Power Catalyst

Traits

Situational Traits

Defiance Bar Damage

Situational Weapons

Hammer

Can be used as a perfectly viable replacement for sword/warhorn that can achieve equal results in most cases.

Hammer in CMs

Playing Hammer means that you can do either air opener or fire opener, this depends on whether you can fit 2 or 1 Lightning Storm during the encounter (if you can fit only 1 it is beneficial to open in fire and precast Firestorm ). The main disadvantage of hammer is being unable to maintain or rebuild stacks once there is any downtime without anything to hit (or any field below you) and thus missing on a major dps modifier.

Hammer in T4s

Hammer is the recommended option for normal tier 4 Fractals. It has the highest sustain due to Rocky Loop , a free block with Immutable Stone , condi cleanse with Cleansing Typhoon and a significant amount of healing with Crashing Font . If your group is struggling to stay alive either because you don’t play with a healer or the instabilities are making it difficult you can consider replacing Conjure Fiery Greatsword with Glyph of Elementals . This provides a very strong burst heal and condi cleanse for you and your allies with Crashing Waves . Additionally you can even consider replacing fire traitline with water traitline for a dps loss but another big boost in sustain for both you and your group through Soothing Mist , Soothing Power and Healing Ripple thus making Catalyst a great choice overall for this content.

Situational Skills

Step-by-Step Rotation

This is a step-by-step explanation of the Catalyst rotation. A mostly complete written rotation and some extra info can be found in step 3. The steps do not indicate what skills do the most damage, it merely demonstrates a possible way to learn the rotation. Keep in mind that this rotation is performed on a standard average golem, on bosses with shorter phases and/or downtime in between although the general idea will be the same, there might be adjustments you need to make.

Step 1: Attunement Order, Auto Attack Chains and Damaging Skills

In the first step, we will take a look at weapon skills.

1. Start in Air Attunement and cast Polaric Leap , Lightning Orb , Cyclone , Quantum Strike
2. Swap to Fire Attunement and cast Flame Uprising , Wildfire , Cauterizing Strike
3. Perform 3x Auto Attack Chains until Flame Uprising is ready again to be used
4. Cast Flame Uprising and swap to Earth Attunement and cast Earthen Vortex , Dust Storm , Rust Frenzy
5. Swap back to Air Attunement and perform 3x Auto Attack Chains
6. Repeat from step 1

This will give you a basic idea of what skills are important, how their cooldowns line up and how the auto attack chain functions.

Step 2: Jade Sphere and Utilities

Now it is time to take a look at the Jade Sphere and Utilities, namely Relentless Fire , Arcane Blast and Glyph of Storms . Augments become stronger when cast near the corresponding Sphere. You will have enough energy to cast your Jade Spheres in Air, Fire, and Earth. Use the Augment right after casting the corresponding Sphere. Use Arcane Blast in Fire because that is where you have the highest damage modifiers on you. Keep in mind that spheres are instant cast actions so they can be used immediately when you swap attunements as long as you have the energy required.

1. Start in Air Attunement , precast Lightning Storm , cast Deploy Jade Sphere and cast Polaric Leap , Lightning Orb , Cyclone , Quantum Strike
2. Swap to Fire Attunement , cast Deploy Jade Sphere , followed by Relentless Fire and cast Flame Uprising , Wildfire , Cauterizing Strike then Auto Attack x3 until Flame Uprising is off cd
3. Cast Flame Uprising and swap to Earth Attunement , cast Deploy Jade Sphere and cast Earthen Vortex , Dust Storm , Rust Frenzy
4. Swap back to Air Attunement and Auto Attack x3
5. Repeat step 1 (without glyph of storms since it will be on cooldown)

Try to use spheres back to back when possible (for example from air to fire) because that way you minimize the 5 seconds internal cooldown that exists until you can start generating energy again.

Step 3: Elite Skill, Water Attunement, Firestorm and Wildfire

Glyph of storms gives you 4 different options depending on your attunement and the ones you want to be using are Firestorm and Lightning Storm . Lightning storm is the strongest option but with a high cooldown so if you know you won’t be able to use lightning storm in every phase or again in the entire fight, you can fit a firestorm somewhere in between and end with a lightning storm. Keep in mind that you heavily benefit from being able to precast Glyph of Storms whenever you can. If you have Elemental Celerity slotted it can be used to either reset air skills or fire skills. The rotation will look like this:

1. Start in Air Attunement , precast Lightning Storm , cast Deploy Jade Sphere and cast Polaric Leap , Lightning Orb , Cyclone , Quantum Strike
2. Swap to Fire Attunement , Deploy Jade Sphere , followed by Relentless Fire and Arcane Blast , Wildfire , Cauterizing Strike , Flame Uprising , Elemental Celerity , Wildfire , Cauterizing Strike , Flame Uprising
3. Swap to Earth Attunement and cast Deploy Jade Sphere , Earthen Vortex , Dust Storm , Rust Frenzy
4. Swap to Water Attunement , cast Deploy Jade Sphere and Tidal Surge
5. Swap back to Air Attunement and Auto Attack x3
6. Repeat step 1 (without glyph of storms and elemental celerity since they will be on cooldown)

Attuning to water is normally part of the rotation in the opener and after that when you have Tidal Surge off cd and enough energy for both Deploy Jade Sphere and Deploy Jade Sphere . On most fractal bosses there won’t be enough time to attune to water due to how short phases are (exception being Ensolyss). You can save that attunement for cc or emergnecy healing.

Step 4: Skill Queuing and Cancelling Aftercasts

After learning what skills to press and in what order the last thing is to learn how to queque them and how to cancel some aftercasts. Skill quequing means that you can always click the next skill you want to press as long it can’t interrupt your previous one ( Polaric Leap and Earthen Vortex can do that for example) so as the action happens immediately when the previous animation is done. You can also use a skill while you are switching attunements which is done with Flame Uprising , Quantum Strike , Cyclone and Rust Frenzy .

Aftercasts are animations that keep happening even after all the damage a skill can do has been applied to the target. They can be avoided by interrupting them with another skill. For example Rust Frenzy has a long aftercast that can be interrupted with Polaric Leap .

In fractals, you will mostly use Conjures to precast skills at the start of the fight or between phases. The most important skills are Invoke Lightning from Conjure Lightning Hammer as well as Firestorm from Conjure Fiery Greatsword .

Extra Info

• It was made clear in previous sections how important Empowering Auras are but other than precasting them, you also need to be able to maintain them in between phases or build them up if needed. There are 2 ways to do that: 1) you can combo in an attunement that you don’t normally use, which is . You can provide a field for yourself with Water Globe and blast it with Arcane Brilliance , 2) you can refresh your stacks with Sand Squall at any given moment as long as you can attune to earth.
• If the downtime is longer (for example skorvald islands or ensolyss capture phases), keep in mind that attuning to fire refreshes your stacks or gives you 1 if you have dropped them, because of Sunspot and you can perform extra combos by providing a field with Flame Uprising and blasting it with Earthen Vortex .
• This is mostly relevant if you decide to play hammer but hammer orbs can’t be precasted anymore because they dissapear on weapon swap. If you play hammer on certain bosses you can do an additional precast with either Meteor Shower or Lightning Orb after casting Firestorm depending on your opener (make sure to not get in combat on the wrong weapon set).