Guild Wars 2

What are the pros and cons? How and where are they best used? Thank you. (By three main hand weapons, I mean staff, dagger, and scepter)

Staff is only useful in WvW and rarely in PvE (when you need to go on range desperatly or if there are extremly huge groups of mobs).

Focus is currently not viable. Too low dmg, too clunky, no mobility and healing at all, only single target with mediocre cc.

As well for PvE as for PvP you can choose between Scepter/Dagger or Dagger/Dagger, what you like most. Scepter/Dagger rather gives you burst dmg with mediocre range (to deal the max. of your dmg you still need to get into close range), Dagger/Dagger gives you more sustain, higher DPS, a lot of AoE and mobility, but as you have to get into melee range you probably need to specc a little bit more defensively.

Peter Buch.8071:

Focus is currently not viable. Too low dmg, too clunky, no mobility and healing at all, only single target with mediocre cc.

This is not completely true in PvE, as the focus has some good defensive uses regarding harder content through reflects (and more), invulnerability, and projectile deflection. Note that these are situation specific, but can be extremely powerful. Also, as hinted at above, the other focus skills are not typically as good as an off-hand dagger.

I agree, focus will never be my primary offhand weapon but projectile reflection and invulnerability can make a lot of hard pve content go smoother. The fire and water skills seem oddly underpowered, tho.

This is not completely true in PvE, as the focus has some good defensive uses regarding harder content through reflects (and more), invulnerability, and projectile deflection. Note that these are situation specific, but can be extremely powerful. Also, as hinted at above, the other focus skills are not typically as good as an off-hand dagger.

Very rarely, yes. But in these situations any kind of guardian or mesmer would be a lot more useful than an elementalist with focus, as this said elementalist won’t deal any remarkable dmg anymore. And most of his defenses only effect himself, unfortunatly.

I agree, focus will never be my primary offhand weapon but projectile reflection and invulnerability can make a lot of hard pve content go smoother. The fire and water skills seem oddly underpowered, tho.

Strangewise water and earth deal dmg on focus, while fire and air are defensive. Major design mistake, doesn’t make any sense. I would like to see the whirling winds either changed towards the direction like it was used for the canons in Metrica Province (whirling winds + lightning hitting in it) or towards the way it is in the Aspect Arena Minigame (lightning 4, “lightning circle”).
Currently focus does mainly lack strong cc, heal, good dmg and mobility. Therefor it has a little bit more defense. To change focus towards an offhand weapon with low mobility, but therefor stronger cc would be nice. Increasing the Area of Effect of water 5, giving fire 4 “flame wall” a knock back on its initial casting (so kinda burst of flames until they become a flame wall) and improving water 4 (maybe the freeze getting stronger over time?) and air 5 (giving it dmg) would already be enough.

Peter Buch.8071:

Very rarely, yes. But in these situations any kind of guardian or mesmer would be a lot more useful than an elementalist with focus, as this said elementalist won’t deal any remarkable dmg anymore. And most of his defenses only effect himself, unfortunatly.

Focus over off-hand dagger mostly drops burst damage, which is perhaps questionable to focus (ha!) on in harder PvE content in which sustained damage from a main-hand weapon may be prefered. Neko’s Guide gives some more thought to some of the uses for focus within the context of running dungeons and fractals, and is partially what I’m referencing.

@Peter Buch
Lets not try and derail this thread too much with balance discussion and change suggestions, there are some other threads for that hanging around. :P

• staff: excellent support, decent AOE dmg, poor single target dmg
• S/?: best burst dmg weapon so decent solo, but hamstrung by some of the worst-designed skills in the game (fire #1, fire #2, water #1, water #2).
• D/?: melee range, but good solo, good small group, good support

you said main-hand, but i’ll do O/H as well for the lolz:

• ?/D: very versatile, good damage/CC options – probably the best-designed Ele weapon
• ?/F: pretty crappy, lack of mobility and dmg make it only good for specific PVE uses.

With the exception of O/H dagger, Ele weapons are all quite pidgeonholed – in WVW you’ll find you’ll need to constantly be switching weapons for different situations.

They seem to want Ele to be difficult/annoying to play /shrug.

If you can’t be bothered switching weapons or would prefer to stick to just one weaponset, then D/D with 0/10/0/30/30 is the obvious choice, albeit the hardest to learn initially.