Hey guys, so I’m assuming a bunch of you have played in WvW at one point in time, and you have taken part in defending a tower, keep, etc. One of the problems that I’ve seen for people camping in the tower is that they don’t defend it as well (unless they’re an organized group or have a commander giving directions) as they could. Another thing that makes it more difficult to defend a building is siege obviously. Just recently I was in WvW and while I was at a fairly upgraded tower, a group came in and within 5 minutes they took down the wall using 3-5 trebuchets that were put up within seconds, and proceeded to take the tower. I don’t know how it ended ’cause my compy froze, but you can imagine what happened.
Normally, the siege attacks are only stopped by going out and taking them out, but sometimes you don’t have a group large enough. But as I’ve found out, the elementalist has something that is greatly overlooked when in WvW combat: the focus.
The air and earth skills on a focus are like a gold mine when it comes to tower/keep defense. The #4 air focus skill destroys projectiles, which is different from reflecting because this skill destroys siege attacks. This is extremely helpful for defending places because it takes the pressure off the gate so you can last long enough for your group to come. The problem with this skill is the recharge time, but there are two things that you can do:
1. Get the Air Trait that reduces recharge time on air skills
2. Get a small group of eles to take turns using it so you can keep it up indefinitely
Now to talk about the earth skills.
I just recent discovered this trick today while defending a keep. Most of the time when a zerg is attacking, the gate will be under heavy fire from ranged attacks, so what i do is go through the portal, pop obsidian flesh, and then use magnetic surge to reflect a whole bunch of stuff, then run back into the portal. I usually have mist form handy just in case something goes wrong. Now if a group of eles were doing this, they’d probably be able to hold off a zerg for quite a while, especially if there were some D/D eles stacking Churning Earth and teleporting through the portal, unless the walls got attacked, then it’d be harder.
The point I’m trying to make is that even though the focus isn’t as good overall as the dagger, there is a whole lot of potential for it in WvW. This isn’t saying that I think the focus is good as it is, it’s not, especially fire attunement. I’m also not saying that all the eles in WvW need to switch to focus right now because they don’t. What would make them more valuable is if they carried around a focus and only switched to it when needed.
tl;dr The ele focus skills are extremely useful in defending towers and keeps in WvW and a well coordinated team of elementalists can hold off a zerg that is attacking a keep or tower fairly effectively.
Please leave comments and opinions, but don’t flame or troll this post, please answer intelliegently. Thanks.