So I’m currently level 42 and I’ve been maining Focus (lifestaff - rapier, or lifestaff - spear) ever since finding a healer was frustrating.
However, I’m getting pretty bored of the playstyle. Maybe it’s just not for me, but in terms of solo grinding all you get is a left mousebutton. Your secondary weapon is a joke, the damage is not even close to the life staff’s LMB orbs – Got it, the secondary weapon is purely utility then.
Surely, being a support isn’t about playing solo, I get that. So I play some open world dungeons. With a tank, I can safely stand back 10 meters and spam my LMB. Oh, someone got hit- He’s standing next to my tank, I guess Sacred Ground and Orb of Protection already have him covered. Someone got hit twice, have a Light’s Embrace. I don’t have to pay attention to anything the boss is doing, as long as I keep an eye on my top-left corner and see anyone getting close to 50% health.
In War-PvP, you stand on the backline and do the same as in group PvE. If you/the backline gets attacked, you can’t get away if the attacker is half capable, so you just stand there and take it like the man you are. Maybe your allies notice and come to your aid, otherwise you are left at the mercy.
It’s so, so, so single-trackminded. Change my mind.
I put some points in Constitution too, so you can be a bit more tanky. This makes it fun in combination with a warhammer or hatches, so you can chop away and crowd control mobs while shooting sacred ground and beacon at the mobs you want to chop at. Spear might be fun for throwing, but then you need to put some points into strength to make it viable.
I feel the same. I’m not really doing as much damage with secondary weapon with amber gem. I guess it’s cuz I don’t have the best amber gem, but I doubt you’re expected to have a highest tier amber gem early on in the game for every weapon you change while leveing. As a result, i’m forced to use just life staff and mostly spam basic attacks at mobs, which gets extremely dull.
I’ve got 10 points in constitution, putting me at 74 con. I don’t have to be any more tanky, since Lights Embrace heals >45% of my HP, Sacred Ground and Orb of Protection do the rest. Going hatchet seems pointless in PvE, the damage is to my knowledge still below Life Staff’s LMB. I did consider hammer, so I could Path of Destiny – Instead I went for Spear, so I could sweep: less cooldown, does almost the same given the AI’s tendency to blob up. Also I get the best Rend (30%) in the game.
Alright. Don’t really know I only had a few levels in life staff during closed beta, but I found it super weak. So I was surprised to hear your secondary is actually the weak one.
When playing as a support, your secondary could be Ice gauntlet since it has a lot of utility.
You don’t need damage when focussing on being a utility mage.
If you really don’t want to play Ice gauntlet you can also equip a gem on your weapon which (can be any weapon) converts 20-50% of your focus stat to damage on that weapon.
You could run a spear and have 20-50% of your focus damage being converted to nature damage on your spear, resulting in a much stronger/more viable secondary weapon that actually deals damage.
This can be done with any weapon that has a gem socket.
If you did all that I don’t think support is boring anymore at all since you can have any weapon you’d like. If you still dislike it, it probably just doesn’t suit your playstyle and you shouldn’t be a support in the first place.
I’ve been maining Lifestaff and Hatchet. How I find myself playing at least solo is pull 4-8 mobs with Lifestaff, kite until they are grouped up than hit with our and Sacred ground swap to Hatchet pop berserk and the multi-hit ability (Cant remember name) and GG them all. I can AOE farm pretty well like this so long as they down have a push back. Its so enjoyable being able to cleave with the hatchet and not loose any health. There was a Reddit post with a great write up a couple days back.
Just wish there was a bit more variety in the playstyle. Currently it is: Step 1- drop your aoe’s, step 2- spam LMB, step 3- repeat.
You can mix it up with a secondary (in my case, spear) to add some extra effects to the mix (Rend primarily in my case, the CC is a non-issue in PvE)
What utility, really? Slows don’t really add anything to PvE, mobs don’t juke or get behind you for crits. Root doesn’t add anything when in a group, since there’ll always be people in melee.
— I do like the ice block panic button though!
I do really agree that they should make more options/weapons that scale off of focus.
Focus is literally the most useless thing in the game right now.
Your only job is to heal once you enter the focus tree.
They should make an “Alchemist” class, or something like that, that can go focus and provide utility in forms of throwing potions for example.
Slowing targets, weakening them, buffing allies with speed and maybe regeneration over time.
Or maybe not a supportive class that runs focus.
Throwing blades perhaps.
Who knows.
Maybe adding more weapons is the fix, or maybe the playstyle in general is just very onesided in the current meta/gaming style. I don’t want to only look at weapons as the issue, there could be something deeper.
For me, it just seems very un-invested, absentminded and singular/one-track minded. That’s more a system issue than it could be the weapon’s.
The awkwardness of trying to hit NPC enemies that doge dip duck dive and dodge is the worst bit for me, I think the life staff projectiles need to have a larger hit box. I don’t mind them doing a bit less damage, I know gem builds exist for other weapons but I’ve been happy from level 10 to 30 just pew-pew’ing with the staff and having my target AOE heal me while we fight.
Honestly, the most fun builds are cc trees from both the great axe and hammer, good for PVP tons of Fun for PVE and you get to be a chunky boi.
Gravity well into the path of destiny is no joke. 100% Strength scaling less the ability penalty/adjustment and you have tons of control and aoe burst which I think is really good for a souls-like game like this.
I do hope they provide some kind of better way for focus main players to do damage. Currently the gems just don’t cut it, my weapon damage on the off hand even with a max level gem is still only 30-35% of the life staff weapon damage. And the life staff weapon damage is 60% of what other players do. I understand it’s difficult to fix this without impacting the game else how and making life staff too strong, hopefully they come up with something. Other games have used toggle abilities that reduce healing significantly and increase damage for the duration.
Amazon just give LS a streaming animation of the attack, like in wow life abduction and they will stop whining;) if I’m not mistaken, then it was on alpha and tcb
