Guild Wars 2

Anyone who can help me? I am now LvL 10 only on my Guardian so Im no wiz in this area.

The problem is that I wanted to be a “tank”/utility player on this toon. I got a focus now and by looking at its skill it looks superior to shield. I simply can’t find any use for a shield compered to a focus.

Anyone want to enlighten me a bit?

It depends on the situation really. In solo PVE I usually play a mace/focus/GS burning build, pulling all people to me and burning them down to the ground while dishing out 3 with GS.
In WvWvW however, I tend to play a rather supportive role, so I take a shield, simply for the amazing 5 and 4 is useful too. Together with Hold The Line, I can put the protection buff on my allies for a really long time. Also now that the traits Defender’s Shield and Honorable Shield are put together, the toughness and cd reduction make it a bit more viable in wvwvw situations. you can take more hits.

But in general, you might need both focus and shield, it depends on what situation you’re in.

Focus is probably better until you can get the 90 toughness shield trait. At that point at least for me shield pulls ahead (especially with today’s buff).

Have you considered the torch instead? I’ve used all 3 and like the torch better for both solo and group stuff. I’ve used focus up to maybe level 20 then switched to the shield until I got a chance to swap it out with a torch. Never looked back. It works for me on my playing style at the moment.

I’m currently debating swapping it out though just to revisit what might be better for WvW.

In PvE, I was struggling to find a use for shield’s 5. The bubble is nice for the knock-down, but scattering enemies to the wind was a bit counter-productive given that in most events people want the enemies clumped for AoEs, and soloing the knock-down was barely an advantage against a single mob once you had to factor in the time it took to run back to the mob. For that reason, I swapped from mace-shield to mace-focus, especially once I realized that focus synergizes so much better with my Honor/Valor build and the 25 point Valor trait.

Personally, I see the shield as primarily a PvP weapon for area denial, the focus as a good healing-support off-hand. Torch is good for damage and the area cleanse, but focus is much better in terms of team support.

I have used the shield so far, but just gave a chance to Focus lately and dont want to come back to the shield. The 5th skill of shield is cool but Focus is far away more usefull both in PvE and PvP.