As a Katalina Main, I'm disappointed (of her Mastery Traits)
Greetings, a support Katalina main here. I mainly use a paladin-type playstyle with her, focused on utilizing cooldown-related mechanics to be able to spam Light Wall in runs for that sweet 12 secs. Invulnerability time to beat down on a boss, while maxing out on Stun Power to bring in Link Attacks and Breaks to subdue them.
..but with that in mind, and with the title of this post, I still have gripes when it comes to this character (and probably applies to the other characters as well); regarding the mastery traits.
[Note: To preface this, I love to play support; Katalina, Captain, Cagliostro, Rosetta & Vane. I understand that there will be some level of bias when it comes to my justifications gearing towards support/utility-type of stuff, but I will still be making statements for the DPS-viewpoint as well, or just the character’s kit in general. Alright? Alright, good.]
[State of Katalina, Pre & Post Endless Ragnarok]
It was a common sentiment that Katalina was frowned upon due to her clunkiness in her gameplay, most notably how her Ares mechanic works. You had to go through lengths just to be able to summon her, may it be through combo finishers, wasting skill cooldowns, etc., and once Ares is summoned, you need to maintain her by continuing her combos via Pactstrikes. You can also use a skill called Azure Sword to have an on-demand refill of the Ares gauge and temporarily have her by your side for 10 seconds without depleting your gauge (but of course, that’s already wasting a skill slot just for that comfort). The thing that made her clunky was regarding how it was very finnicky to maintain Ares once she’s summoned, especially when it comes to dodging. A simple dodge in the middle of your combo unsummons her, and in a game where late game bosses like Lucillius and Behemoth existed, you’re bound to dodge one way or another, resulting in depleting your Ares gauge prematurely and unsummoning her.
So it was basically a “going all-out” kind of kit where if Ares shows up, you have to do everything you can to maintain her, else they piss off and you have to start your prep work all over again. All this for a measly damage upgrade not even comparable to the top DPS characters, worse when it’s crucial to have Ares up since it augments some of her skills (especially the buff ones) to be able to apply buffs to the party.
Entering Endless Ragnarok, she was given some nifty QoL updates, especially when it comes to dodges being able to maintain Ares uptime now (it’s akin to your character’s combos where dodging still queues up the next input of your combo string). This way, Katalina was given more leeway in her Ares uptime, and I’ve been loving it a lot. Being able to move around the battlefield and catch some of the pesky bosses that move a lot while keeping Ares in check is like a minigame in and of itself and I personally think separates Katalina players to those who know the ins and outs of maintaining and opening up her kit’s versatility.
Then when I saw one of her mastery trait perks, Essence: Army of Two, I was stoked because when I saw how her 2nd tier works, it's that every time you call upon Ares, you gain 3 stacks of “Ares Surge”. These stacks are consumed basically whenever you fuck up in your Ares rotation, and while you have stacks of Ares Surge, she won’t get unsummoned. This essentially means you get to have 3 lives for Ares, 3 tries/extensions of her uptime before she disappears. When I initially played this perk, it was heavenly and what Katalina needed to fix her clunkiness prior to this update, giving you breathing room and some margin of error to gain access to Katalina’s full kit.. well, it was supposed to.. then we get into the next tier of this perk.
[One Step Forward, Two Steps Back]
Getting into the 3rd tier of this perk, you might think “Oh cool, on top of having the benefits of the previous tier, this incentivizes you to consume her stacks to gain a DMG Dealt buff?”. That means I need to consume these stacks by doing Pactstrike finishers as fast as possible to be able to utilize this perk line’s benefits, right? Since every time you do a Pactstrike finisher, it consumes a stack that gives you a DMG Dealt buff and resets the combo string. Neat, that opens up avenues on how you can go about doing your combos then.
Then you realize that it later states “If the combo ends, any remaining charges are removed”. It completely invalidates the 2nd tier’s perks and you’re back to square one again. Opening up the 3rd tier means that fucking up on Ares maintenance via combos completely depletes the Ares gauge, unsummons her, and you lose all the DMG buff stacks anyway. Who thought this was a good idea?
AGAIN, prefacing that I understand that I’m coming from a support/utility viewpoint and that I just need to accept that this is the intention of the perk line, but what I’m baffled about is that why was this the natural progression of the mastery trait? Why introduce a cool mechanic that amounts to the biggest QoL that Katalina needs, then making it null if you go deeper in? At that point, you become like me and maybe some crazy person out there as well where you either just bite the bullet and accept the benefits that you don’t really like, or you’re stuck with a half-ass build and only use 2 tiers into this mastery trait line.
Personally speaking, this really makes me envious of other characters that have game-changing augments and upgrades to their kit that completely changes how they’re played, while I’m stuck here with just a QoL update. They might as well have just added this to the patch notes of character balancing rather than creating this horrendous thing of a skill tree.
..and I hear you saying “If you don’t like it, why not choose the other perks? There’s clearly a support-centered perk that fits your needs”. Hoo boii, they’re good perks, alright.
[Katalina and Her Non-Existent Mastery Trait]
To quickly explain Insight: Forever Ares, it basically makes it so that various things extends Ares gauge (landing hits on enemies with your skills, link attacks, etc.), and the longer Ares is summoned, you gradually gain stacks that gives DMG Dealt, up to a cap.. every 15 secs. until you have 5 stacks, So not counting the initial stack you get simply by summoning Ares, IT TAKES 60 SECONDS TO GAIN THE FULL BENEFITS FROM THIS PERK. You quite literally can’t use this trait for damage testing on the dummy since you gain the last buff stack by the time the training is already over.
Oh, also you lose all those stacks when Ares fucks off. Remember bosses with stalling phases and you have nothing to hit? Say goodbye to your stacks and you need to do it again for a minute, and I hope you’re friends with Beelzebub, Lucillius and The World that can allow you to do that.
“If it takes that long, surely the payoff is worth it and you gain a massive damage boost, right?”
+25% DMG Dealt after 1 minute (or +50% if you use one of the mastery nodes). You know what else gives you that much? Essence Perk, the one we previously discussed..
..and you gain a better buff of +65% DMG Dealt.. and you can get that within 10 secs. You gain a better buff for 1/6 of the time spent, completely making the Insight perk useless.
You can argue of niche cases, but the problem is still that why didn’t they introduce an entirely different playstyle through one of the perks rather than just the same perk but with different conditions? Such a waste of space in her character’s features that could’ve been used for something better.
[Support Katalina Perk, but I'd Rather Be Someone Else Instead]
So, Crux: Blade Blue. I’m not gonna lie, it has A LOT of stuff to offer that I can argue is better than most supports can offer; a unique party buff with a total of 33% ATK, 90% DMG Cap & 30% Supplementary DMG. Sounds like a dream come true.
Let’s see, you need the skills Heal & Light Wall to give your party the ATK% & DMG Cap buffs, and Emerald Shield for the Supplementary DMG. Damn, that’s 3 skills down, I guess I need to use Azure Sword to have a good on-demand Ares gauge fill-up.
But that limits how much I can keep Ares’ uptime. Maybe I’ll let go of Light Wall for something spammable like Frozen Blade, despite the loss of the party invulnerability, since Heal has a lower cooldown for those Blade Blue stacks. I guess the 3rd-tier perk with Emerald Shield can give stacks to my party as well anyway.
Wait, the additional stacks from that only affects Katalina? My team doesn’t benefit from the 5% chance of gaining stacks via the supplementary hits?
You basically have to gimp your kit and available skills to use with this perk line just to force the buff uptime. I haven’t told you the inconveniences when it comes to the very restrictive skill options as well, where while Heal affects the party by default, Emerald Shield and Light Wall requires Ares to be active to even be able to give the buff to your party. And guess what, casting any of the buff skills (without Azure Sword’s effect) depletes Ares gauge, so without Azure Sword, you need to resummon Ares again.
Not to mention relying solely on Heal for the Blade Blue stacks upkeep, while doable, can still be missed even with full cooldown management. I’ve tried one time going full aggro on any of the Defy Infinity bosses, utilizing everything from Cascade to Nimble Onslaught to Katalina’s unique sigils. There are still gaps that even after reaching 3 stacks, the time in between cooldowns is so tight that there are times that we all lost the buff and I have to stack them again using only Heal.
A LOT OF HOOPS TO GO THROUGH when at that point, I’d rather just use Cagliostro. She basically has virtually the same type of offensive buffs but she has a much easier time maintaining them with cooldown resets and her heal/shield being more potent than Katalina’s, despite the range (though I’d argue it might be a bug because despite them having the same description of converting their heals to being a “5% HP shield”, Katalina actually grants 5% of the character’s HP as a shield just like the tooltip says, while Cagliostro grants near a full HP bar worth). But even let’s say they fix Cagliostro’s shielding, she still has a much easier time with the cooldown resets and is able to stack those up.
[TL;DR] Katalina's Mastery Traits sucks and feel very counter-intuitive. I'm not sure if other people feel the same way, and I know.. this is a random person's rambling on a playstyle no one probably cares about.. at the very least, going to the lengths of even justifying such a long-winded rant..
..but I personally love what her kit offers. Well, would have, and it just sucks that it could've been much better.