Guild Wars 2

Focus Mastery: Gain protection when using a focus ability. Focus abilities have reduced recharge.

Looking at focus skills:

Ray of Judgement: Pass a ray over foes and allies. Foes are damaged and blinded. Allies gain regeneration and cure one condition.

Shield of Wrath: Create a shield to block the next three attacks. If the shield is not destroyed, it explodes and damages nearby foes.

So thinking of 1v1 or small scale fighting: we gain 4s of protection with the trait but with one skill we have blind and in the second skill we block attacks for 4s anyways; don’t these 2 things make protection somewhat worthless and is this trait sill worth taking for the cooldown over smiter’s boon?

i noticed that too on focus 5 the protection is useless unless your enemy hits you for lots fo small attacks therby breaking your blocks before the 4 seconds are up. The protection is useful on focus 4 since all it takes is one auto attack and the blind is gone.

having said all that i do use focus mastery on one of my builds.

It’s a good extra layer of defense. If your 4 skill is dodged/blocked or your 5 skill is quickly broken, you might need the extra damage mitigation.

It would have been much better suited on shield, though. This only widens the viability gap between the two.

I really like Focus Mastery, amazing extra layer of defense since 99% of the time your shield will be broken relatively quickly.

Edit: Remember, Focus had its cd reduced base and this further makes it more quickly available.

If it wouldn’t be competing with Smiter’s Boon I would definitely be using it, just prefer the Smite on heal

So it sounds like its situation dependent; in a larger battle where you are being hit more often it probably still pays off, in small battles or 1v1s I also like Smiter’s Boon for sustained attack pressure.