Guild Wars 2

I almost never seen any other elementalists using a focus, which really surprises me.

I think a lot of eles fail to realize the potential of this weapon.

I find that, especially paired with the scepter, a focus can easily turn you into a master of dungeons. Every ability of it is a godsend for dungeons and can make you completely indestructible. I first tried it in my very first dungeon, AC story mode when I was level 30. I tried other weapons and have always defaulted to S/F for dungeons. I’m currently on level 17 for fractals, and I am incredibly durable. I rarely die and if I do die, then I’m usually the last one to go down.

Brief overview of the abilities it gives :

Fire 4 : Flame wall, good damage, fire field, not a whole lot to say.

Fire 5 : When paired with the air trait that 80% of eles take, it gives you swiftness and fury. If you’re using the scepter than triggering it before you’re fire 2 – 4 -3 combo can really increase your damage. Also applies damage to nearby enemies.

Honestly fire abilities are a bit weak, but earth more than makes up for it.

Water 4 : Target enemy, press 4, apply chill. It’s a great ability that will save you many times. It also works on most bosses which is great, especially in fractals. Use it on dredge powersuit to keep him under the bucket of lava. Use it on the legendary grawl to buy time to pop his shield bubble.

Water 5 : Targeted daze. Also works on most bosses. It actually has a small AOE effect. Keep in mind though that it has a bit of a cast time and it will land where the target was, not where the target is, so it can miss moving targets. It’s an all around great ability.

Air 4 : This ability is why carrying a focus in WvWvW is absolutely mandatory for every elementalist. Why? Because it’s a giant area of effect that blocks all incoming projectiles, INCLUDING TREBUCHET HITS. 2/3 eles with coordination can completely mitigate all incoming damage from a trebuchet, if you’re in WvW and you don’t have a focus in your inventory or equipped, you’re wrong.

Other than that it’s still incredibly useful for dungeons. Use it to stop harpies knockback from downing you repeatedly, use it to stop attacks from siege in ascalon, use it when people are trying to hit you with projectiles really.

Air 5 : Single target knockback. Not terrible, not great. It will save you many times over. Use it to interrupt, use it to just buy some time.

Earth 4 : Now we’re getting to the really great abilities. Earth abilities alone justifies a focus. Magnetic wave. It gives you 3 seconds of reflection, it does damage to nearby enemies, and it cures 3 conditions. This ability is, quite simply, amazing.

Earth 5 : 4 seconds of complete invincibility. The only thing that can hit you through this is, I believe, agony. For everything else, you take no damage. 4 seconds of invincibility is huge and unlike mist form, you’re free to use all of your abilities.

The focus is severely underrated and I think a lot of people should really give it a shot.

Edit:

I mostly use it in dungeons. Actually that’s a lie. I only use it in dungeons. Elsewhere I would rather use an offhand dagger. It’s not very good elsewhere, but in dungeons it is king.

Usually my weapon layout is:

WvW : D/D. Staff when sieging/defending structures. Focus for blocking trebs.

sPvP : D/D all the way

Dynamic events : D/D usually, S/D for a couple

Dungeons : S/F all day every day.

Overall, you make a solid case. Some of your statements sound a bit like you’re a car salesman though:

Air 5 : Single target knockback. Not terrible, not great. It will save you many times over.

It’s either a great skill that will save you many times over, or an ok skill that you will use sometimes when it’s convenient. But not both. :-)

I was a big focus fan, but the loss of RTL is too great, that skill is important in both offense and defense. Also the offhand dagger earth skills are some of the best an elementalist gets.

Dont get me wrong, I like focus, but its a little too defensive. The earth skills there are also great in a defensive sense. To win one must bring the offense however, unless you are playing more a support role in which case it rocks.

I’d rather have the enemies on the defensive in which case the shock and awe of offhand dagger is required.

Focus is situationally useful while OH dagger is always at least somewhat useful. The general proferrence of OH dagger comes down to that really. In PvE I carry a focus around for ranged heavy instances and dungeons with instagib attacks that are difficult to avoid, but most of the time I use an OH dagger.

I always carry one in WvW and you are right…any ele who doesn’t is wrong.

I also tried traiting a bunch of different ways to see if I could find one that made the focus usable as my always-equipped weapon but I didn’t find one that worked well enough. The focus does add a lot of defensive strength and there may be a traiting that makes it work but I’ll leave it to someone else to discover.

I have found one WvW use for focus in addition to treb-blocking. S/F is great for surviving the push into SM castle lord’s room during a 3-way clusterfight.

There is no doubt the focus has great defensive capabilities, but most players have become accustomed to abilities like rtl, updraft, frost aura, earthquake, fire grab, churning earth, etc. all of which have a more direct “impact” in gameplay. Rtl especially since it is arguably the best mobility ability in the game.

Nonetheless as others have stated, every ele should have a focus ready just in case.

sPvP perspective incoming:

I used to use my focus situationally in sPvP, but not since ANet locked weapon swapping. Burst rifle engis used to be way more popular than they are now, and it was awesome for countering that. Likewise, it was good against power SB Rangers, but those guys are more rare, often favoring some condi/power hybrid with traps and hard-hitting pets, where the destroying/reflecting projectiles is not quite optimal. Losing point presence with Earth 5 has always made Focus less useful than other bunker builds, because you will j ust straight hand over the point if you use the ability on CD (and can just take Mist Form instead).

Still a really fun weapon set to mess around with, but the loss of mobility, coupled with the lack of strong counters for the current meta have made it a bit of an afterthought at the moment.

Could the defensive nature of the focus help to offset a more aggressive build in WvW? Most of the traiting and itemizing I see for Elementalist WvW is centered around healing and defense, with very little though to offense.

If the focus affords so much more defense, could it be used to up the offensive part of a build balance a bit more and still keep survivability? Don’t get me wrong, the d/d roamer is an amazing thing. I just wonder if there is a bricky build that is focused on tower defense and, with some help, can actually break enemy sieges directly.

For the record, I also feel like staff is underappreciated in WvW. I’ve related my experience elsewhere, but I’ve seen staff wreck people with shocking speed when used in the context of a CC-heavy team.

The only problem I have with focus are the rather high cooldowns

Perhaps a skill that reduces cooldowns would solve this problem (like the other skills that buff specific weapons, although I don’t know how that would interract with attunement cd reduction traits.

The focus needs an updated fire line, maybe at the cost of a slightly nerf to earth. Everytime I use /F, I feel like I’m wasting my time with fire.

Any skills that use a line of attack as opposed to a circle of attack just annoy me. The line is hard to line up and if a mob moves at all it becomes pointless.

Focus builds are very funny, but you will find it difficult to down opponents without the aid of arcane blast/wave. There simply aren’t many offensive skills to utilize. D/F, or S/F is fun. 30 air/30 earth/10 arcana, with valkyrie’s amulet and berserker’s jewel for that extra toughness. Stability at 30 earth is awesome for letting Ether Renewal work without interruptions, or allowing for a safer stomp.

Flamewall is lousy imo (and I haven’t seen people use it). Only redeeming effect of it is the combo field, but you get that from Burning Speed as well so it could easily be skipped, or better yet, be remade into a more offensive skill, making the focus less attached to arcane spells.

earth focus skills are great
air 4 is good
the rest are meh to VERY BAD (fire)

I have used focus in point capture or defense situations in wvw. keep or supply depot capture/defense.
I use it also when running with a group.
Not solo or open field stand offs though.
My skill with focus is not great. I use it in dungeons as well.

Basically any situation where i dont need a lot of mobility. But… Most situations need a lot of mobility.
The GTFO ability of RTL is a security blanket of extraordinary magnitude.

Dagger focus… still plays a lot like dagger dagger to me. Fast and furious.

However being that i want to be able to use my DD setup in most situations requires me to build DD friendly which i do not think is the best way to use dagger/focus.
still too unskilled with it to know really.

Situation 1: You play a build without Cantrips (Signet Spec, Glyph heavy spec…).
/F is good because it sorts of makes of for not having def utilities. It almost only pairs with Focus since both are ranged and you dont really want to get too close with low def specs.

Situation 2: You play a build with many Cantrips.
/D has so much more damage, I mean so MUCH more. And mobility.

Fire:
- RoF is widely superior to Flamewall
- Fire Grab is so much damage it wouldnt even match an extra aura.

Water:
- Freezing Gust is a ranged Chill, nice. Matches Frost Aura (if it wasnt an Aura…).
- Comet takes so much time to drop for such a short daze duration and low damage. It wouldnt be even comparable to Cleansing Wave even if it had no cond remove component.

Air:
- Swirling Air is, situationaly, fine to protect rezing, siege machines (from other machines). But I’d chose RTL anytime for general purpose, even (even more?) in WvW when getting in and out fast is critical.
- Gale is a KD, not a KB. It is ranged but has more CD than Updraft and isnt AoE. The duration doesn’t even let you throw Phoenix/Tooth (Updraft does if the target doesnt dodge right away).

Earth:
- Magnetic Wave is very good. Refect, cure condition and actually does a good chunk of damage. I wouldnt trade Earthquake for it tho, AoE KD + Blast finisher is that good.
- I would however, even if Churning Earth is great damage, trade it for Obsidian Flash. 4 sec absolute invulnerability is amazing. Sadly it doesnt make up for all the rest.

If it was a “fix it!” topic I would say:
- Make Flame Wall deal the same amount of damage as RoF on trigger.
- Make Comet seriously INSTENT hit.
- Make Gale KD duration match Updraft.
Then, even if I would personally still use /D because of RTL, we’r fine.

Focus fire #4 should be replaced with Ride The Fire.

If you’re bunker earth5 (the best thing about focus) is worthless because you give up a point when using it. If you’re a roamer RTL offers so much more mobility, and even survivability.

Focus is really useless right now. IMHO it needs (besides some serious fire buffs) some kind of mobility skill. Even staff, our slowest weapon, has mobility in form of constant swiftness.

I’m frequently using S/F while farming, but I don’t like it as much in dungeons, because of the lack of sustained AoE damage that even equipping Conjures doesn’t really remedy.
IMO Focus only works with Scepter anyway, because Focus gives you a very odd combination of skills with Dagger (no heal but double chill in Water, much worse Fire dmg than D/D)

innocent ouarior.1954:

Fire:
- RoF is widely superior to Flamewall
- Fire Grab is so much damage it wouldnt even match an extra aura.

So, something you learn as a Flamethrower engineer is that WoF (which is on the Flamethrower kit) is actually useful for some things. One of those things is throwing over downed opponents who you cannot immediately stomp. Not unlike other fire fields, it does a pretty good job of keeping someone down even in the face of a single helper for its duration. It’s just slightly better because it’s easier to position. The reason it’s good at this is that the wall is actually bigger than its visible size, and if placed properly means even a helper will take hits.

That doesn’t save it as a skill compared to RoF, but people keep saying WoF is useless in PvP and it’s not. Oh, and Elementalists can build for condition damage without being idiots, so that helps a lot for burn.

Earth:
- Magnetic Wave is very good. Reflect, cure condition and actually does a good chunk of damage. I wouldnt trade Earthquake for it tho, AoE KD + Blast finisher is that good.
- I would however, even if Churning Earth is great damage, trade it for Obsidian Flash. 4 sec absolute invulnerability is amazing. Sadly it doesnt make up for all the rest.

Considering you’re probably taking more arcane skills with the focus anyways, I’d say losing the blast finisher is a fair trade. These two earth skills are just insanely, awesomely, crazy good. Especially if you’re deep in earth for additional stability and you’ve got boon duration enhancements…

Earth focus elementalists are pretty good stompers; they can get access to a lot of stability, protection, reflection and invulnerability. I’ve seen them used to this effect in WvW, and the results are not bad. Did you know Earth I turns on during stomps?

innocent ouarior.1954:

- Magnetic Wave is very good. Refect, cure condition and actually does a good chunk of damage. I wouldnt trade Earthquake for it tho, AoE KD + Blast finisher is that good.

Magnetic Wave IS a blast finisher too. So it’s basically an Arcane Wave + Cleasing Flame + Magnetic Aura skill all rolled into one. Magnetic Wave might possibly be our strongest skill at the moment. It’s so good that I would put it above Obsidian Flesh. I don’t even know what the devs were thinking about it, when they make most of the ele’s skills simplistic, and create this one that can do four things at the same time (reflect projectiles, blast finisher, damage, condition removal).

I would probably nerf it by taking away something from it (condition removal?) and put it somewhere else in the focus. And then I would make firewall work like mesmer’s wall field, where the opponent would only need to touch it once to get the full (burning) effect. I would make fire shield remove conditions myself – maybe 1 every second, or icnrease its duration to 5/ 7 and have it remove 3 conditions after that time (so it wouldn’t work with the signet trait – which would still only last for 3s). And in addition to that, I would make the burning last 2s instead of 1s.

Still, having the entire focus fire line about stacking burning does not seems that appealing. Maybe increase firewall’s non-burning damage, duration and size, put it into the 5th slot, and make it the “ultimate” focus fire spell. Or maybe give it a low recharge, low enough to allow us to be able to put two into the same field for the fun of it. Or have it create a massive cross in the field, heavily restricting the area where the opponent could freely walk without going away.

I always carry a focus on me, the defensive abilities are great. The biggest reasons I use it more often is because its not as nearly mobile as having RTL, and I don’t feel like it has as much synergy with the mainhand weapons for some reason. As far as dungeons bosses go, its pretty epic, worth it just for the defensive skills. But yeah, it could use a small buff to fire, maybe a reduction to fire aura recharge, or buffing its duration so it’s closer with other auras in terms of upkeep ability (16-17.5% for the others, compared to 7.5% on fire aura.)

Focus is fine for what it does IMO, but I think they need to redo the fire abilities. Flame wall isn’t a bad skill but the burning it grants to your party’s projectile finishers becomes redundant with the scepter and dagger’s built in burning effects. If they made it a circular flame field, like the Ranger’s bonfire, then it could be more easily used to stack might and the skill itself will greatly increase the focus’ value for point control. Also, it seems to like they threw in fire aura just because they couldn’t fit it anywhere else. Maybe they could replace it with a ranged direct damage skill.

The primary use of Focus is surviving Champion Karka jumps while looting lots of Orichalcum :p

The secondary use is reflecting regular Karka needle attacks and /cheer while they kill themselves (the cheering part is most effective if you are Asura).

IMHO mage magnetic wave an aura (just like the staff magnetic aura, it already reflects projectiles so it fits), lose the fire aura and replace it with some 900 range direct damage ability akin to firegrab.

Didin’t the Fire Aura worked something like the Arcane Shield in the beta? I think it was clear it was supposed to be some kind of defensive skill, but at the moment, it’s nothing but a tool for aura traits, and not even the best one. Its functionality reminds me of the retaliation boon, and its nice for eles to not rely on a boon every once and then, but the effects are so lacking compared to retaliation, it’s really bad. I like the idea of a defensive skill that punishes foes with offensive power – it’s fitting for the fire line of a defensive off-hand, but even if I doubled the burn duration and halved the cooldown, it wouldn’t be a worthy 5th skill, IMO.

If fire aura blocked 1 attack and then exploded in an aoe burning that would be awesome.

I definitely won’t be taking a focus in general PvE unless it was… maybe for a dungeon or super hard hitting events?

I feel that I could have killed generic things faster with a different weapon thus negating the need for that defence. What I would think is that there are going to be situations where just killing things faster is a better defence than being defensive. There’s no point tanking some risen mob with focus abilities when I could have burst it down with minimal effort. The focus cooldowns are too long for general PvE play, at least for my tastes.

Unless it’s a hard hitting and/or competitive environment (where I think the focus could shine) there is zero incentive for me to take the focus over a dagger or staff in general PvE play. So it’s not that I don’t appreciate it, it just doesn’t offer anything useful for me personally.

I used dagger/focus as the basis for some conjure builds i was working on.
in which case i had the focus for general useage.
stack might.
knock down.
switch to water.
bring out the axe.
ROF
leap
its nice.

I think that it’s not much used because of some bad skills or too long CD.
Fire skills suck imo, even though they had some uses (fire stack for #4 for example) I still find them bad.
Water ones are quite good, would have just liked area chill but still not bad.
Air #4 is absolutely great, but #5 definitely sucks (soooo loooong CD for what it does)
Earth ones are awesome, nothing more to add.

Also, when we think of it, the other problem is that it requires a MH : staff excludes this.
Now D is much better in D/D build.
That leaves us with … Scepter.
Now you found the problem : scepter is …. not crap, but underpowered compared to the other weapons, and I insist on the contrast.
Fire Scepter : not bad, though DT a bit slow.
Water Scepter : garbage. Nothing more to say, it sucks.
Air Scepter : #2 and #3 are great, but #1 is not convenient as it bugs when you switch targets … otherwise it’s great.
Earth Scepter : not good. #1 is doing good, #2 has too low damage so only serves as defense, and #3 is defense once again. In a nutshell, when attuned to earth, you only spam 1 with S/F to DPS ..

Navzar.2938:

I don’t feel like it has as much synergy with the mainhand weapons for some reason.

This is my primary reason for not using it much, too. The focus itself is pretty good, but offhand dagger meshes very cleanly with mainhand dagger because it has the “right kind” of movement and defensive skills with some strong offensive uses as well. The scepter is just weak in general, which makes using a non-damage offhand all the more difficult to justify, especially when you can pump out comparable utility and maintain a much higher direct impact with the staff.

In other words, I think that a buff to scepter functionality would bring the focus into play much more often.

So the verdict is: Fire skills on Focus are about the worst skills in the game on their own, the rest is decent/good, but some skills could have their CD reduced (e.g. Air 5) + Focus lacks synergy with Dagger and there are only a few good damage options when combining Focus with Scepter.

that is strange as dagger/focus felt.. right to me.
I cycled through atunments popping might and doing damage and busting out FGS and the ax with immunity.

im just better with dagger dagger and off hand dagger has the best pvp skills available.

Thrym.9436:

Navzar.2938:

I don’t feel like it has as much synergy with the mainhand weapons for some reason.

This is my primary reason for not using it much, too. The focus itself is pretty good, but offhand dagger meshes very cleanly with mainhand dagger because it has the “right kind” of movement and defensive skills with some strong offensive uses as well. The scepter is just weak in general, which makes using a non-damage offhand all the more difficult to justify, especially when you can pump out comparable utility and maintain a much higher direct impact with the staff.

In other words, I think that a buff to scepter functionality would bring the focus into play much more often.

Scepter is definitely not weak in general. Especially in PvE.

I did the “Finish/rez” job for a while in my old team in WvW. D/F 0/0/30/30/10 is great. But it is sincerely quite a niche.

I suppose I should clarify. Scepter is weak in general, compared to any other 1,2,3 abilities an elementalist could be carrying.

Fire: A low damage DD+reasonable burn condition, A hovering spike that does good damage+ more burn, and a GTAOE that does good damage and gives vigor, which is nice(but hardly tough to attain). It can keep a burn going ad-infinitum and has two blast finishers(which are quite handy) but overall DD damage is significantly less than dagger or even staff.

Air: A channeled lightning, a burst lightning, and a blind. Really quite weak, though to be fair, air staff isn’t all that great either(nice abilities, crappy cast times or cooldowns). Doesn’t really touch dagger here.

Water: Probably the best auto-attack of the three weapons for damage(staff trounces it for utility with the melee heal here), it also provides a vulnerability AE(very comparable to staff) and an AE heal that also does damage. By contrast, the same heal with staff offers a water field. Dagger would have to give up the healing breath and a chill.

Earth: A decent bleed stack auto, a quasi protective rock barrier(weak damage but projectile finisher), and yet another blind. The staff will give you weakness condition, a good bleed stacker with another combo field(they have to stay in range of the blast for it to work, a problem shared with scepter attacks), and a projectile reflect. Dagger gets the same good bleed stacks and a nice gap closer/reflect/cleanse.

Globally, the scepter has more range than the dagger but less than the staff. The dagger offers much more utility than I’d mentioned, and a drastically greater burst. At range, the scepter has modestly faster cooldowns than the staff, though this is somewhat moot since staff cooldowns leave something available to use on virtually any attunement shift anyway.

So I’ll tie it in to the subject matter, the focus. The best thing that the scepter has going for it is that the offhand focus fleshes it out a great deal. The focus works better with the scepter than the dagger because offhand dagger delivers much more burst potential with a side order of control that rounds out a mainhand dagger. If using an offhand dagger, a mainhand dagger simply supports the non-ranged aspect of these abilities to a far greater degree. There is a very good reason that dagger/dagger is a go-to staple for so many.

The staff gives up the off hand focus items the scepter would attain, but gains several more combo fields, ae damages(and an ae heal), and utility items. This is where the synergy problem lies with scepter/focus vs. a staff. A staff user will likely be able to work through all or most of the cooldowns in an attunement, whereas a scepter user will have focus items not necessary at that time, leaving the scepter user to fall back on their modest scepter abilities until the defensive focus items come into play.

So yes, in general, scepter is weak. I’m not saying it’s cripplingly, “lfg no scepter elementalist” weak, nor that it is without it’s uses. I am saying that using a focus largely leaves you “stuck” with the lackluster scepter in your mainhand, and that we’d see more focus elementalists if the scepter packed more oomph.

As a point of trivia, my elementalist toolkit currently consists of a staff, a focus, and a scepter(I admittedly use the staff quite a bit more). I haven’t owned a dagger since level 60 or so.

The best thing about focus is dropping fire wall on a bridge before the enemies and muttering “you shall not pass!”. They usually seem quite fearful of it too!

Think the focus is very under rated in SPvP really. Nice weapon that has it’s place even more now with the weapon lock.

Papaganoosh (SPvP Officer, The Unnamed EU)

http://www.the-unnamed.com/spvpapp – recruiting skilled players for TPvP

Atlas.6901:

sPvP perspective incoming:

I used to use my focus situationally in sPvP, but not since ANet locked weapon swapping. Burst rifle engis used to be way more popular than they are now, and it was awesome for countering that. Likewise, it was good against power SB Rangers, but those guys are more rare, often favoring some condi/power hybrid with traps and hard-hitting pets, where the destroying/reflecting projectiles is not quite optimal. Losing point presence with Earth 5 has always made Focus less useful than other bunker builds, because you will j ust straight hand over the point if you use the ability on CD (and can just take Mist Form instead).

Still a really fun weapon set to mess around with, but the loss of mobility, coupled with the lack of strong counters for the current meta have made it a bit of an afterthought at the moment.

nice post sir

I too used to love using Focus. I used it in PVE, PVP, and a little in w3

But ulitmately it’s so situational and not as optimal as using dagger OH. Not to mention since using a tank ele is pretty much the best build, then focus sort of loses it’s luster.

I’m levelling with S/F atm. I tried S/D, D/D, even the staff but scepter+focus really did it for me. Popping combos through the flamewall works better (for me, at least) than through RoF.
Nice utility (air and water), panicbuttons (earth) and easy combos (fire). Im dying less often, thats for sure.

The only thing that bothers me is the look. Its just ..odd on my charr.

If you like to rez in mid battle then focus is your friend. I always use a focus for general PVE and dungeons.

I just tried an Auramancer build in PvE/PvP with a Dagger/Focus setup. Those earth abilities are sweet, and nothing says “screw your projectiles, and screw you, too” like Air 4 and 5. Admittedly, I don’t much care for the Water attunement focus abilities (not really good at doing anything thanks to the delay on Comet), but for my build Fire works just fine.

Thrym.9436:

Fire: A low damage DD+reasonable burn condition, A hovering spike that does good damage+ more burn, and a GTAOE that does good damage and gives vigor, which is nice(but hardly tough to attain). It can keep a burn going ad-infinitum and has two blast finishers(which are quite handy) but overall DD damage is significantly less than dagger or even staff.

Phoenix also removes ALL conditions on a 10 seconds cooldown which makes it pretty insane.

ThiBash.5634:

Overall, you make a solid case. Some of your statements sound a bit like you’re a car salesman though:

Air 5 : Single target knockback. Not terrible, not great. It will save you many times over.

It’s either a great skill that will save you many times over, or an ok skill that you will use sometimes when it’s convenient. But not both. :-)

“Air 5 : Not terrible, not great. It will save you many times, simply because it’s there and you’ll hit the button eventually.”

I used to use S/F in combination with Lightning Hammer in dungeons, back with the old EA. Lay down a Firewall, Arcane Wave (burst + blast), Dragon’s Tooth (burst + blast), Phoenix (burst + blast + cleanse + vigor), roll while swapping to water (double heal + double cleanse + regen + blast), Comet (daze + blast), either Trident or Freezing Gust, roll while swapping to earth (cripple + protection + blast), Magnetic Wave (burst + reflect + cleanse + blast). Afterwards, Rock Barrier/Dust Devil, Obsidian Flesh if I felt like I was taking too much damage, swap to air, let off Lightning Strike/Blind Flash. If it’d be useful, I’d use Swirling Winds. Then I’d summon a Lightning Hammer and go to town – that thing is actually absurdly powerful with its auto attack chain (very high sustained AoE dps, AoE blind + blast finisher on final strike).

This let me permanently keep up 21 stacks of Might for my entire team with boon duration runes, solo (more like 23 with constant fire attunement swaps). The rotation itself actually dealt pretty decent damage, given that Dragon’s Tooth, Phoenix, and Magnetic Wave actually burst well when they land (which is easy in PvE). Whole thing took maybe 5-6 seconds depending on how much extra stuff I decided to cast along the way (ex. Trident, Freezing Gust). Lightning Hammer naturally hits like a truck. Even though I was in full Knights gear (armor and trinkets), I was still very easily hitting 2-3k autos with the Lightning Hammer while constantly blinding/spamming blast finishers with constant Fury. I’d continue attunement swapping while using the Lightning Hammer to keep cycling Fury/Regen/Might/Protection/Swiftness for my team and to work with the extra 2% damage per boon (I also usually had like a minute+ easily of Vigor too with the Vigor on crit trait), and rolling for EA effects. There would be a little bit of downtime after finishing up a Lightning Hammer’s charges that I’d fill in with a quick Lightning Strike/Blinding Flash + Dragon’s Tooth that admittedly sucked, but by the time Dragon’s Tooth came back up again I’d repeat over again.

It may not have been the standard Staff or D/D stuff, but it was a whole lot of fun to be rolling everywhere and literally seeing a nonstop stream of blast finishers, and the damage was surprisingly decent (even if it did require a 5-6 second ramp up period). 12 blast finishers every 30 seconds, lol. Probably only Thief clusterbomb spam tops that. Ranger water fields while I was using my Hammer was hilarious, and light fields were great too for retaliation and 2% more damage.

omgwtflolbbl.7142:

I used to use S/F in combination with Lightning Hammer in dungeons, back with the old EA. Lay down a Firewall, Arcane Wave (burst + blast), Dragon’s Tooth (burst + blast), Phoenix (burst + blast + cleanse + vigor), roll while swapping to water (double heal + double cleanse + regen + blast), Comet (daze + blast), either Trident or Freezing Gust, roll while swapping to earth (cripple + protection + blast), Magnetic Wave (burst + reflect + cleanse + blast). Afterwards, Rock Barrier/Dust Devil, Obsidian Flesh if I felt like I was taking too much damage, swap to air, let off Lightning Strike/Blind Flash. If it’d be useful, I’d use Swirling Winds. Then I’d summon a Lightning Hammer and go to town – that thing is actually absurdly powerful with its auto attack chain (very high sustained AoE dps, AoE blind + blast finisher on final strike).

This let me permanently keep up 21 stacks of Might for my entire team with boon duration runes, solo (more like 23 with constant fire attunement swaps). The rotation itself actually dealt pretty decent damage, given that Dragon’s Tooth, Phoenix, and Magnetic Wave actually burst well when they land (which is easy in PvE). Whole thing took maybe 5-6 seconds depending on how much extra stuff I decided to cast along the way (ex. Trident, Freezing Gust). Lightning Hammer naturally hits like a truck. Even though I was in full Knights gear (armor and trinkets), I was still very easily hitting 2-3k autos with the Lightning Hammer while constantly blinding/spamming blast finishers with constant Fury. I’d continue attunement swapping while using the Lightning Hammer to keep cycling Fury/Regen/Might/Protection/Swiftness for my team and to work with the extra 2% damage per boon (I also usually had like a minute+ easily of Vigor too with the Vigor on crit trait), and rolling for EA effects. There would be a little bit of downtime after finishing up a Lightning Hammer’s charges that I’d fill in with a quick Lightning Strike/Blinding Flash + Dragon’s Tooth that admittedly sucked, but by the time Dragon’s Tooth came back up again I’d repeat over again.

It may not have been the standard Staff or D/D stuff, but it was a whole lot of fun to be rolling everywhere and literally seeing a nonstop stream of blast finishers, and the damage was surprisingly decent (even if it did require a 5-6 second ramp up period). 12 blast finishers every 30 seconds, lol. Probably only Thief clusterbomb spam tops that. Ranger water fields while I was using my Hammer was hilarious, and light fields were great too for retaliation and 2% more damage.

Doesn’t almost all this still work assuming you can do your rolls in earth attunement?

Yes, but at the time of the EA nerf, there were absolutely no blast finishers on roll, and on top of that, dragon’s tooth’s blast finisher was also broken. This meant that it lost 3 blast finishers/nine stacks of might, and was just a lot less amusing overall with no more incentive to roll. It’s pretty much fine now since EA water roll was awesome regardless and earth is a blast finisher again, and dragon’s tooth is finally fixed. I still roll with this whenever I’m doing some like CM that is extremely projectile heavy.

Sure the focus is defensive but it doesn’t mean you can’t deal good damage.

I play D/F for everything pretty much. Karma farming, I instantly kill waves at chopper event. WvW, I can dish out some pretty hefty burst. Faster than D/D due to OH dagger’s 1 sec average cast times.

So, inspired by Sekta’s videos I wanted to try and make a bunker/push build using Dagger/Focus. It’s not as bursty, but its there to make people pop their heals early so teammates can finish the work, and to stand up.

I figured sPvP was the best place to try it. Here is the build link for the first version.

The goals of the build are as follows:

1. Signets trigger auras and are permanently active. This triggers protection, fury and swiftness.
2. Signet of Restoration constantly heals you even as you use it. The math behind toughness and vitality suggests that if you can stand up for along time, small passive heals are actually incredibly powerful (and it’s how Guardians are so tanky despite lacking a big base HP pool).
3. Between the toughness, constant passives, healing in water, and the incredible number of defensive skills on the focus, you can easily contest points even 3v1 and hold out for a surprising amount of time.
4. The build has a lot of passive damage modifiers that trigger when you’re very close, when the foe is burning, and when your endurance is full. Your initial burning-rush-into-earth-rotation hits quite hard.
5. The rune of the smith is pretty perfect for this build, and in practice you end up with protection and constant healing all the time.

It went pretty well, but I appeal to experienced focus users. Is this build nonsense? Are there improvements I can make?

This is how I use scepter and focus in general PvE:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/GUIDE-Scepter-Focus-Build/first#post1091403