Hammer Catalyst is a high damage duelist; its DPS on top of boon support from allows it to be great even in larger fights where Elementalist typically suffers.
Build Fundamentals
Unlike typical Elementalist builds, hammer has a high focus on mitigating incoming damage rather than resustaining through it. Your best defensive skills are , , and . Upkeeping auras specifically and significantly boost your sustain in most matchups, and frequently comboing into them can even win certain duels by themselves.
Hammer 3rd skill no matter the element is an orb giving you a bonus while dealing some damage and conditions around you. It is mandatory you keep them up as much as possible. When they’re about to run out you can cast for a decent burst of damage with good range.
Damage
The more damage you mitigate and the less you have to focus expending energy you worked so hard to generate on defensive jade spheres ( or ), the more you can spend that energy on offensive jade spheres ( or ), which will greatly boost you and your team’s damage output.
Most of hammer’s damage output will come from the skills, however hammer can do noticeable damage outside of too with skills like and , and auto attacks.
Resetting your cooldowns with to unleash another set of , , and right after using them is one of the best things you can do to finish off a pressured or downstate target.
Sustain
Like normal elementalist builds, water fields and your ’s are an important part of your sustain, and you can make great use of your water field with all of hammer’s blast finishers. You can blast or leap through the field 3+ times consistently utilizing , ’s , , , and/or .
As mentioned earlier, hammer catalyst focuses on mitigating incoming damage rather than just resustaining through it with water combos and the more you do it will boost your offensive capabilities.
is a 3 second block that also will give you 3000 barrier to deal with whatever is thrown your way after the block expires. You can lower the recharge on to a very low 16 second cooldown by casting before or during Fortified Earth’s channel.
is the most important jade sphere by far for your sustain and in general. It provides from , and can easily combo with your ’s to give you:
- from which in turn will apply from and additionally removes a condition because of .
- Area on enemies around you from blast finishing the poison field.
This is your easiest and best way of generating , and allows you to use other finishers in other attunements to get other auras, since you can’t with ’s .
The 3 main ways you generate will be casting from as you go into the , casting in , and quickly swapping to before your block is hit.
Anytime you get an aura you’ll cleanse a condition thanks to . This is the way you keep conditions off of you when they’re applied slowly to you over time. The best way of dealing with a condi bomb is either which can cleanse anywhere from 2 to 6 conditions although usually 3-4, and ’s #5 skill as most conditions will fall off during the 3 second invulnerability.
Other Tips and Tricks
Comboing in to get and then pressuring with skills is one of the best ways you can land damage.
Deploy Jade Sphere is instant cast, this means you can use it while doing anything else and even when stunnned!
You can swap attunements mid cast of your skills, and it is integral to getting proper value from some of your skills.
can be used in any attunement in the right situation:
- As mentioned earlier, resetting your skills is great at helping you get a kill, but when chasing down enemies with your teammates, it can often be better to set them up for success by resetting skills to chain crowd control with and .
- Resetting your skills with can be a great source of healing and burst cleanse.
- Resetting your skills is a great way of sustaining and is often better to do so proactively to mitigate damage in than reactively resustain in . It will also help you maintain and uptime.
You don’t get nearly as countered by , or as other elementalist builds thanks to causing to apply . By the time the runs out the conditions will probably have run out or been cleansed.
will only heal you a lot if you hit a target with it; to avoid this being nullified by or you can use a jade sphere during or before the cast of it to remove those two effects. You can also use to blind enemies during the cast to keep yourself from being interrupted.
