Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone,

As with my scepter and staff suggestion threads, here’s the following goals to improve our Focus skillset:

• Analyze the problems with the weaponset.
• Suggest buffs to the weaker skills.
• Brainstorm creative changes when/ if needed.
• Promote synergy.
• Avoid powercreep – weaken the stronger skills a bit when buffing the weaker ones.

The Focus – What it is and isn’t
At the current state, the Focus is mostly a defensive and utility weaponset. It has a really strong party support skill (Swirling Winds), but is otherwise a bit selfish. It offers more survival to the elementalist, but usually at the cost of everything.
The skills are generally a bit inconsistent. No one knows if it is meant to be a condition or direct damage setup. We have a burst condi-cleanse in earth, which does not follow our paradigm with fire and water being the cleansing attunements. And the might-stacking subtheme is unreliable and situational.
Generally, it’s not even a good set for bunker eles, because most of the focus skills are either mediocre or really poor, with some exceptions at the opposite end. Focus sometimes finds a place in this meta, because it can hard counter some meta builds, but it still has trouble fitting in.
Finally, there’s not much synergy with MH Dagger setups.

Magnetic Wave and Fire Aura

I’ve dedicated a section for those two skills for a reason. Not only are they one of our strongest and weakest skills respectively, but my entire focus suggestion list is going to revolve around the proposed changes I have for those two skills.

New Magnetic Wave

• No longer cleanses conditions, and no longer reflects projectiles. It is now an aoe push-back skill that also applies 3 stacks of bleeding for 6 seconds. 1 second casting time added.
• The damage, blast finisher and cripple will still be there.

So, I’ve took three strong things out of this, to add two new effects that are probably only situationally as good. That was a lot of changes, so let me explain:

The push-back is the big thing here. It allows for some good synergy with both scepter and dagger:

• S/F builds want to stay at range. By pushing back and crippling nearby melee foes, focus would now get a tool to maintain the range advantage.
• D/F builds want to push into almost-melee range, but they need the defense. A PBAoE that allows you to interrupt all foes around you can be pretty nice, and even more so when following by a Burning Speed, or in the case of pvp, to decap the point faster.

But it’s not only mechanically that makes sense. When it comes to flavor, we already have a magnetic skill to reflect projectiles (the aura), a magnetic skill to leap into foes (from MH dagger), and a magnetic skill to pull foes into us (from conjure shield). We were missing a push-back magnetic effect so far, and this change fills that hole.

There is, however, a main problem with adding a push-back to this skill. When I proposed this change in a streaming page some time ago, one of Anet’s developers, Jon Peters, said it was not a good idea to add even more CC skills to our weaponsets. I do agree with that, however, because I think a push-back change would fit this perfectly, I think it’s better to go for it, and remove the daze from Comet. Let’s make Comet an epic skill instead:

Comet

• No longer dazes target.
• Now applies 6 stacks of Torment for 6 seconds.
• Higher delay animation.

6 stacks of torment is very strong, but with a higher delayed animation, this would be closer to Dragon Tooth – it would require some skill and CC to make the skill hit. (I don’t think, however, the it should take as long to fall as DT does).

And because this change pushes focus elementalists into condition damage, that was the main reason why I added bleeding to magnetic wave too.

Not only that, but both MW and Comet will have higher counterplay due to the added casting times and delayed animations respectively. This is healthy for the game, promotes skillful play from both sides, and avoids power creep.

I know the projectile reflection is very fun in the current MW, but it’s a bit redudant when we already have swirling winds. It makes focus coutner too hard specific playstyles, while not offer enough defenses against other playstyles.

But I’m going to put condition cleansing somewhere else. Guess what?

New Fire Aura/ Fire Shield

• Each time you get hit, you lose 1 condition and your opponent starts burning for 2 seconds.

Condition cleansing is usually found in fire and water attunements, with fire having most of the cleansing-burst options. This fits perfectly, and also makes this aura finally worthy of being the 5th fire focus skill and having a cooldown of 40 seconds. It can remove up to 5 seconds (the effect only procs each second) from a single source, and scales back. For 5 seconds, you can fight back as many condition builds as you want. But, of course, your opponents will only strike you if they want, the aura’s animation is pretty clear, and the cooldown is still high. It wouldn’t be too strong.

2 seconds of burning is needed so that you can increase its duration with “only” 50% condition/ burning duration.

Slight tweaks to remaining skills

• Flamewall
  Casting time decreased from 3/4 to 1/4. Cooldown decreased from 20 seconds to 15 seconds. Burning ticks increased from 1 second to 2 seconds. Twice the direct damage power.
  This skill is insanely easy to avoid. For this reason, it should be more effective at what it already is “best” at: as an easily-accessible fire field that can punish foes who can’t move.

• Freezing Gust
  Make the effect AoE. Decrease the cooldown from 25 seconds to 15 seconds.
  This skill will be important to help making Comet or Dragon tooth hit. It should be more accessible for general purposes, or even for more combo sequenes with DT. The AoE effect was added for general purposes, but also because the animation seems to imply so.

• Gale
  Decrease the cooldown from 50 seconds to 30-45 seconds. (If the cooldown is not decreased much) Increase the KD duration from 2 seconds to 3 seconds.
  This skill is not too bad, but it could be a little better. Another good candidate to make DT or Comet hit. Should be more available. If not, it should be stronger.

• Obsidian Flesh
  Decrease the cooldown from 50 seconds to 40 seconds. Decrease the duration from 5 seconds to 4 seconds.
  Elementalists have generally many problems with insanely high cooldowns, but this skill is already strong by itself. I’d rather it be more accessible, even if it’s slightly weaker, for the sake of better sustain.

Conclusion

• New synergies were made or improved (Magnetic Wave -> Burning Speed, or Freezing Gust/ Gale -> Comet/ Dragon Tooth);
• One of the strongest skills was toned down to compensate for the other buffs.
• A condition-damage build can be very solid from this, but focus can still work in hybrid or direct damage builds as well as it did.
• More counter-play was added, preventing it from becoming too strong.

well, i made a thread a couple days ago that got mostly ignored, pointing out some changes i’d like to see on focus.

TL;DR of that thread: i think air and earth are on a good spot, but fire needs to be reworked, and water might need some tweaking.

DiogoSilva.7089:

New Fire Aura/ Fire Shield

• Each time you get hit, you lose 1 condition and your opponent starts burning for 2 seconds.

Considering the number of ways to get Fire Aura this is probably a bit over powered.
1) Focus skill
2) Leap through fire field
3) On signet use (with trait)

Also, don’t forget engineer get’s this ability through Kit Refinement with a flamethrower. Probably actually works nicely for them as well, but that’s only a 20s cooldown.

I like the idea, but either the ability on Focus would need to be seperated from the others or the effect would need some toning down. Otherwise you can get pretty high up time with this already.

Other than Fire attunement of focus I think the focus is mighty fine. The main reason why its cooldowns are so kitten high is because it offers really high survivability tools. Which means that instead of having forced to take at least 2 cantrips you’re allowed to slip in some damage instead.

Like say if you know someone has used all their stun breakers you can just use Gale with Phoenix + Arcane Power to their face to execute. With Ogre and potentially the bonus crit damage on arcane skill trait a critted Phoenix wrecks faces. If you take dagger off-hand you might not have the luxury of offensive utility since it offers little survivability.

Candy Constellation.2371:

Other than Fire attunement of focus I think the focus is mighty fine. The main reason why its cooldowns are so kitten high is because it offers really high survivability tools. Which means that instead of having forced to take at least 2 cantrips you’re allowed to slip in some damage instead.

Like say if you know someone has used all their stun breakers you can just use Gale with Phoenix + Arcane Power to their face to execute. With Ogre and potentially the bonus crit damage on arcane skill trait a critted Phoenix wrecks faces. If you take dagger off-hand you might not have the luxury of offensive utility since it offers little survivability.

freezing gust could stand to hit more targets though, or at least deal a bit more damage.

but yeah. it allows you to actually try out some different stuff. i’ve been enjoying an arcane build on WvW with scepter/focus.