Guild Wars 2

You’re concerned that nerfs are coming, so you want to remove a weapon from our arsenal? That does not compute. The devs have said that they want to make other builds more viable, not less.

And you do know that there are three other classes that use focuses? And that focuses aren’t limited in that respect? At least, I’ve not found a focus my ele couldn’t use, aside from level restrictions.

You obviously have no idea what uses and how much utility the focus has in wvw.

This entire post is complete garbage. The argument that, since nerfs may be coming, the entire focus should be removed from the Elementalist’s arsenal. That’s absurd. What about the people who use focuses and actually spent money on better focuses, genius. What about all of the defensive and support abilities a focus can bring to a fight. Just because you have an inability to use focuses doesn’t mean they should be removed. However, I pity you. It’s sad to think that you died so many times with a focus in hand that you had to put them down on a forum to feel better.

the focus rocks, learn to use it before discounting it.

The focus certainly has strong points (air and earth) and weak points (fire and water). As all ele weapons it is not perfect and not how all of us would have designed it.
It is a very situational weapon. It rocks against projectiles (air 4 and earth 4), you can send back some projectiles or nullify all of them (yeah even trebuchet boulders). WvW or dungeons (CM, FotM-Uncategorized, …) it can help your team better than anything else.
As pdboddy said, the devs are having a look at all the weapons and traits in order to make more builds viable. I hope they just reassess water and fire that are just terrible.
Perhaps reducing the fire aura cd to make it more worth it in an auramancer build.
The wall is just terrible damage wise, give me a possibility to make it explode for more damage (and a blast) or add a cripple… just make it do something more than being a combo zone for other classes.
For water just add more damage on the comet or lower the cast time.
Anyway I like the focus, it just needs more love !

Your reasoning is absurdly flawed and you obviously don’t play WvW

I wish that they would grant fire a hard hitting damage spell instead of Flamewall, and add some protective measure to Fire Shield (currently it doesn’t shield from anything and is there to trigger traits only).

Comet in water could use a damage buff, and freezing gust made into a more damage oriented spell.

The reason the focus needs some offensive abilities is that there are almost none. Most are utility and defensive, which is fine, but without a few more damage spells, you simply won’t have enough diversity to down an opponent. I feel it is mandatory to grab arcane blast + wave to be somewhat capable of doing that. The focus is otherwise rather appealing.

A few offensive skills to focus please, Anet.

Although I never used the off-hand focus all that much, I have recently discovered that it can be tremendously useful in the Uncategorized Fractal, specifically against the harpies with their knockdown attacks.

I also know about its usefulness in WvW, although I found it hard to use effectively there.

It just shows that you should never disregard a skillset out of hand, as every skill will have its use in specific circumstances.

@ OP: it has INSANE use in WvW. I understand what you’re saying, but to just add extra abilities to current abilities is a little silly. If ANet did as you suggested, added ranged block to churning earth, that would mean a TON of wasted dmg in WvW.

Sorry, but the focus has a definite use. Either learn to use it or use something else.

Solo.9027:

All I’m saying is that since we cannot weapon swap and the focus offers very specific very limited utility we should have its abilities rolled into other more useful weapons and just let us use the awesome focus skins on other weapons since its all just magic anyway. After all, ele are supposed to be about versatility right?

I absolutely love how mmo forums immediately resort to personal attacks, I have a couple foci and have used them well in wvw and even certain dungeons, but as soon as the specific purpose is over with I always swap back to dagger or staff but having to be out of combat to do it sucks. IMO its not fun having to break away and open my inventory just to swap when other professions can do it with a button press.

Based on what you like and don’ t like, your proposal make perfect sense lol. You just don’t appear to be getting much, if any, agreement in your thread. I think almost all the rest of us learned to live with weapon swapping a long time ago.

Solo.9027:

Several points i’d like to make:

If you examine the profession closely, Ele really only use daggers as a focusing device for magic anyway(albeit close range) since we do not physically stab/slash.

What the focus offers is mostly redundant with other ele skills across the other weapons, traits, and utility skills. We are penalized with long cooldowns for having versatility but only a handful of highly focused builds can really take advantage of these abilities, this is why everyone gives the same advice to go support heavy into water/arcane/cleric/soldiers or go full damage and crit heavy with fire/air/berserker.

There are entirely too many focus skins and comparatively far fewer dagger skins available in the game, this hurts endgame customization as the only really unique dagger is the legendary but there are so many options for cool looking foci. I personally would love to use the anomaly as a dagger, or simply to have a “mists” dagger at all as an option to work towards.

Since Ele do not have weapon swap, giving us so many character-locking choices doesn’t make much sense outside of having very long range and safety or very close range and speed.

My suggestions for how to go about handling this would be to change all foci into daggers for ele only and incorporate the effects from the focus abilities not directly present in the weapons into dagger/staff skills.

For example: churning earth would now reflect projectiles for 2 seconds during its casting, earthquake would provide a second of invuln., windborne speed would also destroy projectiles, gale could have its cooldown reduced or become blowout instead of just push, cleansing wave could offer an additional pbaoe chill, frost aura could deal damage or some stun at casting, fire grab could become a finisher of some sort and ring of fire could be given ground targetting similar to flame wall.

I am not a game designer so I don’t imagine any of this being a perfect solution but I think with the threat of heavy nerfs floating over our collective heads we need some kind of bone thrown our way so as not to neuter the profession completely. I agree that we are a bit too powerful right now when people use a few very specific builds but I also feel something bad is going to ruin us all in this next patch and I am messing around with different builds so the inevitable respec I will have to do doesn’t seem so bad.

Remove focus, ad focus 4 to staff 1 and delete staff 1 from the game.

Some ploy to make dagger elementalists more powerful?

Solo.9027:

If you examine the profession closely, Ele really only use daggers as a focusing device

ANet, hire this man.

After running d/d (and frequently switching to staff) on my ele for quite a while in WvW, I have ended up switching to s/f.

It isnt as effective in some situations (such as outright mobility), but I find it perfectly viable. If anything I would love to see a bit of a buff to it, but.. remove it? I dont even understand the premise. You can effectively do that yourself by not using it, then just ask for things to change on the weapon sets you DO use.

That said, I think the focus fire skills are poor at best, the rest I find myself using constantly. Personally, I enjoy playing it much, much more than any other weapon set on the ele. Some say I am a strange, strange man though hahaha.

I think the OP partly likes the focus skin, just not the performance that comes with it. Focus is a rather defense oriented weapon and it can mesh in certain situations but in others, it might not help as much as just more offense.

That said, I enjoy s/f probably more than I do d/d. s/d is the more offensive combo but you have to keep in close. d/f…is probably my least favorite combo as dagger main feels relatively lacking without its off-hand skills. Another mainhand option that better paired with focus would be nice.

As far as skins, I don’t care about them. But then I play Asura elementalist and you can barely see the daggers anyway.