Switch Water Focus and Water Offhand Dagger

[Coeruleum.9164]

I personally think it's really weird that offhand dagger randomly has defensive skills when you use water and focus randomly has crowd control skills. I thought focus was supposed to be somewhat more of a defensive or support weapon. If focus gets the fire aura and transmute fire skills it should get the ice aura and transmute ice skills too. Anything that works better mechanically also works better thematically. If you use offhand dagger you can use the lightning dagger skin, turn into a lightning bolt, and summon hailstorms, and if you use the focus, you can use an elemental crystal and project auras around yourself. Why does the dagger even come with an ice aura and the focus with a fire aura, when the focus is more defensive and should just get all the auras while dagger should get more lunges and crowd control moves? Thanks for your consideration!

[steki.1478]

Focus isnt necessarily defensive, it's ranged utility and it's a selfish weapon (so fire skills don't provide much support and the only other thing that fire can do is damage). Daggers are bruiser-like weapons so it makes sense to have both damage and defense because you need both in melee range. There's also 3 (5 with weaver) mobility skills, which is more than enough. CC could be higher, but you can apply a decent amount of chill on enemy as well as provide even more CC with weaver. Besides, it's pointless if 2 weapons have the same features, focus currently has better CC and self defense, while dagger provides better burst and mobility.

 

As for auras, every weapon has 1 aura skill. One of the few consistencies in this game.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

water focus needs its skills buffed.

[fuzzyp.6295]

I don't think that would be a very good idea. Off hand dagger is already one of the weakest tools in the ele's kit. By removing Ice Aura you are taking away one of its only tools for defense, something that it desperately needs considering dagger is designed for you to be up in your opponents face. Focus also is mostly a ranged weapon and because of that, Comet and Freezing Gust works well with its play style of keep your enemies at a distance. I don't really think either of these skills would work well with off hand dagger unless they are changed somehow.

 

What about Fire Aura? Most Eles would tell you that the Fire Aura and Flamewall are utter garbage and should be swapped out for new skills on Focus rather than the water skills. At least now Fire Aura has more utility with its detonation atleast, but Flamewall is still a skill that was designed for GW2 2012 where you were expected to drop it for Ranger's to pew pew over it for CoMbOs.

 

Not to mention all of the base ele weapons were designed to have an aura attached to them (Focus/Fire, Dagger/Air, OffDagger/Water, Staff/Earth) so that would mess up that aspect of the elementatlist's tool kit.

 

EDIT: steki pretty much said everything I said so +1 for that haha

[Coeruleum.9164]

> @"fuzzyp.6295" said:

> I don't think that would be a very good idea. Off hand dagger is already one of the weakest tools in the ele's kit. By removing Ice Aura you are taking away one of its only tools for defense, something that it desperately needs considering dagger is designed for you to be up in your opponents face. Focus also is mostly a ranged weapon and because of that, Comet and Freezing Gust works well with its play style of keep your enemies at a distance. I don't really think either of these skills would work well with off hand dagger unless they are changed somehow.

>

> What about Fire Aura? Most Eles would tell you that the Fire Aura and Flamewall are utter garbage and should be swapped out for new skills on Focus rather than the water skills. At least now Fire Aura has more utility with its detonation atleast, but Flamewall is still a skill that was designed for GW2 2012 where you were expected to drop it for Ranger's to pew pew over it for CoMbOs.

>

> Not to mention all of the base ele weapons were designed to have an aura attached to them (Focus/Fire, Dagger/Air, OffDagger/Water, Staff/Earth) so that would mess up that aspect of the elementatlist's tool kit.

>

> EDIT: steki pretty much said everything I said so +1 for that haha

 

Dagger doesn't need defense though if it also has crowd control which it does. Focus doesn't really need crowd control because focus is a defensive weapon on multiple professions. Necromancer focus has a self-heal and a debuff, Guardian focus has a block and ranged attack, Mesmer focus has an illusion that blocks and a swiftness field. I can understand Elementalist focus having crowd control on air or earth, but water doesn't generally have a lot of crowd control so putting crowd control on elementalist focus for water just feels like shoehorning it in. In addition, it's not necessary because elementalist focus already actually does have crowd control on air.

 

Also, Firewall and Fire Aura/Transmute are GREAT skills. Firewall would probably be better if they did the same with with it as they did with Spectral Wall and make it into a ring, but it doesn't really need to be changed besides that. Have you used Firewall and Fire Aura on sword weaver? You can leap over the firewall and just keep making fire auras and transmuting them. I think ice aura would be better for that kind of playstyle. Focus largely isn't a good ranged weapon on ele at all. It mostly gives you blocks and projectile reflects which mostly help you when playing melee. It can totally also work with scepter like intended if you want more defense with your scepter, but scepter already has a lot of ranged crowd control on air and earth and you don't need it shoehorned in to water focus. If you want more defense with your dagger and to be a bruiser, you should either go dagger/focus anyways which would be really nice for making and transmuting auras and blocking projectiles and attacks, or you can go dagger/dagger to have high amounts of mobility and crowd control and take more defensive traits and skills.

 

Combos are actually great even though it's not 2012 anymore. Auras are really great too and I like making auras. However, most of your combos are probably going to be with yourself. Rangers can make rings of fire and pew pew over them all by themselves and it adds a lot of damage, or make other fields and add other effects like poison and chill. If your friend puts up a field that's also useful, and random noobs putting up fields is usually harmless at best although I think there should be a better mechanism for determining which field you want so people don't replace my whirls and projectiles on dark fields with whirls and projectiles on light fields so much and reduce my damage and self-healing, or change my lunge on a fire field into a lunge on a poison field and it's useless against a big boss instead of turning me into the Human Torch.

[fuzzyp.6295]

> @"Coeruleum.9164" said:

> Dagger doesn't need defense though if it also has crowd control which it does. Focus doesn't really need crowd control because focus is a defensive weapon on multiple professions. Necromancer focus has a self-heal and a debuff, Guardian focus has a block and ranged attack, Mesmer focus has an illusion that blocks and a swiftness field. I can understand Elementalist focus having crowd control on air or earth, but water doesn't generally have a lot of crowd control so putting crowd control on elementalist focus for water just feels like shoehorning it in. In addition, it's not necessary because elementalist focus already actually does have crowd control on air.

>

 

Dagger does need defensive abilities because, again, its an in your face weapon for the class with the lowest HP and lowest armor rating. Thats why all of the other skils on the off hand weapon are point blank AoE abilities or gap closers. The Elementalist was designed to be an extremely flexible profession that can do 'everything' by swapping its attunements instead of using a second weapon with weapon swap. Filling an entire weapon with 'defensive' or 'crowd control' skills completely changes this basic identity of the class. It also weakens the Ele because with Dagger you would have no way to sustain and heal back up in this close combat and with Focus you would now be purely reliant on a single knock-down for any openings and forced to play super passively.

 

Also, why should the Focus on other classes dictate how the Focus on Elementalist functions? Hammer on Guardians are heavy crowd controlling weapons where as Hammers on Revenants are ranged burst weapons. Longbow on Warrior is a mostly condi based weapon, where as Longbow on Ranger is pure power. Also, these other classes only have two skills for their focus, where as Elementalist has 8 focus skills, which means variety is necessary. Having it completely filled with defensive abilities makes it, honestly, too strong consider its already an excellent tool for defense for the Ele.

 

 

> Also, Firewall and Fire Aura/Transmute are GREAT skills. Firewall would probably be better if they did the same with with it as they did with Spectral Wall and make it into a ring, but it doesn't really need to be changed besides that. Have you used Firewall and Fire Aura on sword weaver? You can leap over the firewall and just keep making fire auras and transmuting them. I think ice aura would be better for that kind of playstyle.

 

I don't think I've ever seen an ele actually say unironically that Flamewall is a good skill. You can also leap through Ring of Fire... or Flame Uprising's fire field for Auras... both of which don't require you to waste time with ground targeting and a slow cast time. And you may actually deal some damage with those skills to boot. You can get plenty of Fire Auras via Sword and Traits without Focus. The detonation is not really all that good either because if you're really in the mood for might, the Fire Trait line has some of the best might gaining abilities around.. not to mention aura supporting traits. Fire Aura on focus is alright, but hardly the reason why anyone chooses Focus over Dagger. And no one likes Flamewall.

 

> Focus largely isn't a good ranged weapon on ele at all. It mostly gives you blocks and projectile reflects which mostly help you when playing melee.

 

I don't... what? I don't see how blocking ranged projectiles helps you in close combat because... they are projectiles lol. Focus is a ranged weapon because it keeps you safe at range. The only Melee protection it offers is Obsidian Flesh which, up until its recent nerf, was still amazing to use at any range when you were under pressure because it still let you attack while using it.

 

>It can totally also work with scepter like intended if you want more defense with your scepter, but scepter already has a lot of ranged crowd control on air and earth and you don't need it shoehorned in to water focus.

 

What crowd control does scepter have? Are you referring to Weaver Scepter? Because for Core and Tempest you only have access to 2 Blinds as any defensive skills on Scepter. And one of those blinds your opponent can leisurely move to the left or right to avoid. You could maybe make the argument that Dragon's Tooth and Shatterstone are 'crowd control' because they make your opponent move out of the way I guess.

 

If we're talking Scepter Weaver, you really only have one more crowd control ability and an evade. But focus wasn't made for Weaver, it was made for Ele.

 

 

>If you want more defense with your dagger and to be a bruiser, you should either go dagger/focus anyways which would be really nice for making and transmuting auras and blocking projectiles and attacks, or you can go dagger/dagger to have high amounts of mobility and crowd control and take more defensive traits and skills.

 

Or we can stick with the way that Elementalist was designed and have each weapon have the ability to be flexible and fill different niches instead of a single weapon being purely a "cc" weapon.

 

> Combos are actually great even though it's not 2012 anymore. Auras are really great too and I like making auras. However, most of your combos are probably going to be with yourself. Rangers can make rings of fire and pew pew over them all by themselves and it adds a lot of damage, or make other fields and add other effects like poison and chill. If your friend puts up a field that's also useful, and random noobs putting up fields is usually harmless at best although I think there should be a better mechanism for determining which field you want so people don't replace my whirls and projectiles on dark fields with whirls and projectiles on light fields so much and reduce my damage and self-healing, or change my lunge on a fire field into a lunge on a poison field and it's useless against a big boss instead of turning me into the Human Torch.

 

For true, players have been asking ANet for better combo priority for years but there is always an issue with why they can't implement it. But you don't need Flamewall to make auras. And blasting fire fields is so 2015.

 

At the end of the day though, I mean, it doesn't matter because ANet will not swap these skills so :bleep_bloop: