Guild Wars 2

I was just wondering how viable focus builds then i ran into this 2013 video, with a ele running focus zerker and dealing insane WvW damage.

This kind of damage even possible anymore? Seems a bit too high o.o

The ele is playing with dagger (offhand) not with focus.

Lawful.5314:

I was just wondering how viable focus builds then i ran into this 2013 video, with a ele running focus zerker and dealing insane WvW damage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD1S_sP90Ao

This kind of damage even possible anymore? Seems a bit too high o.o

Might and Crit damage nerf, you will never get such numbers again.

I meant scepter, sorry lol

And what happened with crit damage anyways? Personally i run over 200% crit damage, but how was it different in the past without ferocity?

Damage has been nerfed tremendously since April 2014 and this video is quite old.

You know how they nerfed might recently?

The ferocity nerf was pretty much around the same DPS loss in level 80 areas, give or take.

Scepter can do o.k. roaming nowadays, but you REALLY want to use focus with it.

Off-hand dagger doesn’t really have that much more dps, but a lot less survivability. Off-hand focus allows you to stay at range for 90% of the time, gives you an invuln (which is necessary for backstab thieves), a 3x condi clear (which is CLUTCH against all the condi-aids builds you run into roaming), and projectile blocks/reflects (which are super-strong when the YOLO rangers invariably show up mid-fight to pew-pew-pew you down). Since you don’t have RtL when you use focus, FGS is your method of gtfo.

Most fights also won’t end as quickly as this video as most roaming builds just don’t run this squishy anymore (again, thank thieves for that). You can certainly get a strong opening and pressure you opponents into a lot of mistakes with s/f, but you aren’t gonna be 1-shotting (100-0) people like in this video.

I personally use 0/6/0/4/4 as it allows me to easily swap to a lightning rod build for staff-ing.

I tried that build in sPvP, sure it doesn’t give as many stats as you can get in WvW and the nerfed crit is there as you say, but surely enough it deals some hefty burst, and has 3 huge burst combo’s that you can rotate trough, pretty good, and S/D offers more combat ability than focus.

Also Might nerf was nowhere as bad as crit nerf as i read somewhere on the forums.

Lawful.5314:

Also Might nerf was nowhere as bad as crit nerf as i read somewhere on the forums.

The reason the crit nerf was worse is because they coupled it with nerfs to things like stacking sigils, which made them pretty much unusable in PvE.

It wasn’t just the nerf to critting, it was also a loss of 250 power across the board in many cases.

You can still one shot people with s/f or s/d fresh air, its very much viable for both roaming and spvp (well at least not until “very high ranks” in spvp), though s/f seems like more viable option than s/d as mentioned already.

Here are some recent videos from this s/d guy

Also look up guys like phantaram or team riot (jester) on twitch, they stream s/f, s/d quite often, you will be amazed how they destroy people with it.

Lawful.5314:

I was just wondering how viable focus builds then i ran into this 2013 video, with a ele running focus zerker and dealing insane WvW damage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD1S_sP90Ao

Holy crap, seeing this video brings back so many memories. I remember this vid was what got me interested in fresh air after getting bored of D/D and I’ve never looked back since, its a shame its not nearly as powerful as it used to be but still fun as hell to play.