, rotten.9753 said:

Good thing we have virt-stacking meta.

I think they consider it to be more acceptable to have one DPS spec that's just a little more comfortable than the others to 4/5 players being catalysts.

They might well still be overreacting, because I don't think there was much chance of catalyst stacking making it out of the speedrun community anyway, but they are very different situations.

[mirage.8046]

Catalyst is a cute spec, though I don't like having to take more than one trait to do the same role admittedly. It would also be so sick if augments did more augmenting with your jade sphere. The energy bar is also super hard to read because of how tiny it is. Catalyst comes off as very unfinished and restricted with the trait designs.

[rotten.9753]

13 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

I think they consider it to be more acceptable to have one DPS spec that's just a little more comfortable than the others to 4/5 players being catalysts.

They might well still be overreacting, because I don't think there was much chance of catalyst stacking making it out of the speedrun community anyway, but they are very different situations.

Or maybe they just balance based on golem (and MO) videos, virtuoso while being oppressive DPS spec due to utility and easy of play is in line with 42-43k benchmarks.

[zeyeti.8347]

On 5/18/2024 at 5:50 AM, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

Anet's been trying to keep a careful balance on the spec since, for fear that we'll enter into another cata-stacking meta.  

that was only the case cause cata had quickness share baseline with 0 trait invested towards booning vs dps (remind air sphere gave quick based on release) and that's why you got cata stacking cause 8 catalyst full dps oriented could easily maintain quick for your whole party with ease and 0 bd  , now that we must invest in traits and boon duration there will never be this kind of stacking again and even if it would not be relevant 

Virtuoso stacking is not because there is some inside mechanic that make them work well together , it's only because thi spec is too well balanced  with cc , dmg , mobility , survivability.

Now that you have to take two trait to "upkeep" quickness as cata and loose the 10% damage from Empowering Auras , the 10% bonus stats from Empowered Empowerment and going even arcane for the -15% cd of sphere + 180 bd (remind arcane has one good trait for dmg , the rest is pure support)  it's just too big of a loss , meanwhile some spec need one trait swap to cover alac or quick and need 0 investement on bd to do the job , it's a no brainer ! you basically have to choose between a chocolate cake and a pile of sh it.

It's the least played e-spec of the whole game in pve (just slightly in front of mirage) and even if you had a big energy bar with numbers i think it's not gonna change it all. It's not enough to save this misery of a class, it needs an overhaul , and the first step is to get rid off that energy bar who is just making thing complicated for no purpose and make spheres only cooldowns dependent.

It has been even removed from snowcrow build (even out of legacy lol) , that's how bad it is designed , even the pros from snowcrow don't want to deal with this bull****.

3 hours ago, rotten.9753 said:

Or maybe they just balance based on golem (and MO) videos, virtuoso while being oppressive DPS spec due to utility and easy of play is in line with 42-43k benchmarks.

Oh yeah they do , the big nerf on cata (with the amazing "you deal -10% dmg if you take this trait") was done after cata stacking on Mo with 9 catas and one dps alac mech who was afk giving alac for free from his toilet just by AA -> barrier. And we all know mursaat overseer is such a big mechanic dependent bossfight "cough". (a pinata who sometimes moves...)

 

Edited May 19 by zeyeti.8347

[draxynnic.3719]

On 5/19/2024 at 4:50 PM, rotten.9753 said:

Or maybe they just balance based on golem (and MO) videos, virtuoso while being oppressive DPS spec due to utility and easy of play is in line with 42-43k benchmarks.

Oh, they do that too. But they also have a track record of destroying any composition that goes 'we don't need a dedicated quickness support, we'll just have all of our DPS bringing a little bit of quickness so that it adds up to enough quickness'. Prior to Catalyst, there were mesmer- and guardian- based compositions that achieved the same thing, and Time Warp and Feel My Wrath were nerfed hard as a result. Catalyst was just the third to be smacked down on that basis.

As zeyeti said, though, there's little chance of that coming back due to how catalyst quickness has been reworked.

Edited May 20 by draxynnic.3719

[Jeydra.4386]

Cata needs a utility skill that provides instant energy (instant quickness also works). Without that, your boon uptime is screwed if you have to move, if you have to interrupt your rotation to heal/cc, etc. With that, it's much, much easier to upkeep boons - pressing the skill and then any two random spheres would immediately replenish quickness. Right now Cata doesn't have any highly-desirable utilities, either.

Without such a utility skill I imagine making energy generation possible while a sphere is out is also a possibility.

It is possible Cata ends up overpowered because of the sheer variety of boons the spheres provide, but in PvE only a few of those boons are prioritized anyway, so it might not be a big deal. 

[draxynnic.3719]

Quickness providers tend to pump out other boons like they're going out of fashion, I don't think a hypothetical functional quickcata would be out of place next to firebrand, herald, and chrono.

[Mevelios.4809]

What I found the most painful playing Qcata was on a healer profile rather than boondps. I mean, while dagger+warhorn is capable of generating a massive amount of energy to maintain your quickness, as soon as you need stab there's only one viable choice - earth staff. The slowest weapon, least convenient at multi-hits (IF there are multiple targets) where the skills I get the fastest energy output from are a combination of  the glyph's Firestorm with fire staff 2-4-5 (Lava font, Burning retreat & Meteor shower), the latter skills expecting to be unable to act during 3/4 seconds (IF you were under quickness already) with forced mobility & forced immobility on either side.

Well, I'm saying that in the perspective of a raids/strikes player, even if for the rare fractals I bother with it's worse, considering how fast the targets get dispatched. Still, the only other source of group stab is found in the earth spec for which I'd gladly drop the arcane spec (although the concentration loss is really felt on Qheal cata) if it were more practical - Rock solid has a meager 240 range for 3s which, while feasible but terribly risky against Li CM (between the anticipation necessary to have allies in range and the short duration, finding somehow a magnetic aura to transmute is far safer) it becomes quickly near meaningless against something like Samarog CM. Worse, while Written in stone with the earth signet somehow provides a similar combination available to tempest through Aftershock (no aegis/protection on allies, but you can transmute the resulting magnetic aura), on top of requiring to dedicate an otherwise useless utility skill to the healer on its own, it's again restricted exclusively to the staff for transmutation, while still being plagued by the bug making the temporary buff from Written in stone the ancient version of what the passive earth signet effect was: during its cooldown you'll find yourself with 180 toughness instead of the current -10% damages, which you want to avoid in toughness-based encounters if you're not supposed to tank! That's on top of anticipating the changes in your stats from Elemental empowerment, which you're much more willing to handle for your improved healing/concentration although having overall very low access to such stacks.

Personally, while I don't mind having two traits in the cata e-spec to provide boons, it looks more like lazy design as it honestly isn't feasible to even compete for 100% uptime without Sphere specialist. Something like Staunch auras turned into a group tool (more like "allies you grant an aura to also gain stab" rather than "provide stab to allies when you grant yourself an aura", to avoid a spamming effect from Elemental epitome - and even then you could argue there's a risk if running in parallel Powerful aura) could've been the very solution to stab access for a Qcata regardless of the weapon, enabling flexibility in weapon choice instead of making the staff a must-have (which comes as I said earlier with an incredible struggle at generating energy), while Sphere specialist should honestly have already been merged (by increased base durations) into Spectacular sphere. The spheres' method of providing boons, having to stand in their radius to get the full benefit of their boons, is rather impractical in highly mobile encounters such as Samarog (again) or even against Dhuum (for that one you'd definitely go dagger+warhorn, but quick uptime with the greens would turn into a struggle) but that's honestly something we can afford, since we're not talking about such a key topic as quickness, aegis or stab. Had there been ways to generate energy with ease from range, the spheres having the advantage of being usable from a 900 range make kiting roles a possibility: possibly fire/air hammer, and more or less available to condi pistol Qdps cata (which would likely struggle without its own quickness and gets worse without being in range for using the warhorn), meaning we're immediately denying healers or Shattering ice's effect (if slotted for extra energy generation rather than damages).

Many subjects about Qheal cata quickly merge together. Condi cleanse isn't that good as well; you should switch to water attunement to get one from Cleansing wave, then should run water's Cleansing water coupled to arcane's Elemental attunement (with still the limitation of a 240 range) if you want to get some more, which already denies the use of the earth spec. Mainhand dagger doesn't provide any regen, and without access to any light field in the elementalist's arsenal, its blast finisher cannot be used to that end; mainhand sword can do it with a lot more ease, but the melee weapon definitely is less practical from requiring a melee target (and feels overall less efficient) than the dagger. Offhand warhorn has to dedicate its CC skill to that end for a single cleanse, which would be fine if dagger mainhand wasn't that helpless in that regard! Finally there's the dagger offhand which is very handy at cleansing, but losing warhorn skills is felt quite hard. So in the end, as a Qheal cata you're quickly bottlenecked in finding your utilities in the same weapon: the staff! Back to the topic of difficult energy generation and key boons from there, eh? The projected change to Diamond skin in the current 06/25 update preview is promising for the sake of condi cleanse, although it'll then override the possible Written in stone/earth signet/earth staff synergy for stab.

One final word about generating energy: whether dps, boondps or healer, it's a real pain to be left helpless anytime the target phases out, even moreso if for any reason it became untargettable while your energy was sitting below 10 points. I don't play GW2 PvP so I have no idea whether PvP catalysts have use for it, but from a PvE view Invigorating air & Fortified earth have nearly no use and could solve the issue! Fortified earth at least provides a lengthy block, which proves welcome in rare cases when such a tool could find use for every elementalist instead of catalysts only (should you forget you're out of energy/CD for your aegis from earth sphere against Adina, going HK on Deimos -although I feel safer as weaver for that one- and likely more I can't think of right now); Invigorating air is the worse of the two as it is a personal skill only.

Even if Qheal cata isn't as easy as any other herald, it's fun in its own right. Sadly right now, there are so many issues that it's not just performing poorly against other options, it's even shut out of some content (stab encounters) and so clunky to play in several areas that it definitely pales in comparison to any competitor!

Edited May 27 by Mevelios.4809

[Antycypator.9874]

On 5/16/2024 at 1:57 PM, Kuma.1503 said:

We are forced to burn our only aegis skill on CD during our rotation. We cannot use it reactively. Put this aegis somewhere else where we can reliably access it. Consider putting it on one of our augments. Maybe give conjure earth shield AoE stab/aegis. 

100% boon duration and you don't have to burn all your skills just for quickness.

[rotten.9753]

20 hours ago, Antycypator.9874 said:

100% boon duration and you don't have to burn all your skills just for quickness.

At that moment you might just call it heal cata and swap to something else, boon dps is supposed to do around 80% of dps.

[Antycypator.9874]

17 minutes ago, rotten.9753 said:

At that moment you might just call it heal cata and swap to something else, boon dps is supposed to do around 80% of dps.

Boon DPS is supposed to provide boons at first place. It's your main role, to make other players hit faster or recharge skills faster, so you should use Concentration in your stats to make sure your party will never go out of your boons, even during splits. No one really cares about support DPS. That 80% is just Golem scenario.

[rotten.9753]

1 hour ago, Antycypator.9874 said:

Boon DPS is supposed to provide boons at first place. It's your main role, to make other players hit faster or recharge skills faster, so you should use Concentration in your stats to make sure your party will never go out of your boons, even during splits. No one really cares about support DPS. That 80% is just Golem scenario.

It's called Boon DPS for a reason, if you need so much boon duration to play comfortably, there are multiple builds that will outperform you without lowering their DPS output significantly. If you don't care about DPS, then don't play Boon DPS but rather Support builds - it's that easy 🙂 

[draxynnic.3719]

Except that heal cata is also bad, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[The Ghost.3087]

I have to agree with that 100%. I was about to make a thread about it myself. ANET please look into Catalyst and rework the spec properly. We barely keep 70 to 80 percent Quickness while other classes like Revenant and Mesmer could keep up 100% quickness regardless of the situation while Catalyst suffers big times during battles where we have to move often to avoid deadly attacks, AOEs or the boss is simply too quick jumping around the place. We need improvements, big time for the Catalyst and no need for further nurfs or too careful balancing because of a bug on your side. Provide proper boons durations and easier boons especially with the quickness part so we could actually start enjoying Catalysts once more and wanting to play it. You've gotta stop putting preferences on classes like Mesmer Virtuoso or others and actually start putting the same effort in other classes, especially classes like Elementalist Catalyst, which need it badly. 

[Mevelios.4809]

14 hours ago, The Ghost.3087 said:

I have to agree with that 100%. I was about to make a thread about it myself. ANET please look into Catalyst and rework the spec properly. We barely keep 70 to 80 percent Quickness while other classes like Revenant and Mesmer could keep up 100% quickness regardless of the situation while Catalyst suffers big times during battles where we have to move often to avoid deadly attacks, AOEs or the boss is simply too quick jumping around the place.

While I have to agree it's a real pain to balance out boon duration against other stats unlike some competitors, you can definitely go 100% uptime so long as you experience the limitations on every fight. At least I manage that with 50% boon duration, best performances I've seen were players managing that with 20-30% bd; there's a lot of adaptation involved there, as you sometimes have to keep in store your multi-hit skills for the sole purpose of generating energy, said skills being often associated with those hitting the hardest such as warhorn's Lightning orb, hammer's Hurricane of pain or sword's Rust frenzy.

It takes some time to learn which weapons do not match which fight; something like Sabetha's welcomes anything, but definitely not SH or TL (at least I never had satisfying results). There's a margin of error (of learning?); what I struggle the most with personally isn't movement during the fight, but rather targets phasing often such as AH or HT!

[Sweetbread.3678]

18 hours ago, The Ghost.3087 said:

I have to agree with that 100%. I was about to make a thread about it myself. ANET please look into Catalyst and rework the spec properly. We barely keep 70 to 80 percent Quickness while other classes like Revenant and Mesmer could keep up 100% quickness regardless of the situation while Catalyst suffers big times during battles where we have to move often to avoid deadly attacks, AOEs or the boss is simply too quick jumping around the place. We need improvements, big time for the Catalyst and no need for further nurfs or too careful balancing because of a bug on your side. Provide proper boons durations and easier boons especially with the quickness part so we could actually start enjoying Catalysts once more and wanting to play it. You've gotta stop putting preferences on classes like Mesmer Virtuoso or others and actually start putting the same effort in other classes, especially classes like Elementalist Catalyst, which need it badly. 

I'm more of the opinion that other boon supports need to actually have a skill/gearing component applied to them. Call me an elitist gatekeeper or whatever, but if your entire role is dedicated to supplying boons, then you should actually have to work/gear to apply those boons effectively. Like the fact that Cata actually has to invest in boon duration stats or properly execute its mechanics to apply those boons isn't absurd, that's literally just the description of a boon support playstyle/role; it's absurd that other specializations just get to completely ignore those things for seemingly no reason. I don't think power creeping well(ish...)-designed specs to be on par with wildly overtuned, lowest-common-denominator bullkitten that laughs in the face of any sort of logical class design philosophy, is really the answer here. That kind of "balance" just dumbs the whole game down and inevitably leads to more power creep.  It'd be like if instead of nerfing power Mech back in the day, they just buffed every other class to the point that they could all sit there auto-attacking at range to 90% of their max dps.

[mirage.8046]

On 5/31/2024 at 12:52 AM, Antycypator.9874 said:

Boon DPS is supposed to provide boons at first place. It's your main role, to make other players hit faster or recharge skills faster, so you should use Concentration in your stats to make sure your party will never go out of your boons, even during splits. No one really cares about support DPS. That 80% is just Golem scenario.

preach, that is what boon dps is meant to be about at the end of the day. you don't need to be blamed for having bad or scuffed boon uptime because you also wanna DPS when providing good uptime is the goal.