Catalyst - Celestial S/D Signet Cata Roamer
The community gave this build a rating, making it top-tier: Great
Focused on: Hybrid damage and Mobility
Designed for: WvW Roaming
Expansions required: 
Difficulty:
Easy
This build was last updated on March 12, 2025 and is up to date for the March 11, 2025 patch.
Overview
A tanky Cele Scepter/Dagger Catalyst build for WvW Roaming using signets for passive sustain and improved aura access. The build's capable of doing high damage both through power and condition damage sources, and could even demolish some specs with a simple autoattack spam.
Skill Bar
Scepter/Dagger
Utility
Template Code
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Specializations
Variants
- offers higher damage at the expense of some sustain.
Specialization Variants
Arcane over 
Fire - this version has lower cleansing and weaker Fire skills, but offers reduced attunement swap/Jade Sphere cooldowns on top of useful bonuses like another blast finisher and extra healing on dodge from :
Equipment
Head
Celestial
Shoulders
Celestial
Chest
Celestial
Hands
Celestial
Legs
Celestial
Feet
Celestial
Backpiece
Celestial
Accessory
Celestial
Accessory
Celestial
Amulet
Celestial
Ring
Celestial
Ring
Celestial
Scepter
Celestial
Dagger
Celestial
Sigil
Sigil
Rune
x6
Infusion
x18
Relic
Equipment Variants
Sigils
- Take and if you're having trouble surviving, but these shouldn't be necessary.
Relics
We're recommending Relic of Rivers because it helps reduce important CDs (including attunements swapping) while also providing some Regen for extra healing. There are plenty of others viable relics too though, depending on what you're looking for:
- - this is primarily a burst-focused option that buffs your direct damage (especially in Fire attunement) but the aura synergy gives it some defensive value too, including condi cleansing and gaining defensive boons upon using your healing skill.
- - improves your
Fury uptime if you want to focus on the Power side of the build a bit more. Could be useful in matchups vs high cleansing builds.
- - effortless permanent
Vigor uptime. Strong defensive relic but it's not that important if you're already using some kind of endurance regen food like .
- - the extra healing reduction and
Poison procs could make you better at fighting other high sustain roaming builds.
- - adds a new cover condition to the build with high uptime, making it harder for enemies to cleanse your more important conditions. Also increases your damage a bit.
- - passive damage boost, both power and condi.
Consumables
Food
- - defensive option with more evasion and great Relic of Rivers synergy.
- - passive damage mitigation and a boost to all of your stats, goes well with all Celestial builds.
Utility
- Optimal:
- Budget: either from Canned Food Crates found in WvW s or purchased from the Permanent Portable Provisioner.
Usage
Elite specialization basics
- Catalysts gain access to Deploy Jade Sphere which drops an AoE combo field with pulsing boons depending on the attunement it was used in.
- The Jade Sphere costs energy to deploy, you build energy by hitting enemies or swapping attunements thanks to .
- Jade Spheres are instant and can be used while casting skills or sitting in a CC.
General
- makes your signets retain their passive effects after being used. With this you no longer need to make a decision between using the active and keeping the passive, feel free to use the signets pretty much on CD. For instance on other Ele builds using 's active would be a desperate last resort option, but here you're encouraged to do it whenever you're missing more than 3k HP.
- Because of you should almost always be casting something for the passive healing, even if it's just an autoattack that's not even hitting anything. An exception to this would be having high enough
Confusion stacks that you'd take more damage than what the signet could outheal.
- Whether you need to chase another roamer or want to disengage from a lost fight, is a very strong mobility skill. Just make sure you have "auto-targeting" disabled in the options and use it without a target selected if you want to escape a fight, otherwise it's going to take you right back into the action.
- Try going from to whenever you can. The
Quickness from Air's Jade Sphere is best combined with the burst damage of Fire attunement.
- (the elite) reduces the recharge of every weapon skill on your current attunement. Use it on:
- Air if you need mobility/CC/evasion.
- Fire for extra burst damage.
- Water for healing/cleansing.
- Earth for CC and minor sustain from
Blind and barrier.
Auras
- You gain
Stability whenever you gain an aura thanks to .
- With the Fire variant you also cleanse 1 condition via .
- With the
- further improves your signets by attaching auras to their activation. Each signet grants an aura based on the element the signet's associated with, for example applies
Frost Aura.
- grants an aura based on your current element when you execute a combo (with a 10s CD per element).
- The spread of combo finishers on S/D isn't optimal for aura stacking with Elemental Epitome - Air and Water don't have any while Earth has up to 5. This however can be remedied with good timing and a little bit of creativity by switching attunements at the right moment, causing some finishers to land in a different attunement.
- An example of spreading out finishers would be dropping the Jade Sphere on Earth, following up with and swapping to Air for or casting a in a then swapping to Water before the blast goes off.
- Combo finishers in the build:
- and on Fire.
- (chain skill of ), , and (if you're playing the Arcane variant) the first dodge you perform after swapping to this element thanks to . There's also the autoattack but that's a bit random.
- There're also some less complicated ways of obtaining auras. Water #4 creates a (and flips over into a chain skill which lets you transmute it for extra effects or, more cleansing via when playing the Fire variant). Another easy one on the Fire variant is to simply swap to for a proc. These are both instant and can even be done while casting skills or sitting in a CC, preventing enemies from piling more CCs onto you via .
- As the Jade Sphere is instant you could even drop a combo field in the middle of your dodge in Earth to obtain an aura.
Damage
- Fire is your strongest element, followed by Earth.
- is an autoattack which is more dangerous than it looks, capable of rapidly stacking burning on enemies if you're allowed to freecast for a few seconds. Quickness from the Air Jade Sphere can help a lot with that, so dropping the sphere on Air before switching to Fire is always a good idea.
- There's no set rotation on this attunement, only good practices like making sure your Blast finishers land in a Fire field and sending everything on CD before swapping out of Fire. Spam autos if you have Quickness otherwise burst targets with other Fire skills and use the auto as a filler once everything's on CD.
- and both do good damage and are Blast finishers. Other than stacking auras they have inherent value as combo tools, for example if used inside the Fire Jade Sphere these two are going to stack
Might which increases your damage.
- Both of these skills work on targets behind your character, allowing you to effortlessly pressure enemies even while kiting them.
- has a delay and often forces enemies to keep a dodge ready so they can avoid it. Use the time while it's hanging above your enemy to unload your other fire skills while they're less likely to dodge.
- is a simple AoE that burns foes when cast (and whenever they cross the ring). It's also a combo field.
- should always be used when the target has
Burning for the extra damage. Considering how every other weapon skill on this attunement inflicts burning that shouldn't be hard.
- Air skills don't do a whole lot of damage compared to Fire but and offer good cover conditions to make your Burning stacks harder to cleanse.
- While offers a passive stat increase, most of the time people tend to go immediately for its chain skill to deal damage. Hurl launched 5 projectiles which apply
Bleeding that are guaranteed projectile finishers, these are best used inside the Earth Sphere to combo Poison or a Fire Field for Burning.
- adds more condition variety to your bursts on top of being a great defensive skill.
- isn't quite as good of an auto as but it's an okay filler skill when you've got nothing better to do.
- Use , ,
Shocking Aura and to root people into hard hitting skills like or .
Sustain
- The build has lots of passive strike damage mitigation and several tools that reduce incoming condition damage/duration:
- + + +
Protection + Frost Aura against strike damage. - + reduce the duration of incoming conditions.
- + + +
- Arcane variant Simply swapping to Earth can already help you out against strike damage as you'll gain Protection from . Earth Jade Sphere grants the same boon plus
Resistance.
- Water is the best attunement when it comes to dealing with condition pressure. With the Arcane variant your cleansing is limited mostly to and the first dodge on water via , while the Fire variant turns every aura application and aura transmute into a source of cleansing due to synergy. With Fire you get to do back-to-back s for burst cleansing as the build has plenty of Frost Aura application (Dagger 4, Signet of Restoration and Water, plus the one from ).
- cleanses 1 condition.
- is rather straightforward, heals when it strikes an enemy.
- Water Attunement's Jade Sphere is a Water field, dropping blast finishers inside it is a good way of resustaining yourself. While Water doesn't have any such finishers, swapping to right after and following up with a dodge (when playing Arcane) + Earthquake + Churning Earth for 3 blasts is a common play.
Chill from and can help you kite enemies.
- and mitigate damage via Blind spam, but Blinding Flash also has
Weakness which is quite nice against power-based specs (and it's instant so could even be used while CC'd).
- is a decent barrier source for damage mitigation and makes Resistance negates non-damaging conditions.
- is your only stun break, luckily it's on short CD and the build has plenty of Stability. If you're good enough at reading the field you could even use it preemptively, Blinding an incoming CC (or any other impactful attack skill) instead of reacting to it after you've been hit. The skill laso grants Shocking Aura which stuns attackers.
- Other than just being a powerful CC tool also has an evade frame which is quite useful if you're out of dodges and need to avoid something important.
- also works on downed players, you could use this to knock enemies off of capture points to bleed them out slowly while you cap the node.
- is great at disengaging from fights and lets you do it twice, which should make it impossible for most builds in the game to chase you down.
Ratings
If you replace geo with sigil of cleansing, nothing can kill you in 1v1. Otherwise, be careful of Harbinger and core mes.
The epitome of being broken. The only thing I don't understand is why this isn't more popular. It does everything and isn't even hard yet I barely see anyone playing it. Maybe people don't want to get angry whispers lol. If you ever want to know how it feels to win a 1v3, try this.
Ven I finished mein level 80 story, I dived straight into WvW, und Cele Cata has been so forgivin' like a grandma vith cookies, und it smashes foes like they're little bugs, vith good defense und good moves like a cat on a hot tin roof. Beginners or newer players to WvW should totally jump into cata more often. It's recommended, beginner-friendly; it's simply ze best, like wurst on a brötchen, no vonder it's S-tier, like ze top shelf beer at Oktoberfest!
Extremely strong cele build that managed to dodge most of the sPvP nerfs (not just this month but also in prior months). High sustain, high damage, high mobility, almost every boon in the game, great condition variety. SotO update: still S tier. Nothing's changed since last year, still a great pick.
Comments
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