Build:Catalyst - Spear Cata

This is a test build. You may comment and rate it.

Focused on: Strike damage, Control and Mobility

Designed for: PvP Conquest

Expansions required:

Difficulty:

Hard

This build was last updated on July 08, 2025.

Overview

A Catalyst build utilizing the land spear introduced in Janthir Wilds. A strong emphasis on mobility and burst damage.

Skill Bar

Spear

Utility

Skill Variants

Utility

For the optional slot:

• Armor of Earth - strong stun break with Stability and barrier.

• Invigorating Air - relatively short cool down stun break with Superspeed and restores endurance.

• Lightning Flash - a teleport that allows you to get out of dangerous situations vertically.

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Specializations

Variants

• Spectacular Sphere offers strong boons like Resistance from Earth's sphere.

Specialization Changes

Arcane enhances a majority of your utilities and provides reliable access to boons like Protection and Fury. Water provides reliable condition cleansing and healing with slightly more damage at the cost of less reliable boons.

Variants

• Stop, Drop, and Roll provides cleanse against conditions like Chilled, which can heavily hinder your recharge times.

Equipment

Spear

Sigil

Sigil

Rune

Amulet

Relic

Equipment Variants

Amulets

• - reduced damage, but more sustain. Take Rune of Scholar to make up some of the damage loss.

Relics

• Relic of Rivers - amazing synergy with Cleansing Water (when playing the Water variant).

Usage

Elite specialization basics

• Catalysts gain access to Deploy Jade Sphere, which is an AoE that grants boons and provides a combo field depending on the attunement.

• The Jade Sphere requires energy to deploy, which is generated by hitting enemies.

• Jade Spheres are instant and can be used while casting abilities or while suffering from CC.

Spear basics

• Here's a quick rundown of the weapon in case you're new to it.

• The 3rd skill of every attunement boosts the effectiveness of your next weapon skill in some way, ranging from extra damage to CD reduction.

• The 4th skill of every attunement is a ground targeted AoE with a bonus effect if you can catch someone near the center of it. This rewards those with good aim.

• The 5th skill of every attunement is an etching. An AoE combo field will be placed below your character, granting boons to allies inside. For a few seconds you'll gain access to their chain skills which are ground targeted AoE skills. These chain skills can be empowered by casting other weapon skills while the etching is active, but it's also fine to use them for their base effect.

General

• Role: your job is to roam the map and assist in team fights or +1 sidenodes. You should generally avoid 1v1s, but you can handle some of them due to the range of your abilities.

• Everytime you land a CC, you proc Lightning Rod (LR) for extra damage and Weakness. This is important both for defense and offense, as Weakness spam is your first line of defense against Power-based builds.

• Your 4 skills on Spear are significantly stronger if you can hit enemies within the 120 radius circle instead of the 240 radius one. This even allows for skills such as Twister to activate Lightning Rod for additional damage.

• Generally speaking, you should try to get your etchings charged up, but getting greedy and staying inside the AoE field spamming skills while you're being focused could quickly get you killed.

• The etchings are valuable enough on their own, especially with Etching: Jokulhlaup healing over time or Etching: Haboob providing Stability for your team, and their chain skills are reasonably strong even without further empowerment.

• Catalyst has a trait called Elemental Epitome, which essentially enhances all your combo finishers depending on your attunement. This means you can use skills such as Arcane Wave to blast one of your Etchings or Jade Spheres to gain an aura.
  • Fire Attunement ⇒ Fire Aura
  • Water Attunement ⇒ Frost Aura
  • Air Attunement ⇒ Shocking Aura
  • Earth Attunement ⇒ Magnetic Aura
  • Note: building energy for Jade Spheres is harder on this build due to some trait choices, but you can make use of your etchings instead.

• Elemental Celerity recharges every skill of your current attunement. This can be beneficial for escaping a bad situation or dishing out extra damage in a fight.
  • Fire provides raw damage.
  • Water has healing, cleansing and mobility.
  • Air has CC and some mobility.
  • Earth is usually not something you want to use EC on. The attunement isn't weak, but for specific things like damage or sustain other attunements simply offer more. Earth is relatively tanky due to the barrier/Weakness/Stability package with good damage and minor CC.

Damage

• Spear is a fairly simple weapon when it comes to damage. Other than trying to catch people in the inner circle of the 4th skills, there's not much else to worry about. Most skills are simple AoE damaging abilities that were made to be spammed, and there aren't really any big combos or rotations you should be aware of.

• Most of the damage comes from Fire Attunement, as usual.

• Seethe's damage buff is best used on Meteor, especially if you can hit targets in the center of the AoE.

• Earth has several hard hitting skills, they're almost on par with those on Fire.

• Water only has Ice Beam which you could (and should) set up with Undertow. It's very important that you try and catch people in the inner circle of Undertow so they'll be pulled in - this will proc LR and cause Ice Beam to hit multiple targets once they're balled up.

• Air and Water are relatively low damage, although Air at least has 2 CC skills for Lightning Rod synergy.

• Energize can be considered unusual, as it actually makes the entirety of your next skill critically strike, not just the first strike of it. This gives it good synergy with Fulgor, although Fulgor is a small and slow AoE skill that usually won't even land 50% of its max damage in a real fight. Therefore the best target for it on Air is arguably Lesser Derecho, the chain skill of your etching. Alternatively you could carry over the crit chance buff to another attunement, like Fire or Earth.

• Arcane Wave gives you a damage boost while doing heavy damage on its own, which also includes proccing LR. If you bring someone to low HP and need a quick AoE finishing move, this could get the job done.

Sustain

• Water shines here.

• Etching: Jokulhlaup creates a long duration water field with passive healing. You can increase this healing by performing blast and leap finishers inside like Ripple or Arcane Wave.

• Ripple is your best defensive skill. Heals, evades, cleanses conditions, acts as a blast finsiher, and even offers some much needed mobility so you may safely reposition yourself. You can follow this up with an Undertow cast behind your back to leave enemies even further behind.

• Etching: Haboob pulses AoE Stability which can make it easier to resustain yourself under pressure.

• Every skill on the right side of the bar can be used defensively, including Arcane Wave which is a mobility tool, CC and blast finisher all in one.

• Armor of Earth and Arcane Shield are both skills that break stun, give Stability and reduce incoming damage in some capacity.

• Soothing Water is your best source of condition removal.
  • Using it inside your Water Jade Sphere reduces its CD! Don't hold off on using your skill if you're pressured and the sphere isn't available, but do try to benefit from this interaction whenever possible.