Guild Wars 2

Focus is a weapon set of Elementalist which is picked specifically for 2-3 skills useful to make glass cannon elementalists somehow work, while the other one are completely and utterly useless and not worth using in any situation.

Compared to dagger, focus lacks the mobility, damage and healing capability, making it a bad choice for anyone except glass elementalists, who picks this set just because of Swirling Winds and Obsidian Flesh.

The proposed solutions aren’t necessarily thought to be added together.

• Flame Wall: damage is low, casting time is high, the combo field is tight, recharge is relatively high, the burning is underwhelming. Compared to Ring of Fire, it is just flat out horrible.
  Proposed Solutions:
  - Make it give 3 stacks of might for 20s at any ally passing through it with 3s internal cooldown. This will compensate for the lack of fire field area.
  - Lower the casting time to 1/4s: this will make its casting more fitting into the dynamic playstyle of Elementalist.
  - Increase the burning duration to 3s: more punishment to foes crossing it.
  - Add 5 stacks of torment for 5s: again, more punishment to really make the wall a threat and to push further the viability of condition elementalists.
  - Reduce the aftercast delay.

• Fire Shield: recharge is high, its effect are incredibly underwhelming compared to any other aura.
  Proposed Solutions:
  - Decrease the recharge to 30s: this will make this skill more viable as a way to build might stacks.
  - Add blindness to burning when attacked in melee: this will help to increase the shield concept as a true shield, increasing the survivability of focus elementalists. It also fits the concept of the fire shield, whose light blinds the foes attacking.

• Freezing Gust: low damage, low chill duration, high recharge.
  Proposed Solutions:
  - Increase the chill duration to 6s: this will help the elementalists to kite the damage of melee professions and to shut down enemies.
  - Reduce recharge to 15s: helps to push the viability of the skill
  - Add Torment to the Chill: again, to help pushing the viability of condition elementalists.
  - Add healing to the caster: it doesn’t really fit the skill design, but focus need an healing skill to make it viable compared to dagger offhand.

• Comet: unreliable compared to other any weapon set CCs and its casting time does not allow for timed interrupts.
  Proposed Solutions:
  - Reduce the casting time to 1/4s:

• Gale: the recharge is just too high.
  Proposed Solutions:
  - Reduce the recharge to 40s: helping to make it viable compared to dagger.

Proposed solutions are just a stub. I’ll edit the topic gathering feedback from users as far as the thread goes.

There is a lovely thread in the elementalist forum which I was tempted to plagiarise from :P The focus has some amazing skills, and some diabolically terrible ‘wth were they thinking’ skills.

It really does need improving. I feel that the focus is particularly painful to bring in PvE, where I really want mobility to help me move around the map and the power to actually kill things. I only really that the focus would shine in a high damage environment, where defense might actually be useful?

I agree with the OPs suggestions.
I do think some form of healing should go on the weapon. Not sure where

I do also think maybe they can add some sort of secondary activated leap on something like ‘gale’. Knockdown a foe, then press it again to leap to their location or something.

This weapon needs a mobility spell. Maybe Fire #4 could be replaced with that Fiery GS-charge? Still provides a firefield bould could then also deal decent damage and provide mobility.

or this weapon should have a teleport-like spell, similar to lighting flash or to mesmer staff

The best solution is to completely redesign the weapon.

In my eyes, it looks extremely rushed and badly made compared to any other elementalist weapon set.

Just because you guys don’t like / use it it’s no bad weapon. I agree that the focus fire skills have to change, but I’m perfectly fine with any other spell on it.

Lowering CD’s here and there couldn’t hurt tho.

I don’t think a teleport or a rush would fit to the focus theme, as it is more a suvivability / control weapon. And it fits that role pretty well. Just change the fire skills to something more reliable and I’m fine.

Don’t try to make it another dagger, or give it another Ride the Lightning just because you want to try out something else then offhand dagger…

I like the blindness on fire shield and the lower cast time for fire wall idea.

D/F is my preferred weaponset in PvE. It’s a quirky set, but it’s a lot of fun to play and can support a variety of playstyles.

As I’ve said in a previous post about this issue, the cooldowns on focus feel ludicrously out of proportion to the benefits of the skills. These skills in particular need to be addressed (and I think sorrow’s proposals are excellent): Flamewall, which has a too-narrow area and underwhelming damage; Fire Shield, which stacks Might slowly and is counterproductive to surviving or sustaining in a fight; Freezing Gust, which applies only 3 second of Chill on a 25-second cooldown (compare this to Winter’s Bite, Chillblains, or Spinal Shivers, all of which have lower cooldowns and additional effects); and Gale, which has a 50-second cooldown for a 2s KD (compare this to Backbreaker, Tremor, Line of Warding, and Ring of Warding, all of which have lower cooldowns and additional effects).

Focus fire attunement is horrible.
Freezing gust doesn’t really bring much to the table.
Everything else on the focus is great. Everything.
My suggestions

Fire attunement:
Drop Fire shield to 20s cooldown.
Make flamewall unevadable like a ward. Increase the burn duration to 2s and it would give a boon to allies who pass through it on a 8s ICD. Probably might as you mentioned, Regen wouldn’t be bad either.

Then there is freezing Gust. I think the cast should move up to 1/2s and it should do more damage, with an extra damage boost if it hits a foe suffering from chill, which would give some inherit bonus to D/F.

As someone who enjoys playing glass D/F ele, I’ll say that the fire skills are garbage and badly need help, but the rest is passable to great.

Both fire spells are horrible. Everything proposed here for them has been great. (though that’s just evidence that doing literally anything to them would be an improvement.) I especially like the torment idea, since that solves two problems with one change (the other problem being that condition ele is terrible in PvP)

Water spells are fine, but they are also kind of weak.
- Notably, Comet’s delay is too long. It takes too long from when you press the button to when the target gets hit. Also, the fact that it’s a blast finisher is awkward. It gives the skill power that is extremely difficult to take advantage of, so if removing that would allow you to buff it in other ways, please do so.
- Freezing Gust is usably decent, but the chill uptime is pretty weak. The first three suggestions in the first post I all agree with, except that I think 6 seconds is too long. Or actually, looking at Spinal Shivers, maybe it isn’t. Maybe. I do not like the heal suggestion, however. Not every weapon set needs a heal. Some of us like having a weapon set that doesn’t give up any of its power for heal utility that doesn’t gel with offensive builds.

and Gale is great. I mean I obviously wouldn’t argue with a buff, but I think it’s fine.
and swirling winds, magnetic surge, and obsidian flesh are all obviously great

The strength of comet is that it can be cast on enemies behind walls AND that it is a blast finisher.

Freezing Gust chill duration or dmg could be increased slightly. As it is currently abit underwhelming. Would prefer chill over damage.

(From mainly a WVW perspective)

Focus is not at all viable because it completely lacks mobility and any form of healing, both of which can be found in O/H dagger. The dmg and CC potential of focus is also the lowest of all 4 Ele weapon options.

Changes that make sense to me:

• add swiftness to Air #4
• change water #4 to a version of burning speed (dagger fire #3) that chills
• increase burning duration on fire #4 from 1sec -> 4sec
• remove the 1sec CD on the burning inflicted by fire #5 – ie: 3 hits in 1sec = 3sec burning, 1stack might, rather than 1sec burning, 1 stack might.