So, as someone who’s played a fair amount of catalyst as the quickness provider for my raid group, I figured I’d provide my perspective for anyone interested. The rotation I used had some key differences to Muk’s, with the important one being that you don’t actually need to use 3 spheres at once. You pair them up, air->fire, earth->water, casting one sphere right before swapping to the other element and immediately casting that sphere so the two almost perfectly overlap in duration. That way you have more time to build up energy, and you only need 20 energy before the next time you deploy spheres. The basic idea is: hit all your buttons in air -> swap to fire placing the two spheres -> hit all your buttons in fire (besides warhorn 4), auto until 2 comes back up -> use fire 2 and swap to earth, then press all the buttons in earth that you can (some are only up every other time) -> swap to water, placing spheres -> press 4 if it’s up, the swap to air -> 2-3 auto chains will give you time until you start the loop again. It ends up being pretty fluid and easy to remember, and I think it’s pretty fun. And with pistol, you can apply the same principles to make a condi rotation (with the pairs being fire->earth and water->air) with similar damage (around the mid 20k range). That being said, you don’t build up nearly as much reserve as other quickness, so if someone’s off stack they’re probably going to lose their quickness, and like willbender, you need something to hit to provide your boon, so you can end up in situations where you have no energy and no real way of getting more. So, while it’s easier than Muk made it seem, and I really like the build, I can’t recommend over something like deadeye that can easily do more damage for significantly less work while also being more reliable in keeping up the boon. Only the diehard elementalist fans should bother with this one.
you can hit over 30k on cata, on a static fight, the problem is maintaining your flow through the elements when you have to deal with mechanics and the boss moving, so actual fight dps will be less. other specs have less of an issue with movement, but thats an imbalance quite a few specs have to cope with. I think its a very rewarding spec to play, but it does take time to master.
@@cameirusisu1024 I love cata but feels like a punishment to play it and not rewarding. Every single friend or guildie that tried it, quit it. The difference of effort vs damage compared to certain classes is literally orders of magnitude. Like, Cata vs Reaper lol Cata is like 3 times harder to reach reaper damage on easy mode. Cata has Higher potential, yes, but that's pointless to reach in gw2 and unhealthy. Also, I've never seen an actual good Cata in the world out-dpsing other classes (dps meter). Never. If you have, I'll need screen shots lol
@@cameirusisu1024 Oh, yeah, in the right hands you can get your damage that high, but that requires having some real skill. In my experience I never got close to 30k, even on fights like MO where we barely had to move. I think catalyst is a decent option for ele mains who just want to play their ele, and get satisfaction from pulling off the whole rotation in a chaotic fight (that's why I played it as long as I did, it is very fun if you can pull it off), but if you aren't already very familiar with ele as a class this is not the quickness build to pick.
@@joshanonline I'll admit I have a somewhat eccentric take on builds I like to play. I used to raid wow with the old boomkin spec with was massively rng dependant, and loved it. so what i like is not necessarily what many will. but its a viable spec if you put the work in. and personally i find its priority system and element flowy rotation very satisfying to play.
Yeah, it's basically just the dps rotation but a little adapted. Stuff like double sphere and Air-Fire-Earth-Water rotation is necessary for it to work. For better uptime you could always run some concentration gear and boon duration utility which makes life much easier. Though I love my Catalyst I gotta agree that the support variant is dogwater, the output just cant compete with herald chrono etc. It needs some buffs like double the current energy gain and more boon duration on quickness fury might etc so it can stack 30s like other classes, then it can be viable.
A buddy of mine started complaining about how complex the mage rotation had become in WoW. I linked him the Hammer Cata rotation and he stopped complaining.
And arcane mage is honestly an outlier. By far the most complex rotation among all the WoW specs. My biggest issue with GW2 isnt pressing different buttons, but not seeing the buttons of different kits so I know when it's time to press them.
@@alexandrospapadopoulos4297 While it is annoying personally I think Engineer's Kits are just worse. I tried to play full celestial HAM using pistols with Med kit, Elixir Gun, Flametherower kit, Grenade kit and Mortar kit ... you are constantly thinking about two different things. Pistol cooldowns 8s / 12s / 12s Med Kit 5 every 20s Elixirt Gun 5 every 16s Flamethrower kit 2 every 6s and 4 every 25s Grenade Kit 2 every 5s Mortar Kit 2 every 10s and 5 every 24s NON OF THE COOLDOWNS THAT ARE IMPORTANT ARE THE SAME! AAAAAAAA........ Do you know how ANNOYING that is? You can't MATCH any of the cooldowns! Why is Grenade 2 5 seconds while Flamethrower 2 is 6s and Pistol 2 is 8s?!? While Med Kit 5 is 20s while Mortar 5 is 24s but Flamethrower 4 is 25s!!! and the pistol 3 & 4 being 12s each is not helping here! and then Elixir Gun 5 is randomly 16s! And these are the important cooldowns for your rotation. You want all of them to be used off-cooldown 😭 At least Elementalist has a rotation which you can attempt to follow. Qucikness is brutal, you can't make single mistake or you drop quickness instnatly. Bit boonduration helps but at that point you could just play something easier. I found Hammer Catalyst fun and the Quickness is not much different if at all. I'm just too slow to upkeep quikness or to do amazing damage.
As a main elementalist i can only agree 100% with this judgment. this elite spec especially boon side needs to be rebalanced. And please make that energy bar bigger!
I also 100% agree. Found those problems since I touched Cata but people always bash me cuz gw2 has gone too religious. I love it for its mechanics too, but it is very uncomfortable to play with its current restrictions. It's what I always said: "other classes do more damage for half the effort." Sure in the hands of the top 1% it can outperform others but for regular players, it is a nightmare class. I know many that tried it, all quit. Literally any other proff is better or more fun for them.
Frankly, it always felt like the Ele is hated and cata even more so. Which conflicts with what people tell me that some Devs play it...but every time the Ele is OP, it gets fixed within a few days while any other class stays broken for weeks or months. Logically, this is a Bias against Ele.
get rid off that energy bar , made sense when sphere were on a 5 secs cd , but now with a 15 secs cd it's just a wasted amount of complication for nothing or at least add numbers to the bar , really hard to see if you have enough to launch two sphere while you are at 18 or 19 energy.
The sad thing about it is hammer has some cool skills but the whole package plus the design of catalyst just don’t feel or play well in many cases when the class is balanced.
When I thought of elementalist wielding a hammer, I was so excited for what I was sure was a slow, heavy hitter, that more prioritized camping a single element, and I was so excited to play a geomancer bruiser. But we ended up with Weaver whirling + Tempest overload, a half dozen of some of pvp's most oppressive skills, and "Catalyst wasn't designed to have quickness, we had to add boons to classes late in development when we decided every profession should have both alacrity and quickness options." Making "multiattack" a build concept on what was already the most fevered of professions was... a choice. I wish it generated quickness by spending EE, or that you could place up to one sphere of each type for twice as long as they do. It'd help you cover more of the field, none of this stack-on-this nonsense, but I don't think that'd necessarily fix what feels bad about it.
As an Ele main since pre-order I am very pleased to see this video pop up in my feed looking like it does. It's honestly very flattering. Makes me feel cool and experienced with my 2300 ele hours. The trick is not to full cycle but go in packets of two orbs, Air Fire then auto to squeeze another 2, Earth then water (which you leave as soon as possible) back into Air then wait (Air is best for building energy, you can save Air 5 for when it counts). It probably doesn't help that you need to burst out your F5s as soon as possible while chaining animations. Full Zerker Sword Quickalyst has been my go-to for most Open World and PvE for a while since I've been farming Gen 3s. When you get the fingers and muscle memory for it it's honestly one of my favorite builds to play. Fairly self-sufficient, very rewarding intensity, very HIGH intensity, and if you're comfortable enough with the skills you can just take some backroads-ass loop to readjust when you fuck up your rotation. I would also like to point to the fact that Staff has terrible energy gain because it does very poor hits-per-second unless you're cleaving hard. And god I would sure love for that UI to change though you're totally right.
What Ele needs is have some of the support abilities migrated into the utilities. That's why Tempest is able to be somewhat competitive while weaver and catalyst are stuck with purely selfish Utility skills.
This is why I love Muk. Doesn't clickbait with THIS CLASS IS TERRIBLE. Spends the first 4 mins showing what he did and acknowledging that he struggles with the class. Then goes to explain +'s and -'s. TH-cam needs more Muk's
Louder so Anet finally addresses the qdps spec for Ele. I’ve been playing Ele for years and it’s such a pain to play this spec and realize that other classes have it so much easier to upkeep Quickness. While HAT is also not perfect, at least it’s functioning and does its job. Playing Cata qDPS on the other hand is you just griefing your party. Anet just hates Ele at this point.
I will say, the tiny energy bar and no energy regen while a sphere is up made sense when the sphere was a toggle and the energy was basically "how long can you keep the sphere up before you need to build energy again" But the UI and energy system didn't really get updated when they changed how the sphere worked. I have done quick cata since 2 sec quickness was implemented BUT, it was Deimos tank quick cata where I had full boon duration. (I did not feel confident enough to even attempt using staff to have a modicum of party healing to add to that.)
Is that how cata used to work? Man, I came back after many years, and find they reworked scrapper's wells to be around the scrapper. I LOVED this change, that I am a walking combo field, and that everyone should stick near me for cool combos! Especially blast and whirling gyro, in how you become a time bomb, as well as walking blender spitting whirling combos everywhere for 3 seconds straight! Why they remove this for cata? That honestly sounds cool being the center point for a sprouting fiery phoenix.
On hammer you generally want to use your 5 first in all elements, during which you summon the 3 orb, and use 2 while switch to the next element, use 5 last and your cds arent going to match up for when you drop your spheres to combo in. Also you should always wait in earth until full energy not fire, earth autos generate energy faster iirc And finally you dont always do 3 spheres in a row, first loop its 3 (fire, air, water) then its consistentaly 2 spheres earth/fire, then generate a little energy in air before air/water Also thanks for making me feel better about my 25k dps xD
@@didoma73 orb is instant cast, so you do get it up asap, but only if an attack animation is already going Ideally you want the 2 of the previous element casting while you swap and cast orb of the next, then the 5, but just trying to keep it simple for TH-cam comments
So, as a Power DPS Cata Main (36k Bench), I wasn't even aware this build could do quickness. Nonetheless, I tried and with Rune of the Scholar, I was unable to maintain quickness within the two attempts I tried. However, with Rune of Fireworks I was able to stack up about 10 sec of quickness with perfect rotation on the first try with about 25k DPS. I just played my casual DPS rotation with the exception of going in Water every loop (instead of every 3rd on full DPS) to provide more quickness. While I was able to maintain quickness, the video is still pretty accurate. It took me months to reach the 36k DPS (far from Snowcrows bench) and requires A TON of practice to be quick enough to collect enough energy for the spheres and have the timings right of all the abilities. In addition, the rotation is easily messed up my mistakes and it's impossible to recover without significant DPS loss. Not to talk about how difficult it is with boss mechanics. Moreover, the build lacks stacks of quickness to not drop off in fights for your teammates. Only recommend to try-hard Cata mains. I will probably never play it again :D Appreciate the hate for Cata in the video. This class is unnecessarily complex and weird to play.
I've been playing quickness Catalyst for the past few weeks now, just to freshen things up, some notes: - Quickness with the snowcrows build/gear is so incredibly tight it's damn near impossible to maintain 100% quickness. If there is a boss that phases or even moves a lot you WILL struggle as you need to hit things to fill energy. - This rotation is weird but this rule should still matter: Drop jade spheres in pairs, use skills in one attunement, drop the sphere, swap attunement and immediately drop the second sphere. This way the jade spheres overlap and you can double down on the quickness but start refilling energy sooner. You do not need to use three spheres rapidly, you only use two spheres rapidly so you really only need 20 energy. Yes, all Catalyst players want a bigger bar that has three segments. Currently I'm running 15.66% boon duration by using an Accuracy sigil and swapping out some gear for Diviner's, and I do fine. (It turns out literally just using Rune of Fireworks instead will be significantly more damage and 25% boon duration, though.) One thing that you kinda need to know is when the boss phases since you don't want to drop double spheres just before it phases and then you need to start building energy from scratch once it's vulnerable again. It's better to let quickness drop and resume it after the phase with full energy. That being said, I've been playing sword Power Weaver for years now so I picked this up quite quickly. Once I got used to and can execute the rotation well I started doing absolutely massive damage in pugs often outperforming pure dps, sometimes I'm firmly in top 4. I found it no where near as difficult as Muk did. Downside is this has no utility, you do not have stability at all, you have aegis but it's tied to your rotation on the earth sphere. You can not do group wide projectile block, you can not pull adds. You do have 432 cc damage on your Conjure Lightning Hammer which doubles to 864 IF an ally picks it up and uses the correct skills. In conclusion: This build is not recommended, it's there to challenge/torture yourself.
It's me again with some extra potentially useful info but I don't want to edit my original comment to not get the precious Muk heart removed. Running Rune of Fireworks means you overall give more boons, which means with my rotation I can maintain: - 13 Might at all times, 22 on average. - 100% Fury. - 26% Regeneration - 82% Protection(!) - 77% Resolution - 65% Vigor - 34% Aegis (not helpful but means your team occasionally blocks attacks "for free" which can make it it easier to stay alive.) - 92% Swiftness If I take a ~3k dps loss and run Arcane instead, I can do: - 17 Might at all times, basically 25 on average. - 64% Regeneration - 96% Protection - 85% Resolution - 76% Vigor - 94% Swiftness Point being a Catalysts boons aren't actually that bad, and it's a decent filler if your healer is struggling to maintain some of them.
@@didoma73 At the time I was playing Berserker's with some gear on Diviner's with Dragonhunter runes and an Accuracy sigil to hit 15%+ boon duration and still crit cap. I was beating SOME pure dps' with it, it depends on the group. On groups that happen to have inexperienced dps I can even be top dps, on other groups that happen to have experienced players I'll be where I should be, maybe beating one or two pure dps. Currently I play full Berserker's with Dragonhunter runes with a Concentration sigil for 10% boon duration, but frankly I'm going to swap to Fireworks runes and Impact sigil just to make the quickness uptime easier. In my original comment I wrote that Fireworks runes is a smaller dps loss than switching some gear to Diviner's to hit at least 15% but further testing showed that it's actually a bigger loss. However I feel it's worth it to not make it as painful. I always play sword/warhorn, it's easier than hammer and extends ALL boons on your party.
In a way, I almost think qCata should be the norm, and not the exception, at least in terms of needing a decent chunk of boon duration to be comfy. Boon DPS roles are mostly all running full damage stats/runes/sigils now. I think there should be a trade off between boon duration and dps. If you want 100% boon uptime, then invest in concentration gear/runes/sigil, and vice versa. If Anet thinks this will drop the dps output of the boon DPS role by too much, they can just add a concentration % modifier on the boon trait to boost damage.
@Alphenis The gear should have tradeoffs, too. Otherwise, there is no point for stat combos like Diviner to exist because boon dps can maintain key boons while running full dps gear. More specifically, I am arguing that boon dps should not be able to have 100% boon uptime without investing in concentration.
as some1 who actually likes Ele, Cata, is not an Elite i would recommend at all. 1 issues is when looking a DPS Cata your goal is to keep up 2 other buffs on you, Elemental Empowerment and Empowering Auras, which Elemental Empowerment give a +3 to all stats with a max of 10, and Empowering Auras give +2 strike and +2 Condie with a max of 5, Empowerment buy making Auras, but YOU have to do a Combo. Might sound easy but 1 issue is all your Combos are with your Sphere and Blasts are with your weapon, which was typically hammer at the time, and this giving quickness while trying to get off Combo Fields i think can get rather tricky, as everything is based off the weapon, this might work a bit better with Pistol but, i don't see it effectively working unlike, CaT or Condie Alac Tempest, and with a rotation more complicated the No Self Weave Weaver.
Random thought while watching - i think they really should rework the utility skills. I feel like only the Tempest shouts are done well. Maybe some of the Arcane. A class with so many weapon skills should be able to do all their damage and boon stuff with those skills. The Utility skills should be encounter-based flavoring like Mesmer or Necro. Instead most of the Ele utility is “you do more damage for X attacks/seconds”. Or some weird hoop jumping to get more damage (Weaver elite). Maybe I just fell out of love for Ele cause I realized other clases are easier to play and I’m dumb lol
I don't think all the others classes are always easier, but at least they're worth the effort. Also, playing ele is not fun at all. You can't even enjoy your elements like a mage or something. It just looks like spamming all your kills all the time. The others classes seems to like much more interesting because using skills has more decision making.
I kinda agree to you. Kinda! Core skills are mostly fine however their usage is kinda niche since you really have to know how to use them to do anything (Glyph of storms for example which has 4 different cooldowns depending on the attunement) Weaver has nice utility skills IMO. Weave-Self is a bit.. Yea you already named it but the idea is still nice, you can't put that down. Tempest is amazing. I only whish for small change to Flash Freeze and Rebound. Flash Freeze to me feels like it's not doing anything at all. Give this skill 2k heal and it'd cool IMO. For Rebound I wish it had less cast time. It's a cool skill but I never could make it work because of the cast time. Catalyst just isn't an option to play for me. Everything it does can also be done by Tempest/Weaver but better. It's toolkit literally has nothing worth going for, not even the quickness. The only good skills Catalyst has are Fortified Earth which does blocks and gives barrier to self and the elite skill which resets weapon cooldowns which is kinda nice. HOWEVER this IMO should be a 40s cooldown utility skill instead of a 90s elite skill.
Aww, I was hoping to catch the stream when you did this but looks like I missed it. I think the reason why you had so much trouble is you misread the Snow Crows rotation. For sword it's air->fire->earth->water repeat. For hammer it's fire->air->water->earth. With the way you did your rotation, I'm not surprised you had as much trouble as you did. Sword/warhorn basic weapon skill rotation: (this is the basic rotation. if you want to min/max the heck out of it like snow crows, the loop is slightly different) Start Air: press all buttons except 4. Air jade sphere swap fire attunement then fire jade sphere Fire: Press all buttons except 4 (if 5 is on cooldown, auto attack until it's off CD press 5 then 2 before swapping out of fire) Earth: press all buttons. auto attack if necessary until you reach 25-30 energy. Once you reach 25-30 energy place earth jade sphere, swap water, then water jade sphere. Water: press 4 (if off CD) and swap to air as fast as possible. Water 4 is the only skill that does worthwhile damage so you want to get out of water as fast as possible. Swap Air: auto attack chain three times then repeat from beginning by mashing every button except 4. Jade sphere usage: jade spheres come in pairs. Do not use three jades spheres in a row. The first pair is press f5 right before you swap out of air and right after you swap into fire. The second pair is f5 right before you swap out of earth and swap into fire, then f5 immediately after (edit meant to say water attunement not fire). I personally think hammer is more fun, but sword/warhorn is just better. Sword has a better benchmark, better burst, is lower intensity than hammer, and it'a more forgiving for mistakes than hammer. Don't play hammer if you are new. When I play quick cata, I use rune of the firework and replace sigil of impact with sigil of concentration and that gives a very cushy safety margin on quickness. If you play well you can stack up a 15 second buffer pretty quickly. When learning this build, start of ONLY learning then attunement swap order. Next you only use weapon skills. After spending 20-30 minutes just practicing the weapon skills, then include the jade sphere. After another 10-15 minutes you can work in utility skills. It's also beneficial to practice it without quickness and alacrity to slow it down and make it easier to learn. As a side note for those who like green numbers: you can mix in about 4-5k worth of aoe healing into the loop by using sword water 3 and warhorn water 5. It's quite satisfying to be able to give out a solid burst heal to your group while on a dps build.
The best way to do the spheres imo is to wrack up enough for two spheres and then place one as you're about to leave an element, and the another as you go into an element.
From the F5 energy, to the hammer orbitals, to the traits that have you jump through hoops to gain percentile stats, Catalyst isn't so much an elite spec as it is three gimmicks in a trench coat. Pistol shows the same poor design choices: underwhelming benefits tied to the puddle-deep mechanic of choosing which to push first: '2' or '3'.
The hammer build takes a lot of practice, but one thing I noticed right away that would give you better results, skill 2 on hammer in each element does not get interrupted by swapping elements. You kept using it right off the bat in the new element, but you're actually supposed to use it right before you swap out. Since they're all channels, using it right away loses you time to use other skills that can't be placed in the element swaps. The one exception is fire where you use it when you get in, and then use it again right as you leave to go to air. 3 is always first priority, then 4/5 depending on the element, then autos until the next swap (or until energy is full in earth) and then 2 and swap. Granted, the quickness variant really does just suck and feel terrible to play, even when you've put a lot of time and practice into it, but if anyone is wanting to use it and is struggling, these are some of the basics
Actually if you use the double sphere technique, why would you use Hammer 2 right before you switch attunement? That would mean you're using your most number of hit skill while a jade sphere is out. You should be saving Hammer 2 for at the start of every attunement, so that you can build up energy for the next double sphere drop.
I got a couple of qdps in my lineups. Outside of firebrand, which I only got because I was getting sick of being mistrusted as a vanilla guardian in t4 fractals, I got 3 options atm in deadeye, scrapper, and harbringer. All of them are easy, all of them hurt. I am planning on two more, in heal zerker, and heal chrono. Cata wasn't among my ideas of potential candidates, as that is by far my least played class. Seeing this has further convinced me why. IMO, if your job is difficult, something's wrong. Deadeye can cap quickness and many other boons in the first 5 seconds, and maintain it from there super easy. Harbringer is even easier, just shroud and exist next to teammates. Scrapper may seem more complicated, but all it boils down to is press well skill/function gyro, and then just run in bonking things with hammer and explosives. Unlike q-catalyst, it just feels... right. Like it works without being overly jarring and going against a natural flow. Not to mention it also feeds my high apm itch incase I feel like actually pressing more then 2 buttons throughout a fight. ;p
By the accounts of others in this comment section, he seems to have been playing the build in an unnecessarily difficult way, but even the optimal way sounds tough to maintain quickness compared with other qDPS builds. I've tried condi qDPS Catalyst and, while the pistol's ammo mechanic is very silly, I did have a better time with condi than power. Ultimately I still went straight back to condi alac Tempest though. p.s. Love your prinny avatar :3
The energy mechanic is just plain awful. People have been calling for it to be removed since catalyst got released to even give this spec a SHOT at feeling good... so far anet has not listened.
Quick Cata was viable for all of like 5 mins after one paych a few months into EoD. Then 2-3 weeks later the quick duration got dumpstered and took thr entire build with it
A simple tip to help with quickness is to run fresh air and always end your rotation in fire then swap back to air quickly after using your fire skills when doing 3 spheres. Air sword chain has 5 hits and 3rd skill has many hits, so it makes it easy to fill the energy up fast. That way you spend 90% of your time in fire and air which are your power damage attunements and also your energy generation attunements. I think the 2 problems that made you struggle so much are 1: always using whatever sphere comes up first, and not having a stable rotation for quickness and 2 : treating water and earth like real weapon sets on a power build. They're there just for their spheres, treat them like and engineer kit and get out as fast as you can.
@@didoma73 3 spheres drop, I do mine on a heal build so idk about dos, but if you always do air-earth-water-fire-air, while spending most time in air and fire I guess dps should be ok
They really had to place the Jade Sphere recharge over the F5? Couldn't give it a separate bar like Celestial Energy or over all the skills like Initiative? Wow. At least the colour changes with the element. Yeah?
It's like since Tempest in Heart of Thorns, Arena net didn't really know what to do with elementalists. Tempest: Focus an element to unleash its full power. Get warhorn and shouts, make noise and go in the heart of battle while supporting your allies. There's a theme, an idea, there's cohesion in the spec. That's the war, I can imagine the Commander leading the remains of the Pact troops into battle. Unleash the elements to avenge the fallens, blow that warhorn to rally the troops, shout orders imbuded with elemental magic. That works and that rocks! Weaver: The sword doesn't really have a distinct identity, and the whole theme of the spec is: You have 1 skill that mix 2 elements. Weak idea, I don't call this weaving the elements. And don't even mention the "Stances", what a bland concept, it's just "button to make a thing", there's no identity and nothing that tells "this is a WEAVER skill" (except the stance that puts you out of the weaver mode for 5s, lol). Calayst: An agglomerate of unrelated mechanisms. Ok, I give you that there's an idea behind the hammer, but what's its relevance to the jade sphere? None. The sphere is also a good idea: Jade tech to power the elements through, ok, let's go full jade tech, that's Cantha spec after all! But where are my jade tech skills? Why didn't they give Catalyst something like a rifle and really went into the jade tech theme? Did Arena Net just pulled ideas randomly out of a hat for that spec? Pistol: Do I need to say anything? From fire to earth: Pew-pew. In weaver mode, you get some less pew-pewish effects but my man, you gotta really aim (badum-tss) for it by having the good bullet with the good mixed elements: it's not "oh, I need that effect, so I'll swap to this element and press that button" noooo, too easy mate! You gotta do: "I swap to element water, then swap to element air, now I have the proper skill, but first I must attack with skill 2 to get an air bullet, and now I can finally hit 3 to grant myself 4s of superspeed. While evading backward." Flowing Finesse, for you. EDIT: I love elementalist. I main elementalist. FFS I even "fought" Muk during a stream, trying to make him change his ranking of quick-catalyst in one category of his summary of all the boondps he tried. I'm that level of elementalist enjoyer. So take this comment as from someone who doesn't mock or despise that class, but from someone who genuinly love it, but is sad to see that A Net have no idea what they are doing with it.
I play almost exclusively hammer quick cata in fractals and raids and I adore it. You have sphere usage slightly wrong, as others have pointed out: you do them in pairs, not in groups of three. You can have up to 30 energy and never need to build up more than 20 at a time, because a sphere costs 10. So it's (sphere pairings in square brackets): Fire -> attacks -> Air -> attacks until 20 energy -> [Air sphere -> Water -> Water sphere] -> attacks -> Earth -> attacks until 20 energy -> [Earth sphere -> Fire -> Fire sphere] -> repeat. It's theoretically more than enough for 100% quickness, but I still run a couple Diviner's pieces for padding, because it can be hard to build up energy if you're moving away from the boss a lot for mechanics. All that said, you're right about basically everything: the amount of work involved is super sweaty for ultimately less payoff than other builds. If I want a more chill play style some days, I just go quick Scrapper, which does more quickness and generally more DPS, and is about the most braindead build you can play. And, yes, the UI element for the Catalyst's energy is horrendous. It needs to clearly show three sub-bars like Warrior's bursts do, so that you *know* when you have enough energy for two spheres. Edit: some other more advanced tips: you can always deploy a sphere, even if you're channeling another skill or you're CCed, and (this is hammer-specific), the 2 skill in each element is channeled, so you can save it for last and swap elements while it continues, getting you to your next element a bit faster. This is most relevant when heading from Earth to Fire: you can start channeling Earth 2, drop your Earth sphere, swap to Fire, and drop your Fire sphere, all while Earth 2 is still channeling (if you're fast). Also works when heading from Air to Water, but I find that I normally need to sit in Air for a second to reliably get to 20 energy.
The bar just needs to go away. People have been complaining about that since Cata was released and instead of just yanking it off and giving it a cooldown, they've screwed with it until it's now as it is. Just remove the energy mechanic. No one likes it. It's terrible. Throw it away and just let the sphere have a normal cooldown.
using wrong rotation all the way through - wonders why it does not work.... you need to use a 4 element jade sphere rotation, split into 2 pairs back to back on element swap. that will give you exactly 100% uptime on boons, so you probably need to mix in some concentration gear for a fight depending on how effective at uptime you are. cata is a hard spec, but its good and viable and not that hard, but you were ignoring chat (not your fault, some people were talking absolute rubbish) telling you how to play it. Cata is not a spec you can pick and play in short order, unlike a simple easy spec like herald.
I’m surprised no one but you mentioned the cast jade sphere in pair thing. I don’t even play cata and I’m confused But still, this class is underwhelming
I was a pretty good Qcata player on some early patches for it. Now its fun enough for open world but in instanced settings I almost never pick it up. If you crave that high apm gameplay but also wanna actually contribute a good bit, chrono has been a good replacement pick for me. I'm coping for a rework any day now but its been a wait already.
"I feel like you're doing all that work to be half a deadeye" sounds like elementalist. Only class in the game I don't play as there is always another class that does xyz role better and easier than ele.
"I have never played a class that it's base design felt more conflicting toward itself than this" the support elementalist experience. I don't think it's unfair to say that Anet has no idea what to do with elementalist.
Ele main here (~95% bench on hammer+sw/wh), Qcata is a decent quick provider but it has one of the highest entry levels across all builds (as shown in the vid). Hammer, sw/wh and sc/d (FA) are all viable picks. It has decent dmge & great boon coverage. Unfortunately the CC/utility options are pretty minimal. Id recommend a good amount of diviner pieces just to secure good boon uptime. (I quite often run around 60% BD on hammer in exchange of a ~10% dps loss). Whenever you get more comfortable with the build+have encounters without alot of spread mechanics+ dont have party members running into narnia & you want to push your dps output, you can usually lower it down to ~20% BD Wouldnt recommend the build to inexperienced players, efficiency focused players or anyone who doesnt hate Qdps herald with a passion (nerf pls!).
For the longest time I really thought I would love hammer catalyst cause I thought the look of the spells and play style looked so cool but in trying it I discovered exactly what you're describing. It just felt so disjointed and clunky to play I could not believe how un-fun it was to play. And that's not even specifically as a quickness provider, just playing the class mechanic in general. Shocking how much I did not like it.
from a desing perspective, the energy bar does nothing in cata, it could just be a base cd twice as long as base duration with a built-in mechanic of having a slight reduction of said cd every time you would gat said energy and it would work bettwr
full cele, hammer deploy field, faceroll, swap attunement; deploy field, faceroll, swap attunement; deploy filed, faceroll, swap attunement; faceroll energy to full, deploy if current attunements boons are desired, back to first attunement my first qdps and still one of my most favourite ones, sole reason i got the aurene hammer back in eod launch
Ended my 5 month haitus to try cata again. Something definitely changed because I'm also doing 19-22k DPS. I used to reach 32k on Golem as quick DPS (27kish in actual fights). And that was with a few diviner pieces. Will update after I figure out new rotation. Update: This is not working with full Zerker gear. Sphere Specialist used to double the duration of quickness on the sphere and now it doesn't. Your quickness will drop off at multiple points in the rotation. You definitely need boon duration on this now. Trying the new trick where you pair spheres together and am up to 23k DPS. Still a far cry from before. For now let me assure you. It's not just you Muk. Cata is scuffed af right now. I've been a huge advocate for removing the limitation on energy building while a sphere is out before... But now... I don't think this is playable until they remove that restriction. For now I definitely reccomend ignoring the reccomendation to run full zerker. You need diviner's gear or your quickness will plummet anytime someone walks 5 feet from you or you have 0.001 secs of downtime from the boss.
Catalyst gave us hammer which thanks to Soto doesn't need to be played on Catalyst anymore. That's the only nice thing I can tell about Catalyst. Catalyst to me is just a core elementalist with some (not super useful) extra gimmics. I rather play Weaver, which is more complex and offers no boons then this. Weaver at least feels fun to play. However I mainly Tempest because Tempest rocks ✌🏻
i was there. I trained the hammer quick build till my head would go numb, because i really like playing ele. You can pull it off, if you master it first. Mastering means: NO - ERRORS! The quick duration got nerfed shortly after EoD release and the quick catalyst never recovered.
The build you have is different than the one I got of snowcrows, when I too was trying to learn qcata. The hammer version. It used FG , that was part of your earth rotation and had the water version of the fire skill instead of that arcane one that was added to the water rotation. I made the mistake of trying to learn it while also trying to learn how to do the raids themselves tho, and spending time in downstate on that build is a massive energy suck, meaning my quick was terrible. That being said I prefer giving quick or alac on my heal chrono at this point, its much easier. The pure dps cata build is a lot more fun than the quick one. Same weapons but less conflicting.
You didn't mention it because you didn't try it in an actual encounter but: If you go down as Cata you lose ALL Cata energy and if you have an orb out, you still can't regain it. Which isn't mentioned on tool tips, making it one of the few hidden rules of the elite spec that defines the entire elite spec. So its like berks where you get a double penalty for getting downed, but on a light armor and low hp class.
i like cata with hammer, even though warhorn is slightly more dps and a little bit of support, but hammer just feels nicer. and yes, the energy bar is horrible. they should just put it under the attunements like holo heat or rev energy or necro life force and they should also put little bars that tell you when you have 10/20/30 energy like with heat on holo. but apart from that it's a pretty solid build that provides A LOT of boons
For me, Cata has nothing worth for. The only things I like about it are the hammer, Fortified Earth and Elemental Celerity. Tho there is a similar core skill to Fortified Earth, Elemental Celerity doesn't feel like an elite skill and no matter how you take it 90s is way to long and since Soto, hammer isn't Cata exclusive anymore. I rather play Tempest which does a lot in a similar manner but better.
I've always struggled with Elementalist, Engineer and a bit less with Mesmer. All I can say is that you start to get the hang of it after a few days. The guides could use some work, but should also mention to at least try the build for a week.
I love elem, I love catalyst and I love hammer as a weapon. I hate the current state of quick catalyst. It delays providing quickness because you have to fill the energy bar, the quickness provided is way to low, the design goes against itself and the rotation is way to complicated and requires having a PHD on catalyst just to provide the minimum amount of damage and quickness. I just don't understand why Anet never balances this spec that just doesn't work. But at the same time you have many specs that provides quick or alac by just pressing a button and auto attacking on full berserker gear, makes sense right? So for now I play my catalyst in open world for fun but I would love to take it to instanced pve.
I think the problem here are the top 2% of players that were able to do 40k DPS with full quickness duration. That's why they nerfed it into the ground. I wish Cata was more like Chrono. Good toolkit does what it's supposed to do without overdoing it and it plays without needing to understand quantum physics.
@@ColdMystery Well I would not mind if the top 2% players could do 40k DPS with 100% quickness uptime if it was earned. Quick catalyst is hard to play so you should be rewarded for mastering it. Or make it simpler and I very much agree with what Muk suggested.
I was very disappointed when I unlocked Catalyst. It seems pretty cool at a glance but the traits are so dull. 7(!) of them are based around gaining stacks of buffs for percentage benefits.
Would Diviners gear even help this at all? More conc for more quickness time might make it feel better, idk. You'd lose dps, but I mean whats the point of power support stats if you dont use it, right ANET?
Thank you very much Muk! I finally found myself a main because of this video. I love challenging gameplay and spend hours now to find a way to play quickness catalyst - Big thanks to xChris he got me to pick up Ele again
Unfortunately I feel like the core design of elementalist in general isn't really in line with the meta for instanced pve. When you're roll is just do as much damage as possible and give 1 boon, that takes away from the concept of having a skill for every situation. But, of course, for open world play that design really shines.
I'm not very good at the game but I really like my hammer cata. It's the only thing I've been playing for awhile now. I like that I have an answer to everything if I do my part. Watching this does make me realize though it would probably be much better if energy on spheres was just removed entirely. They already have a cooldown. Not having em to start the fight cause no charge just feels bad. I've had many downstates cause of that where once I got the first sphere down I had sustain forever.
Played ele from launch and i've been yelling and screaming for devs to allow the bar to fill while you're in the sphere since day 1 of cata. Also the sphere needs to just drop on your location instead of having ground targeting. Ele has ONE truly ranged weapon and thats the staff and it is useless with catalyst
Hey mukk i know its pointless, forgotten and also why would you ever now that chrono is better but do you plan on doing alac mirage or is it just dead in the water like our dreams? it still works and its still easy
You should have seen how hilarious (painful) it was to play it on Twin Largos before they removed the self-knockback on their CC Many swims were taken :D
Well..seems like devs listened U XD but tbh for me spheres design wasnt issue as cata main, thing that is frustrating is ele always lacks sth, like not providing stab, horribly low cc, n stuff
I think ele is pretty much just incompatible with the core design of GW2. Since launch, I can't remember a single time when it was not either broken or was too much hassle to play it compared to other professions. You just have way too many buttons to press, so the outcomes are either you do waaaay too much compared to other professions and or you need to do double the work to do the same.
The energy stuff should not be related to the spheres casts because it ruins the spec synergies lol. Ideally, hence it is high apm and skillcap atm, you'd do something like filling energy bar when hitting within the sphere which triggers AoE that produces quick, then the uptime for boons should be at 100% with no concentration and 90% percentile gameplay(near perfect inputs) hence it is extremly skill/input intensive. Also I would not bother if this was doing less than 30K dps considering how complicated it is and how quickness is important for a party.
I want the energy bar to replenish out of combat or just let it replenish with slower rate when the spheres are out or just switch the energy system with ammunition charge system. I love playing QuickCata in open world solo play since I use Celestial gears but this elite spec need more balancing especially with how infuriating it is to maintain both EE and boons without the use of hammer
Sad to hear about this but it is true this is my 1st character and I spent a lot of resources on it and it is worse Been thinking to turn this to a quickheal see if it is work 😢
"Just... don't play it" , yep i don't , never ever again am i gonna be a burden to my squad. f5 , skill 2 3 4 5 f2 f5 skill ... go herald utility 1 2 3 4 go to sleep and see quickness might and fury ramping up to 30 secs 'yawn' clear unbalance ! legacy build on snowcrow btw , even them are tired to play this non rewarding over complicated mess
If I had one complaint about guild wars 2 it would be it's terrible, terrible UI/UX-design-language. The UI is tiny, it delivers info poorly and I won't even start on how inaccessible it is for sight impaired people. Only one example (I have pages of issues and fixes): why, god, why is the icon border highlight for combos IDENTICAL to the highlight when said skill can damage a breakbar? It makes ZERO sense. I feel catalyst is like a catalyst for these issues and multiplies them tenfold
yea i hated how they changed how catalyst gives quickness used to be just the air sphere that gave it, now they made it so u have to keep spamming all the spheres
They need to rework the energy, and let people generate it out of combat as well. That's what I have been thinking since it came out. Hopefully they'll buff it at some point but they've abandoned the ele support builds so bad that I'll probably just learn to play chrono at this point.
Lord Hizen be like: "I was put here at the dawn of life on Earth to feed on the last breath of every one of you ***. I’m a little more than a... 'thing.'"
Yikes, I think even my Celestial Condi Quick Catalyst with exotic level itemization and budget runes can do 19k DPS with hammer, and has more relaxed gameplay due to more boon duration and tankier stats. But I would never bring this to raids ever, and energy is always an issue.
well besides all the comments down here and all the bad things Mukluk says about Catalyst in the video here's some unpopular opinion: Catalyst isn't actually that bad Of course it is one of the harder classes to pull off and it needs some help from the balance team, especially the quickness variant but it is totally capable of doing the job in most content. It takes more time to get used to and to understand but once it clicked in ur brain it is very fluent and a lot of fun. I think the problem is most players dont spend the time or get frustrated if its not going well or just dont understand the concepts of the class. A great example is Mukluk trying this with 3 spheres while I dont think any Catalyst player is doing that nowadays. It feels a little like: I am playing this wrong, where is my dmg and quickness? Of course you will struggle if you dont have the right rotation or understand whats going on. Imagine playing sth like bladesworn and complaining about no dmg because u always use dragon trigger immediatley without letting it charge up... It's often player issue and I am not saying the player is bad but they need to take the time with the class, many people seem to expect to understand everything and to perform perfectly after half an hour of gameplay... In addition you will need to know the encounters very well to manage the energy - e.g. u dont want to use ur spheres on the last second of a phase so you can´t build energy up in the meantime and then you will have to waste time in the beginning of the phase resulting in loss of dmg and boon uptime and you have to be very mindful and aware on how and when you are using almost every single spell... The skill level is something else compared to other classes (where you sometimes just mash and dont have to think at all) but its totally fine, I think it would even be at a good spot if they increased quickness on spheres by 1 or 2 seconds. I actually love that there are classes like this. Every time when I go in a raid or whatever and see a quickness catalyst perform well, I am always like: "Man this guy really knows what he is doing, that is so sick!" And it encourages me to spend more time on my classes to be able to pull them of perfectly. In my opinion it would be a loss to the game to make all classes 'easy to pick up' and I don't think they should make catalyst easier.
I *love* Catalyst... but.... holy hannah Cata is hard AF to play and has an APM that can only be described as "legendary", I'm serious were it not for the fact that I game on a Razer Tartarus V2 and a Corsair Scimitar I couldn't play the class. "I guess it's cold..." LOL man almost really laughed out loud in the middle of the office on that one... anywho one of the things I love about GW2 is the class identity, *but* they could make some minor common sense changes to catalyst, keep the class / build identity, and have it work so much better.
Catalyst noun "a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change." Sooo a whole lot of stuff for not that much stuff in the end, it actually fits pretty well.
A catalyst improves the efficiency of everything else while staying chill on its own. This class is doing the opposite; not brining anything meaningful for the other folks while tearing itself apart trying to do basic functions
![ILLSLICK - KILLSHOT REMIX [FULL VERSION]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/RIK8RrqIAzE/mqdefault.jpg)
So, as someone who’s played a fair amount of catalyst as the quickness provider for my raid group, I figured I’d provide my perspective for anyone interested. The rotation I used had some key differences to Muk’s, with the important one being that you don’t actually need to use 3 spheres at once. You pair them up, air->fire, earth->water, casting one sphere right before swapping to the other element and immediately casting that sphere so the two almost perfectly overlap in duration. That way you have more time to build up energy, and you only need 20 energy before the next time you deploy spheres. The basic idea is: hit all your buttons in air -> swap to fire placing the two spheres -> hit all your buttons in fire (besides warhorn 4), auto until 2 comes back up -> use fire 2 and swap to earth, then press all the buttons in earth that you can (some are only up every other time) -> swap to water, placing spheres -> press 4 if it’s up, the swap to air -> 2-3 auto chains will give you time until you start the loop again. It ends up being pretty fluid and easy to remember, and I think it’s pretty fun. And with pistol, you can apply the same principles to make a condi rotation (with the pairs being fire->earth and water->air) with similar damage (around the mid 20k range). That being said, you don’t build up nearly as much reserve as other quickness, so if someone’s off stack they’re probably going to lose their quickness, and like willbender, you need something to hit to provide your boon, so you can end up in situations where you have no energy and no real way of getting more. So, while it’s easier than Muk made it seem, and I really like the build, I can’t recommend over something like deadeye that can easily do more damage for significantly less work while also being more reliable in keeping up the boon. Only the diehard elementalist fans should bother with this one.
you can hit over 30k on cata, on a static fight, the problem is maintaining your flow through the elements when you have to deal with mechanics and the boss moving, so actual fight dps will be less. other specs have less of an issue with movement, but thats an imbalance quite a few specs have to cope with. I think its a very rewarding spec to play, but it does take time to master.
@@cameirusisu1024 I love cata but feels like a punishment to play it and not rewarding. Every single friend or guildie that tried it, quit it. The difference of effort vs damage compared to certain classes is literally orders of magnitude. Like, Cata vs Reaper lol Cata is like 3 times harder to reach reaper damage on easy mode.
Cata has Higher potential, yes, but that's pointless to reach in gw2 and unhealthy. Also, I've never seen an actual good Cata in the world out-dpsing other classes (dps meter). Never. If you have, I'll need screen shots lol
@@cameirusisu1024 Oh, yeah, in the right hands you can get your damage that high, but that requires having some real skill. In my experience I never got close to 30k, even on fights like MO where we barely had to move. I think catalyst is a decent option for ele mains who just want to play their ele, and get satisfaction from pulling off the whole rotation in a chaotic fight (that's why I played it as long as I did, it is very fun if you can pull it off), but if you aren't already very familiar with ele as a class this is not the quickness build to pick.
@@joshanonline I'll admit I have a somewhat eccentric take on builds I like to play. I used to raid wow with the old boomkin spec with was massively rng dependant, and loved it. so what i like is not necessarily what many will. but its a viable spec if you put the work in. and personally i find its priority system and element flowy rotation very satisfying to play.
Yeah, it's basically just the dps rotation but a little adapted. Stuff like double sphere and Air-Fire-Earth-Water rotation is necessary for it to work. For better uptime you could always run some concentration gear and boon duration utility which makes life much easier.
Though I love my Catalyst I gotta agree that the support variant is dogwater, the output just cant compete with herald chrono etc. It needs some buffs like double the current energy gain and more boon duration on quickness fury might etc so it can stack 30s like other classes, then it can be viable.
Well... You forgot downstate as part of your rotation. That's why you failed to succeed.
Hi Downstate DPS
A buddy of mine started complaining about how complex the mage rotation had become in WoW. I linked him the Hammer Cata rotation and he stopped complaining.
And arcane mage is honestly an outlier. By far the most complex rotation among all the WoW specs. My biggest issue with GW2 isnt pressing different buttons, but not seeing the buttons of different kits so I know when it's time to press them.
@@alexandrospapadopoulos4297 While it is annoying personally I think Engineer's Kits are just worse. I tried to play full celestial HAM using pistols with Med kit, Elixir Gun, Flametherower kit, Grenade kit and Mortar kit ... you are constantly thinking about two different things.
Pistol cooldowns 8s / 12s / 12s
Med Kit 5 every 20s
Elixirt Gun 5 every 16s
Flamethrower kit 2 every 6s and 4 every 25s
Grenade Kit 2 every 5s
Mortar Kit 2 every 10s and 5 every 24s
NON OF THE COOLDOWNS THAT ARE IMPORTANT ARE THE SAME! AAAAAAAA........ Do you know how ANNOYING that is? You can't MATCH any of the cooldowns! Why is Grenade 2 5 seconds while Flamethrower 2 is 6s and Pistol 2 is 8s?!? While Med Kit 5 is 20s while Mortar 5 is 24s but Flamethrower 4 is 25s!!! and the pistol 3 & 4 being 12s each is not helping here! and then Elixir Gun 5 is randomly 16s! And these are the important cooldowns for your rotation. You want all of them to be used off-cooldown 😭
At least Elementalist has a rotation which you can attempt to follow. Qucikness is brutal, you can't make single mistake or you drop quickness instnatly. Bit boonduration helps but at that point you could just play something easier. I found Hammer Catalyst fun and the Quickness is not much different if at all. I'm just too slow to upkeep quikness or to do amazing damage.
As a main elementalist i can only agree 100% with this judgment. this elite spec especially boon side needs to be rebalanced. And please make that energy bar bigger!
non-Elementalist here, the energy bar is really too short? i see alot of catalyst using the f5 constantly
I also 100% agree. Found those problems since I touched Cata but people always bash me cuz gw2 has gone too religious. I love it for its mechanics too, but it is very uncomfortable to play with its current restrictions. It's what I always said: "other classes do more damage for half the effort." Sure in the hands of the top 1% it can outperform others but for regular players, it is a nightmare class. I know many that tried it, all quit. Literally any other proff is better or more fun for them.
Frankly, it always felt like the Ele is hated and cata even more so. Which conflicts with what people tell me that some Devs play it...but every time the Ele is OP, it gets fixed within a few days while any other class stays broken for weeks or months. Logically, this is a Bias against Ele.
get rid off that energy bar , made sense when sphere were on a 5 secs cd , but now with a 15 secs cd it's just a wasted amount of complication for nothing or at least add numbers to the bar , really hard to see if you have enough to launch two sphere while you are at 18 or 19 energy.
As someone who played ele for years, tons of bad decisions for all classes seems to land on ele and just stays.
Ele can’t have fun. Literally the middle child of anet
"You will have the most complicated rotations for the least benefit and you will like it."
-ANet
The sad thing about it is hammer has some cool skills but the whole package plus the design of catalyst just don’t feel or play well in many cases when the class is balanced.
When I thought of elementalist wielding a hammer, I was so excited for what I was sure was a slow, heavy hitter, that more prioritized camping a single element, and I was so excited to play a geomancer bruiser. But we ended up with Weaver whirling + Tempest overload, a half dozen of some of pvp's most oppressive skills, and "Catalyst wasn't designed to have quickness, we had to add boons to classes late in development when we decided every profession should have both alacrity and quickness options." Making "multiattack" a build concept on what was already the most fevered of professions was... a choice. I wish it generated quickness by spending EE, or that you could place up to one sphere of each type for twice as long as they do. It'd help you cover more of the field, none of this stack-on-this nonsense, but I don't think that'd necessarily fix what feels bad about it.
I kind of want to write a few things that‘d make it easier to play, but I also want Anet to fix this broken mess.
So… Muk good, Catalyst bad.
As an Ele main since pre-order I am very pleased to see this video pop up in my feed looking like it does. It's honestly very flattering. Makes me feel cool and experienced with my 2300 ele hours. The trick is not to full cycle but go in packets of two orbs, Air Fire then auto to squeeze another 2, Earth then water (which you leave as soon as possible) back into Air then wait (Air is best for building energy, you can save Air 5 for when it counts). It probably doesn't help that you need to burst out your F5s as soon as possible while chaining animations. Full Zerker Sword Quickalyst has been my go-to for most Open World and PvE for a while since I've been farming Gen 3s. When you get the fingers and muscle memory for it it's honestly one of my favorite builds to play. Fairly self-sufficient, very rewarding intensity, very HIGH intensity, and if you're comfortable enough with the skills you can just take some backroads-ass loop to readjust when you fuck up your rotation.
I would also like to point to the fact that Staff has terrible energy gain because it does very poor hits-per-second unless you're cleaving hard. And god I would sure love for that UI to change though you're totally right.
The optimal way to play dps quickness catalyst is to switch over to herald and do the same dps and boons with less work
What Ele needs is have some of the support abilities migrated into the utilities. That's why Tempest is able to be somewhat competitive while weaver and catalyst are stuck with purely selfish Utility skills.
This is why I love Muk. Doesn't clickbait with THIS CLASS IS TERRIBLE. Spends the first 4 mins showing what he did and acknowledging that he struggles with the class. Then goes to explain +'s and -'s. TH-cam needs more Muk's
Louder so Anet finally addresses the qdps spec for Ele. I’ve been playing Ele for years and it’s such a pain to play this spec and realize that other classes have it so much easier to upkeep Quickness. While HAT is also not perfect, at least it’s functioning and does its job. Playing Cata qDPS on the other hand is you just griefing your party. Anet just hates Ele at this point.
I will say, the tiny energy bar and no energy regen while a sphere is up made sense when the sphere was a toggle and the energy was basically "how long can you keep the sphere up before you need to build energy again" But the UI and energy system didn't really get updated when they changed how the sphere worked. I have done quick cata since 2 sec quickness was implemented BUT, it was Deimos tank quick cata where I had full boon duration. (I did not feel confident enough to even attempt using staff to have a modicum of party healing to add to that.)
Is that how cata used to work? Man, I came back after many years, and find they reworked scrapper's wells to be around the scrapper. I LOVED this change, that I am a walking combo field, and that everyone should stick near me for cool combos! Especially blast and whirling gyro, in how you become a time bomb, as well as walking blender spitting whirling combos everywhere for 3 seconds straight!
Why they remove this for cata? That honestly sounds cool being the center point for a sprouting fiery phoenix.
That was how it worked in the beta preview. I don't remember the timeline offhand but I don't think it made it to live that way.
On hammer you generally want to use your 5 first in all elements, during which you summon the 3 orb, and use 2 while switch to the next element, use 5 last and your cds arent going to match up for when you drop your spheres to combo in.
Also you should always wait in earth until full energy not fire, earth autos generate energy faster iirc
And finally you dont always do 3 spheres in a row, first loop its 3 (fire, air, water) then its consistentaly 2 spheres earth/fire, then generate a little energy in air before air/water
Also thanks for making me feel better about my 25k dps xD
why wouldn't you summon orb first in every attunement since the orb gives you modifier?
@@didoma73 orb is instant cast, so you do get it up asap, but only if an attack animation is already going
Ideally you want the 2 of the previous element casting while you swap and cast orb of the next, then the 5, but just trying to keep it simple for TH-cam comments
So, as a Power DPS Cata Main (36k Bench), I wasn't even aware this build could do quickness.
Nonetheless, I tried and with Rune of the Scholar, I was unable to maintain quickness within the two attempts I tried. However, with Rune of Fireworks I was able to stack up about 10 sec of quickness with perfect rotation on the first try with about 25k DPS.
I just played my casual DPS rotation with the exception of going in Water every loop (instead of every 3rd on full DPS) to provide more quickness.
While I was able to maintain quickness, the video is still pretty accurate. It took me months to reach the 36k DPS (far from Snowcrows bench) and requires A TON of practice to be quick enough to collect enough energy for the spheres and have the timings right of all the abilities. In addition, the rotation is easily messed up my mistakes and it's impossible to recover without significant DPS loss. Not to talk about how difficult it is with boss mechanics. Moreover, the build lacks stacks of quickness to not drop off in fights for your teammates. Only recommend to try-hard Cata mains. I will probably never play it again :D
Appreciate the hate for Cata in the video. This class is unnecessarily complex and weird to play.
did you do the 2 sphere or 3 sphere drop strategy?
I've been playing quickness Catalyst for the past few weeks now, just to freshen things up, some notes:
- Quickness with the snowcrows build/gear is so incredibly tight it's damn near impossible to maintain 100% quickness. If there is a boss that phases or even moves a lot you WILL struggle as you need to hit things to fill energy.
- This rotation is weird but this rule should still matter: Drop jade spheres in pairs, use skills in one attunement, drop the sphere, swap attunement and immediately drop the second sphere. This way the jade spheres overlap and you can double down on the quickness but start refilling energy sooner. You do not need to use three spheres rapidly, you only use two spheres rapidly so you really only need 20 energy. Yes, all Catalyst players want a bigger bar that has three segments.
Currently I'm running 15.66% boon duration by using an Accuracy sigil and swapping out some gear for Diviner's, and I do fine. (It turns out literally just using Rune of Fireworks instead will be significantly more damage and 25% boon duration, though.) One thing that you kinda need to know is when the boss phases since you don't want to drop double spheres just before it phases and then you need to start building energy from scratch once it's vulnerable again. It's better to let quickness drop and resume it after the phase with full energy.
That being said, I've been playing sword Power Weaver for years now so I picked this up quite quickly. Once I got used to and can execute the rotation well I started doing absolutely massive damage in pugs often outperforming pure dps, sometimes I'm firmly in top 4. I found it no where near as difficult as Muk did. Downside is this has no utility, you do not have stability at all, you have aegis but it's tied to your rotation on the earth sphere. You can not do group wide projectile block, you can not pull adds. You do have 432 cc damage on your Conjure Lightning Hammer which doubles to 864 IF an ally picks it up and uses the correct skills.
In conclusion: This build is not recommended, it's there to challenge/torture yourself.
It's me again with some extra potentially useful info but I don't want to edit my original comment to not get the precious Muk heart removed.
Running Rune of Fireworks means you overall give more boons, which means with my rotation I can maintain:
- 13 Might at all times, 22 on average.
- 100% Fury.
- 26% Regeneration
- 82% Protection(!)
- 77% Resolution
- 65% Vigor
- 34% Aegis (not helpful but means your team occasionally blocks attacks "for free" which can make it it easier to stay alive.)
- 92% Swiftness
If I take a ~3k dps loss and run Arcane instead, I can do:
- 17 Might at all times, basically 25 on average.
- 64% Regeneration
- 96% Protection
- 85% Resolution
- 76% Vigor
- 94% Swiftness
Point being a Catalysts boons aren't actually that bad, and it's a decent filler if your healer is struggling to maintain some of them.
@@Jmvars Thanks for sharing, you're out DPSing DPS classes with quick catalyst on full berserkers? or with rune of fireworks?
@@didoma73 At the time I was playing Berserker's with some gear on Diviner's with Dragonhunter runes and an Accuracy sigil to hit 15%+ boon duration and still crit cap. I was beating SOME pure dps' with it, it depends on the group. On groups that happen to have inexperienced dps I can even be top dps, on other groups that happen to have experienced players I'll be where I should be, maybe beating one or two pure dps.
Currently I play full Berserker's with Dragonhunter runes with a Concentration sigil for 10% boon duration, but frankly I'm going to swap to Fireworks runes and Impact sigil just to make the quickness uptime easier. In my original comment I wrote that Fireworks runes is a smaller dps loss than switching some gear to Diviner's to hit at least 15% but further testing showed that it's actually a bigger loss. However I feel it's worth it to not make it as painful.
I always play sword/warhorn, it's easier than hammer and extends ALL boons on your party.
In a way, I almost think qCata should be the norm, and not the exception, at least in terms of needing a decent chunk of boon duration to be comfy.
Boon DPS roles are mostly all running full damage stats/runes/sigils now. I think there should be a trade off between boon duration and dps. If you want 100% boon uptime, then invest in concentration gear/runes/sigil, and vice versa.
If Anet thinks this will drop the dps output of the boon DPS role by too much, they can just add a concentration % modifier on the boon trait to boost damage.
There is a trade off, but it's carried by your traits, not by your gear.
@Alphenis The gear should have tradeoffs, too. Otherwise, there is no point for stat combos like Diviner to exist because boon dps can maintain key boons while running full dps gear.
More specifically, I am arguing that boon dps should not be able to have 100% boon uptime without investing in concentration.
as some1 who actually likes Ele, Cata, is not an Elite i would recommend at all. 1 issues is when looking a DPS Cata your goal is to keep up 2 other buffs on you, Elemental Empowerment and Empowering Auras, which Elemental Empowerment give a +3 to all stats with a max of 10, and Empowering Auras give +2 strike and +2 Condie with a max of 5, Empowerment buy making Auras, but YOU have to do a Combo. Might sound easy but 1 issue is all your Combos are with your Sphere and Blasts are with your weapon, which was typically hammer at the time, and this giving quickness while trying to get off Combo Fields i think can get rather tricky, as everything is based off the weapon, this might work a bit better with Pistol but, i don't see it effectively working unlike, CaT or Condie Alac Tempest, and with a rotation more complicated the No Self Weave Weaver.
Comboing and auras work best with Hammer, because it was designed to provide combo finishers on every Hammer 5 skill
Random thought while watching - i think they really should rework the utility skills. I feel like only the Tempest shouts are done well. Maybe some of the Arcane.
A class with so many weapon skills should be able to do all their damage and boon stuff with those skills. The Utility skills should be encounter-based flavoring like Mesmer or Necro. Instead most of the Ele utility is “you do more damage for X attacks/seconds”. Or some weird hoop jumping to get more damage (Weaver elite).
Maybe I just fell out of love for Ele cause I realized other clases are easier to play and I’m dumb lol
I don't think all the others classes are always easier, but at least they're worth the effort. Also, playing ele is not fun at all. You can't even enjoy your elements like a mage or something. It just looks like spamming all your kills all the time. The others classes seems to like much more interesting because using skills has more decision making.
I kinda agree to you. Kinda!
Core skills are mostly fine however their usage is kinda niche since you really have to know how to use them to do anything (Glyph of storms for example which has 4 different cooldowns depending on the attunement)
Weaver has nice utility skills IMO. Weave-Self is a bit.. Yea you already named it but the idea is still nice, you can't put that down.
Tempest is amazing. I only whish for small change to Flash Freeze and Rebound. Flash Freeze to me feels like it's not doing anything at all. Give this skill 2k heal and it'd cool IMO. For Rebound I wish it had less cast time. It's a cool skill but I never could make it work because of the cast time.
Catalyst just isn't an option to play for me. Everything it does can also be done by Tempest/Weaver but better. It's toolkit literally has nothing worth going for, not even the quickness. The only good skills Catalyst has are Fortified Earth which does blocks and gives barrier to self and the
elite skill which resets weapon cooldowns which is kinda nice. HOWEVER this IMO should be a 40s cooldown utility skill instead of a 90s elite skill.
8:52 "half a deadeye"... Don't forget the Revenants that can provide quickness for 30 seconds in Shiro by pressing one button. Just the one.
And then go afk for a minute. I use herald to farm my home instance each day cause it has perma quick
Aww, I was hoping to catch the stream when you did this but looks like I missed it. I think the reason why you had so much trouble is you misread the Snow Crows rotation. For sword it's air->fire->earth->water repeat. For hammer it's fire->air->water->earth. With the way you did your rotation, I'm not surprised you had as much trouble as you did.
Sword/warhorn basic weapon skill rotation: (this is the basic rotation. if you want to min/max the heck out of it like snow crows, the loop is slightly different)
Start Air: press all buttons except 4.
Air jade sphere swap fire attunement then fire jade sphere
Fire: Press all buttons except 4 (if 5 is on cooldown, auto attack until it's off CD press 5 then 2 before swapping out of fire)
Earth: press all buttons. auto attack if necessary until you reach 25-30 energy.
Once you reach 25-30 energy place earth jade sphere, swap water, then water jade sphere.
Water: press 4 (if off CD) and swap to air as fast as possible. Water 4 is the only skill that does worthwhile damage so you want to get out of water as fast as possible.
Swap Air: auto attack chain three times then repeat from beginning by mashing every button except 4.
Jade sphere usage: jade spheres come in pairs. Do not use three jades spheres in a row. The first pair is press f5 right before you swap out of air and right after you swap into fire. The second pair is f5 right before you swap out of earth and swap into fire, then f5 immediately after (edit meant to say water attunement not fire).
I personally think hammer is more fun, but sword/warhorn is just better. Sword has a better benchmark, better burst, is lower intensity than hammer, and it'a more forgiving for mistakes than hammer. Don't play hammer if you are new. When I play quick cata, I use rune of the firework and replace sigil of impact with sigil of concentration and that gives a very cushy safety margin on quickness. If you play well you can stack up a 15 second buffer pretty quickly.
When learning this build, start of ONLY learning then attunement swap order. Next you only use weapon skills. After spending 20-30 minutes just practicing the weapon skills, then include the jade sphere. After another 10-15 minutes you can work in utility skills. It's also beneficial to practice it without quickness and alacrity to slow it down and make it easier to learn.
As a side note for those who like green numbers: you can mix in about 4-5k worth of aoe healing into the loop by using sword water 3 and warhorn water 5. It's quite satisfying to be able to give out a solid burst heal to your group while on a dps build.
Thanks for sharing. what's your recommended rotation with hammer?
The best way to do the spheres imo is to wrack up enough for two spheres and then place one as you're about to leave an element, and the another as you go into an element.
From the F5 energy, to the hammer orbitals, to the traits that have you jump through hoops to gain percentile stats, Catalyst isn't so much an elite spec as it is three gimmicks in a trench coat. Pistol shows the same poor design choices: underwhelming benefits tied to the puddle-deep mechanic of choosing which to push first: '2' or '3'.
i played ele once ... i switched to warrior when it got staff, ive been much happier
The hammer build takes a lot of practice, but one thing I noticed right away that would give you better results, skill 2 on hammer in each element does not get interrupted by swapping elements. You kept using it right off the bat in the new element, but you're actually supposed to use it right before you swap out. Since they're all channels, using it right away loses you time to use other skills that can't be placed in the element swaps. The one exception is fire where you use it when you get in, and then use it again right as you leave to go to air. 3 is always first priority, then 4/5 depending on the element, then autos until the next swap (or until energy is full in earth) and then 2 and swap. Granted, the quickness variant really does just suck and feel terrible to play, even when you've put a lot of time and practice into it, but if anyone is wanting to use it and is struggling, these are some of the basics
Actually if you use the double sphere technique, why would you use Hammer 2 right before you switch attunement? That would mean you're using your most number of hit skill while a jade sphere is out. You should be saving Hammer 2 for at the start of every attunement, so that you can build up energy for the next double sphere drop.
I got a couple of qdps in my lineups. Outside of firebrand, which I only got because I was getting sick of being mistrusted as a vanilla guardian in t4 fractals, I got 3 options atm in deadeye, scrapper, and harbringer. All of them are easy, all of them hurt. I am planning on two more, in heal zerker, and heal chrono.
Cata wasn't among my ideas of potential candidates, as that is by far my least played class. Seeing this has further convinced me why.
IMO, if your job is difficult, something's wrong. Deadeye can cap quickness and many other boons in the first 5 seconds, and maintain it from there super easy. Harbringer is even easier, just shroud and exist next to teammates.
Scrapper may seem more complicated, but all it boils down to is press well skill/function gyro, and then just run in bonking things with hammer and explosives. Unlike q-catalyst, it just feels... right. Like it works without being overly jarring and going against a natural flow. Not to mention it also feeds my high apm itch incase I feel like actually pressing more then 2 buttons throughout a fight. ;p
By the accounts of others in this comment section, he seems to have been playing the build in an unnecessarily difficult way, but even the optimal way sounds tough to maintain quickness compared with other qDPS builds. I've tried condi qDPS Catalyst and, while the pistol's ammo mechanic is very silly, I did have a better time with condi than power. Ultimately I still went straight back to condi alac Tempest though.
p.s. Love your prinny avatar :3
The energy mechanic is just plain awful.
People have been calling for it to be removed since catalyst got released to even give this spec a SHOT at feeling good... so far anet has not listened.
Quick Cata was viable for all of like 5 mins after one paych a few months into EoD. Then 2-3 weeks later the quick duration got dumpstered and took thr entire build with it
A simple tip to help with quickness is to run fresh air and always end your rotation in fire then swap back to air quickly after using your fire skills when doing 3 spheres. Air sword chain has 5 hits and 3rd skill has many hits, so it makes it easy to fill the energy up fast. That way you spend 90% of your time in fire and air which are your power damage attunements and also your energy generation attunements. I think the 2 problems that made you struggle so much are 1: always using whatever sphere comes up first, and not having a stable rotation for quickness and 2 : treating water and earth like real weapon sets on a power build. They're there just for their spheres, treat them like and engineer kit and get out as fast as you can.
is 90% uptime possible with full berserker's though? do you advocate for 2 spheres or 3 spheres drop?
@@didoma73 3 spheres drop, I do mine on a heal build so idk about dos, but if you always do air-earth-water-fire-air, while spending most time in air and fire I guess dps should be ok
They really had to place the Jade Sphere recharge over the F5? Couldn't give it a separate bar like Celestial Energy or over all the skills like Initiative?
Wow. At least the colour changes with the element. Yeah?
It's like since Tempest in Heart of Thorns, Arena net didn't really know what to do with elementalists.
Tempest: Focus an element to unleash its full power. Get warhorn and shouts, make noise and go in the heart of battle while supporting your allies. There's a theme, an idea, there's cohesion in the spec. That's the war, I can imagine the Commander leading the remains of the Pact troops into battle. Unleash the elements to avenge the fallens, blow that warhorn to rally the troops, shout orders imbuded with elemental magic. That works and that rocks!
Weaver: The sword doesn't really have a distinct identity, and the whole theme of the spec is: You have 1 skill that mix 2 elements. Weak idea, I don't call this weaving the elements. And don't even mention the "Stances", what a bland concept, it's just "button to make a thing", there's no identity and nothing that tells "this is a WEAVER skill" (except the stance that puts you out of the weaver mode for 5s, lol).
Calayst: An agglomerate of unrelated mechanisms. Ok, I give you that there's an idea behind the hammer, but what's its relevance to the jade sphere? None. The sphere is also a good idea: Jade tech to power the elements through, ok, let's go full jade tech, that's Cantha spec after all! But where are my jade tech skills? Why didn't they give Catalyst something like a rifle and really went into the jade tech theme? Did Arena Net just pulled ideas randomly out of a hat for that spec?
Pistol: Do I need to say anything? From fire to earth: Pew-pew. In weaver mode, you get some less pew-pewish effects but my man, you gotta really aim (badum-tss) for it by having the good bullet with the good mixed elements: it's not "oh, I need that effect, so I'll swap to this element and press that button" noooo, too easy mate! You gotta do: "I swap to element water, then swap to element air, now I have the proper skill, but first I must attack with skill 2 to get an air bullet, and now I can finally hit 3 to grant myself 4s of superspeed. While evading backward." Flowing Finesse, for you.
EDIT: I love elementalist. I main elementalist. FFS I even "fought" Muk during a stream, trying to make him change his ranking of quick-catalyst in one category of his summary of all the boondps he tried. I'm that level of elementalist enjoyer. So take this comment as from someone who doesn't mock or despise that class, but from someone who genuinly love it, but is sad to see that A Net have no idea what they are doing with it.
Word.
Pain of being ele main
Bro Cata is Te.pest and Scraper that mix together
I play almost exclusively hammer quick cata in fractals and raids and I adore it. You have sphere usage slightly wrong, as others have pointed out: you do them in pairs, not in groups of three. You can have up to 30 energy and never need to build up more than 20 at a time, because a sphere costs 10. So it's (sphere pairings in square brackets): Fire -> attacks -> Air -> attacks until 20 energy -> [Air sphere -> Water -> Water sphere] -> attacks -> Earth -> attacks until 20 energy -> [Earth sphere -> Fire -> Fire sphere] -> repeat. It's theoretically more than enough for 100% quickness, but I still run a couple Diviner's pieces for padding, because it can be hard to build up energy if you're moving away from the boss a lot for mechanics.
All that said, you're right about basically everything: the amount of work involved is super sweaty for ultimately less payoff than other builds. If I want a more chill play style some days, I just go quick Scrapper, which does more quickness and generally more DPS, and is about the most braindead build you can play. And, yes, the UI element for the Catalyst's energy is horrendous. It needs to clearly show three sub-bars like Warrior's bursts do, so that you *know* when you have enough energy for two spheres.
Edit: some other more advanced tips: you can always deploy a sphere, even if you're channeling another skill or you're CCed, and (this is hammer-specific), the 2 skill in each element is channeled, so you can save it for last and swap elements while it continues, getting you to your next element a bit faster. This is most relevant when heading from Earth to Fire: you can start channeling Earth 2, drop your Earth sphere, swap to Fire, and drop your Fire sphere, all while Earth 2 is still channeling (if you're fast). Also works when heading from Air to Water, but I find that I normally need to sit in Air for a second to reliably get to 20 energy.
"I did not want to subject a team of people to this"
How dare you breaking a cardinal rule of the ele main.
Ahahahahaha
Not being able to fill the bar when a sphere is out seems like the dumbest concept ever
Honestly, just use full diviners and call it a day. When I play q-cata, I only worry about boon upkeep. Nobody yells at boon support for low dps.
Well...what did you expect Muk ? Anet hates elementalist for ages. Still waiting for that DPS staff...its been more then a decade.
DPS Staff was huge for a while about 5-6 years ago
I guess they want staff more like an AoE/support kind of weapon. At least is what it seems.
@@boutch1993 Yea you would think that but its shit as a support weapon too. Outclassed by warhorn in every situation.
The bar just needs to go away. People have been complaining about that since Cata was released and instead of just yanking it off and giving it a cooldown, they've screwed with it until it's now as it is. Just remove the energy mechanic. No one likes it. It's terrible. Throw it away and just let the sphere have a normal cooldown.
using wrong rotation all the way through - wonders why it does not work....
you need to use a 4 element jade sphere rotation, split into 2 pairs back to back on element swap. that will give you exactly 100% uptime on boons, so you probably need to mix in some concentration gear for a fight depending on how effective at uptime you are.
cata is a hard spec, but its good and viable and not that hard, but you were ignoring chat (not your fault, some people were talking absolute rubbish) telling you how to play it. Cata is not a spec you can pick and play in short order, unlike a simple easy spec like herald.
I’m surprised no one but you mentioned the cast jade sphere in pair thing.
I don’t even play cata and I’m confused
But still, this class is underwhelming
I was a pretty good Qcata player on some early patches for it. Now its fun enough for open world but in instanced settings I almost never pick it up. If you crave that high apm gameplay but also wanna actually contribute a good bit, chrono has been a good replacement pick for me. I'm coping for a rework any day now but its been a wait already.
"I feel like you're doing all that work to be half a deadeye" sounds like elementalist. Only class in the game I don't play as there is always another class that does xyz role better and easier than ele.
I do. Yes.
With the new update will you revisit this?
"I have never played a class that it's base design felt more conflicting toward itself than this" the support elementalist experience.
I don't think it's unfair to say that Anet has no idea what to do with elementalist.
Idk if it has been mentioned yet, but using relic of the herald provides more boon duration!
Ele main here (~95% bench on hammer+sw/wh), Qcata is a decent quick provider but it has one of the highest entry levels across all builds (as shown in the vid).
Hammer, sw/wh and sc/d (FA) are all viable picks. It has decent dmge & great boon coverage. Unfortunately the CC/utility options are pretty minimal.
Id recommend a good amount of diviner pieces just to secure good boon uptime. (I quite often run around 60% BD on hammer in exchange of a ~10% dps loss). Whenever you get more comfortable with the build+have encounters without alot of spread mechanics+ dont have party members running into narnia & you want to push your dps output, you can usually lower it down to ~20% BD
Wouldnt recommend the build to inexperienced players, efficiency focused players or anyone who doesnt hate Qdps herald with a passion (nerf pls!).
Would you say 90% quickness is possible with full berserker's? do you advocate for 2 sphere or 3 sphere drop strategy?
For the longest time I really thought I would love hammer catalyst cause I thought the look of the spells and play style looked so cool but in trying it I discovered exactly what you're describing. It just felt so disjointed and clunky to play I could not believe how un-fun it was to play. And that's not even specifically as a quickness provider, just playing the class mechanic in general. Shocking how much I did not like it.
Doing more for less is the exact reason i stopped being an ele main
from a desing perspective, the energy bar does nothing in cata, it could just be a base cd twice as long as base duration with a built-in mechanic of having a slight reduction of said cd every time you would gat said energy and it would work bettwr
full cele, hammer
deploy field, faceroll, swap attunement; deploy field, faceroll, swap attunement; deploy filed, faceroll, swap attunement; faceroll energy to full, deploy if current attunements boons are desired, back to first attunement
my first qdps and still one of my most favourite ones, sole reason i got the aurene hammer back in eod launch
Ended my 5 month haitus to try cata again. Something definitely changed because I'm also doing 19-22k DPS. I used to reach 32k on Golem as quick DPS (27kish in actual fights). And that was with a few diviner pieces.
Will update after I figure out new rotation.
Update: This is not working with full Zerker gear. Sphere Specialist used to double the duration of quickness on the sphere and now it doesn't. Your quickness will drop off at multiple points in the rotation.
You definitely need boon duration on this now. Trying the new trick where you pair spheres together and am up to 23k DPS. Still a far cry from before.
For now let me assure you. It's not just you Muk. Cata is scuffed af right now. I've been a huge advocate for removing the limitation on energy building while a sphere is out before... But now... I don't think this is playable until they remove that restriction.
For now I definitely reccomend ignoring the reccomendation to run full zerker. You need diviner's gear or your quickness will plummet anytime someone walks 5 feet from you or you have 0.001 secs of downtime from the boss.
Cata got nerfed a while back I think.
Agreed, 100% quickness uptime is not possible with full berserker's in real fights. what's your take on dps hammer Catalyst?
They should change the catalyst bar, for the holosmith bar with the "Enhance Capacity Storage Unit".
Catalyst gave us hammer which thanks to Soto doesn't need to be played on Catalyst anymore. That's the only nice thing I can tell about Catalyst.
Catalyst to me is just a core elementalist with some (not super useful) extra gimmics. I rather play Weaver, which is more complex and offers no boons then this. Weaver at least feels fun to play. However I mainly Tempest because Tempest rocks ✌🏻
Uh oh, we've finally broken Muk
i was there. I trained the hammer quick build till my head would go numb, because i really like playing ele. You can pull it off, if you master it first. Mastering means: NO - ERRORS!
The quick duration got nerfed shortly after EoD release and the quick catalyst never recovered.
how would you recommend maintaining quickness now in real fights?
@@didoma73 classic situation. If the boss moves, uptime goes down the drain.
The build you have is different than the one I got of snowcrows, when I too was trying to learn qcata. The hammer version. It used FG , that was part of your earth rotation and had the water version of the fire skill instead of that arcane one that was added to the water rotation.
I made the mistake of trying to learn it while also trying to learn how to do the raids themselves tho, and spending time in downstate on that build is a massive energy suck, meaning my quick was terrible.
That being said I prefer giving quick or alac on my heal chrono at this point, its much easier.
The pure dps cata build is a lot more fun than the quick one. Same weapons but less conflicting.
You didn't mention it because you didn't try it in an actual encounter but: If you go down as Cata you lose ALL Cata energy and if you have an orb out, you still can't regain it. Which isn't mentioned on tool tips, making it one of the few hidden rules of the elite spec that defines the entire elite spec.
So its like berks where you get a double penalty for getting downed, but on a light armor and low hp class.
And that's why I play Tempest.
i like cata with hammer, even though warhorn is slightly more dps and a little bit of support, but hammer just feels nicer. and yes, the energy bar is horrible. they should just put it under the attunements like holo heat or rev energy or necro life force and they should also put little bars that tell you when you have 10/20/30 energy like with heat on holo. but apart from that it's a pretty solid build that provides A LOT of boons
For me, Cata has nothing worth for. The only things I like about it are the hammer, Fortified Earth and Elemental Celerity.
Tho there is a similar core skill to Fortified Earth, Elemental Celerity doesn't feel like an elite skill and no matter how you take it 90s is way to long and since Soto, hammer isn't Cata exclusive anymore.
I rather play Tempest which does a lot in a similar manner but better.
I've always struggled with Elementalist, Engineer and a bit less with Mesmer. All I can say is that you start to get the hang of it after a few days. The guides could use some work, but should also mention to at least try the build for a week.
I love elem, I love catalyst and I love hammer as a weapon. I hate the current state of quick catalyst. It delays providing quickness because you have to fill the energy bar, the quickness provided is way to low, the design goes against itself and the rotation is way to complicated and requires having a PHD on catalyst just to provide the minimum amount of damage and quickness. I just don't understand why Anet never balances this spec that just doesn't work. But at the same time you have many specs that provides quick or alac by just pressing a button and auto attacking on full berserker gear, makes sense right? So for now I play my catalyst in open world for fun but I would love to take it to instanced pve.
I think the problem here are the top 2% of players that were able to do 40k DPS with full quickness duration. That's why they nerfed it into the ground.
I wish Cata was more like Chrono. Good toolkit does what it's supposed to do without overdoing it and it plays without needing to understand quantum physics.
@@ColdMystery Well I would not mind if the top 2% players could do 40k DPS with 100% quickness uptime if it was earned. Quick catalyst is hard to play so you should be rewarded for mastering it. Or make it simpler and I very much agree with what Muk suggested.
I was very disappointed when I unlocked Catalyst. It seems pretty cool at a glance but the traits are so dull. 7(!) of them are based around gaining stacks of buffs for percentage benefits.
Catalyst is a down grade of Tempest concept that combidnation with Scrapper which create by some dev who only read wiki about Ele
Would Diviners gear even help this at all? More conc for more quickness time might make it feel better, idk. You'd lose dps, but I mean whats the point of power support stats if you dont use it, right ANET?
Cofficency of quick boon on Shpere is real bad and very low also you trade so many dps drop
I did few tries. Shoulders and ring with assassins and chest with diviners (like snowcrows suggests) Got 96% uptime with 27,8k dps.
Further proof to me that Catalyst is a mess that needs reworked.
Thank you very much Muk! I finally found myself a main because of this video. I love challenging gameplay and spend hours now to find a way to play quickness catalyst - Big thanks to xChris he got me to pick up Ele again
Unfortunately I feel like the core design of elementalist in general isn't really in line with the meta for instanced pve. When you're roll is just do as much damage as possible and give 1 boon, that takes away from the concept of having a skill for every situation.
But, of course, for open world play that design really shines.
Thank you for playing this c:
Maybe they should change to gain (more) energy when you gain an aura, and remove the ability to build the bar while the sphere is out
I'm not very good at the game but I really like my hammer cata. It's the only thing I've been playing for awhile now. I like that I have an answer to everything if I do my part. Watching this does make me realize though it would probably be much better if energy on spheres was just removed entirely. They already have a cooldown. Not having em to start the fight cause no charge just feels bad. I've had many downstates cause of that where once I got the first sphere down I had sustain forever.
Played ele from launch and i've been yelling and screaming for devs to allow the bar to fill while you're in the sphere since day 1 of cata. Also the sphere needs to just drop on your location instead of having ground targeting. Ele has ONE truly ranged weapon and thats the staff and it is useless with catalyst
This seems like it has all the madness of alac tempest without any of the versatility that comes from being able to juggle your elemental order a bit.
Hey mukk i know its pointless, forgotten and also why would you ever now that chrono is better but do you plan on doing alac mirage or is it just dead in the water like our dreams? it still works and its still easy
He tried it already and he actually mostly liked it.
Video should come out at some point.
Video on alac mirage soon 👍
You should have seen how hilarious (painful) it was to play it on Twin Largos before they removed the self-knockback on their CC
Many swims were taken :D
Well..seems like devs listened U XD but tbh for me spheres design wasnt issue as cata main, thing that is frustrating is ele always lacks sth, like not providing stab, horribly low cc, n stuff
I think ele is pretty much just incompatible with the core design of GW2. Since launch, I can't remember a single time when it was not either broken or was too much hassle to play it compared to other professions. You just have way too many buttons to press, so the outcomes are either you do waaaay too much compared to other professions and or you need to do double the work to do the same.
In the meantime, quick deadeye: full dps gear + [Steal Timerino] = 200% quick uptime
The energy stuff should not be related to the spheres casts because it ruins the spec synergies lol. Ideally, hence it is high apm and skillcap atm, you'd do something like filling energy bar when hitting within the sphere which triggers AoE that produces quick, then the uptime for boons should be at 100% with no concentration and 90% percentile gameplay(near perfect inputs) hence it is extremly skill/input intensive. Also I would not bother if this was doing less than 30K dps considering how complicated it is and how quickness is important for a party.
Welcome to catalyst. the problems we had ever since the eod beta haven't gone away
I want the energy bar to replenish out of combat or just let it replenish with slower rate when the spheres are out or just switch the energy system with ammunition charge system. I love playing QuickCata in open world solo play since I use Celestial gears but this elite spec need more balancing especially with how infuriating it is to maintain both EE and boons without the use of hammer
Sad to hear about this but it is true
this is my 1st character and I spent a lot of resources on it and it is worse
Been thinking to turn this to a quickheal see if it is work 😢
Quickheal is possible with staff; you will be spitting out a lot of boons with catalyst
This is the biggest cancer of a build I've seen, and I tried condi holo already.
"Just... don't play it" , yep i don't , never ever again am i gonna be a burden to my squad.
f5 , skill 2 3 4 5 f2 f5 skill ... go herald utility 1 2 3 4 go to sleep and see quickness might and fury ramping up to 30 secs 'yawn' clear unbalance ! legacy build on snowcrow btw , even them are tired to play this non rewarding over complicated mess
If I had one complaint about guild wars 2 it would be it's terrible, terrible UI/UX-design-language. The UI is tiny, it delivers info poorly and I won't even start on how inaccessible it is for sight impaired people.
Only one example (I have pages of issues and fixes): why, god, why is the icon border highlight for combos IDENTICAL to the highlight when said skill can damage a breakbar? It makes ZERO sense.
I feel catalyst is like a catalyst for these issues and multiplies them tenfold
Oh god yes thousand times this.
As a UI developer GW2 is for me like a guilty torturing pleasure.
Never heard of this class...
is this new?
Catalyst came out with End of Dragons expansion
yea i hated how they changed how catalyst gives quickness
used to be just the air sphere that gave it, now they made it so u have to keep spamming all the spheres
You need to update this video after the sphere changes in the last patch.
Yeah, have a new one that will be out in a few days👍
They need to rework the energy, and let people generate it out of combat as well. That's what I have been thinking since it came out. Hopefully they'll buff it at some point but they've abandoned the ele support builds so bad that I'll probably just learn to play chrono at this point.
Lord Hizen be like: "I was put here at the dawn of life on Earth to feed on the last breath of every one of you ***. I’m a little more than a... 'thing.'"
Fuck the hammer. Hate that weapon.
And the rest of cata is a f5 button, which is boring.
Yikes, I think even my Celestial Condi Quick Catalyst with exotic level itemization and budget runes can do 19k DPS with hammer, and has more relaxed gameplay due to more boon duration and tankier stats. But I would never bring this to raids ever, and energy is always an issue.
Thank god i have never been interested in ele my fingers hurt just from watching this 😂🙏
I loved catalyst ever since it released. Played through every possible build it offered, i still hope heal cata will be a thing one day. Please Anet 🥺
You could do quick heal with scepter before they reworked it
@@gabrielpelegrini6135 yup. Also the variant of the heal build with karakosa relic was so fun. Blasts for heal on cata was satisfying imo
well besides all the comments down here and all the bad things Mukluk says about Catalyst in the video here's some unpopular opinion: Catalyst isn't actually that bad
Of course it is one of the harder classes to pull off and it needs some help from the balance team, especially the quickness variant but it is totally capable of doing the job in most content. It takes more time to get used to and to understand but once it clicked in ur brain it is very fluent and a lot of fun. I think the problem is most players dont spend the time or get frustrated if its not going well or just dont understand the concepts of the class. A great example is Mukluk trying this with 3 spheres while I dont think any Catalyst player is doing that nowadays. It feels a little like: I am playing this wrong, where is my dmg and quickness? Of course you will struggle if you dont have the right rotation or understand whats going on. Imagine playing sth like bladesworn and complaining about no dmg because u always use dragon trigger immediatley without letting it charge up... It's often player issue and I am not saying the player is bad but they need to take the time with the class, many people seem to expect to understand everything and to perform perfectly after half an hour of gameplay... In addition you will need to know the encounters very well to manage the energy - e.g. u dont want to use ur spheres on the last second of a phase so you can´t build energy up in the meantime and then you will have to waste time in the beginning of the phase resulting in loss of dmg and boon uptime and you have to be very mindful and aware on how and when you are using almost every single spell... The skill level is something else compared to other classes (where you sometimes just mash and dont have to think at all) but its totally fine, I think it would even be at a good spot if they increased quickness on spheres by 1 or 2 seconds. I actually love that there are classes like this. Every time when I go in a raid or whatever and see a quickness catalyst perform well, I am always like: "Man this guy really knows what he is doing, that is so sick!" And it encourages me to spend more time on my classes to be able to pull them of perfectly. In my opinion it would be a loss to the game to make all classes 'easy to pick up' and I don't think they should make catalyst easier.
what is your general approach for maintaining quickness on catalyst?
Ele itself... yea, I don't play it, have a few but, I suck at ele period so I don't do much with it period.
Thank you, now I have a headache
welcome to ele life...
I love watching you suffer on my main lmaooooo
I *love* Catalyst... but....
holy hannah Cata is hard AF to play and has an APM that can only be described as "legendary", I'm serious were it not for the fact that I game on a Razer Tartarus V2 and a Corsair Scimitar I couldn't play the class.
"I guess it's cold..." LOL man almost really laughed out loud in the middle of the office on that one... anywho one of the things I love about GW2 is the class identity, *but* they could make some minor common sense changes to catalyst, keep the class / build identity, and have it work so much better.
Jeez that's worse than my janky attempt to make Alac Tempest with Fresh Air and Staff work :')
Granted my setup actually works so yknow. there's that
Catalyst
noun
"a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change."
Sooo a whole lot of stuff for not that much stuff in the end, it actually fits pretty well.
A catalyst improves the efficiency of everything else while staying chill on its own.
This class is doing the opposite; not brining anything meaningful for the other folks while tearing itself apart trying to do basic functions
See...I didn't bother with the quickness part. Then again, I play it in open world. XD
My takeaway from this video is that ele needs to be nerfed again