Guild Wars 2

It’s no secret that the focus is a tragically underused weapon by elementalists. On the surface, its defensive orientation and chainable abilities appear to suit the playstyle of many elementalist builds. However, I believe that most players, elementalists or otherwise, would agree that despite several of its “rock-star” abilities, it lacks the tools to serve as a viable elementalist weapon in most situations. To be clear, I am unsure if this is actually the case. There may be legions of elite pros using the focus, but if so they have not contacted me and I am unable to find their builds. Wrong or right, and without any complain or qq intended, it is my personal belief that the focus needs more love.

To that end, I am posting a series of ideas on how to mend some of the most-griped-about focus abilities what I hope to be a fair, balanced way. Generally, these suggestions will involve reworking or tweaking skills rather than replacing them entirely. This will hopefully make the suggested changes more practical and easier to implement. Also, these suggestions are not to be taken as a whole. This is not an “all or nothing” focus rework, just a smattering of concepts that I believe would make the weapon more fun to use.

It should also be noted that all of my suggestions pertain exclusively to tpvp. I have no experience in pve or wvw and so cannot suggest changes for those areas. That said, I do not expect these skills to be split between game types, and I hope that the proposed changes are balanced throughout.

I am aware that others have proposed changes to the focus. I have not read many of them, and if I my proposed changes are similar or identical to changes proposed by others, I apologize.

Finally, if you have thoughts or disagreements about the proposed changes or if you have new ideas regarding the focus, feel free to post them.

Flamewall
Look at ring of fire, now back at this, now back at ring of fire. Sadly, this is not ring of fire. But with a few practical tweaks, it can offer the same zone control. The most practical change I’ve heard regarding this ability is to first massively increase the damage per pulse as well as its scaling (so it, you know, does a little more than tickle) and second to have it cause 4-5 seconds of burning once when a person crosses the wall, much like Ring of Fire does. I also agree that this burning should have an internal cooldown of 4-5 seconds so that if a person chooses to walk through it again once the initial effect wears off, they’d get a fat new stack of burning.

Also, some have suggested that flamewall also give a fire shield to all allies passing through it. While this would be extremely cool, I’m of the opinion that simple zone control better fits the theme of the ability.

Fire Shield
If you use d/d, you’ll get twice as many fire shields via leap finishers than you would with this little gem. Some have suggested that the best fix would be to reduce the cooldown or increase the duration. I believe this would remove a ton of the thought and counterplay from this ability. I’m fine with only being able to access it 5 out of every 40 seconds, but only so long as for those brief 5 seconds, I feel more like “COME AT ME BRO!” than “I’ll deal marginally more damage if I time this with your burst!”. To that end, I believe that this ability should, in addition to its fire shield, grant 5 seconds of retaliation, 5 seconds of protection, and deal a pulse of aoe damage every second in a manner akin to Locust Swarm. The retaliation would better incentivize your opponent to avoid attacking you. The protection would actually allow you to survive the attacks (remember, you’re an elementalits, face-tanking usually isn’t an option), and the short-range pulses of damage, while they shouldn’t deal all that much damage, would help make the ability feel more stylized as well as give it a pinch of utility even if you aren’t the focus target.

This may sound like a lot is being added, but that’s because a lot should be added. If all of the proposed additions are too much, any combination of them would still help the ability feel more impactful rather than “that button you press when you switch to fire attunement”.

Gale
Ranged, difficult to predict stuns are extremely valuable. They are not, however, single-target-50-second-cooldown-no damage-no outside-utility valuable. Even for an elementalist, whose cooldowns are justly longer than those of other classes (elementalist would be horrifically OP if the cooldowns weren’t so long), 50 seconds for an ability like this is pushing it. At first, I thought that making this ability aoe or adding some sort of secondary effect to it such as damage, conditions, or boons would make it more appealing. However, the more I think about it, the more I’m of the opinion that the best way to fix this ability is to keep it single target and damageless but to greatly reduce its cooldown. To understand why this would be the best solution, understand the role that gale plays in the focus’s setup. It’s the start of your chains. It’s the making of your combos. It’s the thing you throw down so you can land that dragon’s tooth+phoenix before chaining it into a signet of earth and again into a comet. It wouldn’t gain any flavor or utility from having damage attached to it. All it needs is a cooldown in the 30-35 second range. This would allow it to be used about two times in a skirmish rather than being an all-in-kill-him-with-this-chain-or-lose sort of move.

Freezing Gust
This ability had good synergy with comet. That’s about all I can say for it. Chilled is a wonderful condition to apply to people in pvp, but 3 seconds of chill every 25 seconds with no real damage (less scaling than the auto-attack of either mainhand) does not compensate for its range. I don’t think its cooldown should be reduced; the only thing worse than a free condition is a spam-able free condition. Nor do I think its base effect should be increased or improved because as it stands the ability lacks counterplay. When you cast this ability, you spend ¼ second waving your hands in the air like you just don’t care, and suddenly an opponent finds themselves with 3 more seconds of chilled than they would have liked. If the base effect were improved, the ability would read “Push this button if not on cooldown.” Instead, the ability should be a 1 second channeled ability. Over the course of this second, it should pulse three times. Each pulse should have the same effect as the original ability (3 seconds of chill plus the token damage). This way, the ability becomes powerful, yet can be reacted to.

Alternative Approach: Freezing gust is one of the few abilities that I believe would benefit from a full rework. Imagine the following ability: Aimed as a 900 range skillshot the approximate width of a whirlwind attack, this ability produces a chilling wind in the area for 3 seconds. Each second an ally remains within the area of the attack, it gains 2 seconds of swiftness. Each second an enemy remains in the area, it takes a small amount of damage as well as 2 seconds of chill.

This new ability would, in my opinion, add many more options to the focus playstyle and would involve much more skill than the previous Freezing Gust. Rather than simply using the skill whenever you have a target and happen to be in water attunement, you would need to think about how to use it. Do you attempt to run down a retreating foe, or do you save it as an avenue of escape for your allies? Do you use it here in the field where your enemy can dodge to the side of it, or do you wait until you are in a more narrow corridor where you can control their movement? While I do believe that the game as a whole should have less spammable aoe, I do not believe this would qualify. This would be an ability that would call for timed, strategic use. Its low damage but high tactical potential would demand that it be used intelligently rather than immediately.

It really saddens me when people make such awesome suggestions the devs are never going to see it and the focus will remain just as horrible

The devs are braindead at this point to elementalists. They never post in here IF A DEV IS READING THIS POST SAY SOMETHING AND YE SHALL RECEIVE A THANK YOU FOR GIVING A FLYING kitten

TGSlasher.1458:

Flame Wall (fire 4): Increase damage or burn duration

Fire Shield (fire 5): Increase duration of aura or reduce cooldown or add retaliation for a short duration currently outclassed by frosty aura (same cooldown, longer duration, better effect)

Freezing Gust (Water 4): Aoe at targets location or increase the chill duration

Comet (Water 5): Fine, bug fix to prevent going through obstruction

Swirling Winds (Air 4): This skill is fine in my opinon, however, adding an aoe swiftness (1 second per second standing in the field, so swiftness within the field) or vulnerability (to foes standing in the field) would be nice for when not fighting a projectile class (keeping the skill still usefull). However, swiftness and vulnerability do not really match the focus as it seems to be a stationary defensive weapon. Perhaps damage reduction for melee enemies in the field (something like 5-10%) but that would make the skill harder to counter.

Gale (Air 5): This skill has potential, everyone says its bad, but is a long cd with not much loss during the skill (see updraft), it has a not so obvious tell/animation and it goes backwards. It is also a cast so it hits stealthed foes (even if the teleport). A small cooldown reduction could help boost the power of this skill, but I wouldn’t like for its fire backwards to be removed (one of the only ways to get away from foes with the focus)

Earth: fine, powerful, possibly why the other skills are lacking. It has a better mistform and a better cleansing fire built into the set.

With earth in its current state (strong) I don’t see Anet adding movement skills to the weapon and I think that would take away from the theme of the focus. It is a defensive weapon with a couple of area denial skills, but mostly focused on fighting 1 foe or bunkering (no support skills, only a couple area denial, strong 1v1 abilities, no escape abilities). Moving bunker to the focus would be a good change I believe. We have a damage / roaming weapon already (dagger) lets not make the focus into a clone of that weapon.

I think the focus desperately needs a movement skill. Reasons:

• mobility is key to main-hand dagger effectiveness, lack of any mobility on focus means that D/F will only ever be a niche set.
• sceptre has no movement skills at all, and
• focus will always compare poorly to O/H dagger because of RTL.

Water #4 for example could be a 600 leap with a trail that chills (ice field) or heals (water field).

Otherwise, as everyone agrees, the fire skills and air #4 (swirling winds) need love but i think these matter less than making sure focus provides some kind of mobility.

Suggestions for fire would be making flamewall add 2s of burning, not 1, and make it destroy projectiles. Then air #4 could become a PBAE blind that also grants swiftness.

Reduce the number of conditions removed by magnetic wave to 2 and focus would be a pretty good place.

This is one of the most well thought out threads on any class forums. The OP understands that balancing isn’t just “obvious” buffs (which often have not-so-obvious ramifications) such as cool down decreases, but also about providing utility with respect to other weapons. Resolving weaknesses without just making abilities more spammable.

elithrar.7143:

This is one of the most well thought out threads on any class forums. The OP understands that balancing isn’t just “obvious” buffs (which often have not-so-obvious ramifications) such as cool down decreases, but also about providing utility with respect to other weapons. Resolving weaknesses without just making abilities more spammable.

I’m not saying the ideas are bad, but less obvious buffs aren’t any better regarding accounting for ramifications and resolving weaknesses. For example, how would the proposed change to fire shield interact with aura sharing? Do you let eles share so many boons and a pbaoe effect with allies? Low damage and retaliation times 5 can easily become not very low. Plus, an aoe attack would hit 5 enemies, so you could end up with way too much aoe damage in a short amount of time. What scenario do you balance the damage around? Do you somehow leave those effects out of the aura itself, so it leaves fire shield as a subpar aura share skill and leave one of the many weaknesses of the focus unaddressed?

Spamming isn’t exactly bad either. Freezing gust could absolutely stand to be spammable. Focus has only two snares, freezing gust and gale. The focus has two long cooldown single target snares and zero mobility; one of those things needs to change. If a weapon is going to be slow (especially an ele weapon that can’t be swapped mid-fight), it needs good and frequent snaring to make sure any enemy can’t just casually walk away from you. If a weapon has poor snaring, it should have some decent mobility. Honestly, an ele should always have both considering the whole jack-of-all trades but master of nothing idea. Leaving that issue unaddressed would be unacceptable regardless of how creative the buffs are or how much utility they add.