I just use focus for burst combos, having people completely unaware of your target allows you to do crazy stuff that normally isn't possible. Examples would be killing them in literally one volley so they have very little to almost nill opportunity to hit bubble/iceblock hotkeys...way, way to powerful to waste that focus with CC IMO if you are a shaman group. Say your throwing lightning bolts at a DK...his hpally which is your focus comes into LOS to heal the DK... you hold your modifier key and hit him with a lava burst->chain lightning and he explodes. He won't know your casting against him until the spells fly in his direction, by that time it's usually too late. I think if a team fights you enough times they may start wising up a bit and preemptively bubble/iceblock...if I ever win regularly enough where thats actually a problem I'll let you know

So, the way I set focus is by targeting desired target with my current leader and hit a key which makes it a focus for the lead, as well as makes the alt target this target and set him to focus. I put this functionality on the same key that I use to switch to my current leader:

F8 = PIP toona , set toonas target to party focus

So you need a FTL mapping for each toon to aquire the current leaders target same as you have for lightning bolt, folllow, etc


Now that you are able to get focus targets efficently it's your preference on how to use it and this is ofcourse out of the scope of FTL as you can just use [target=focus] at this point


So to recap heres my lava burst on leaders target:


key press
(using a hotstring)
4

macro:
FTL target acquisition
....
/cast lava burst


here is my lava burst on focus:

key press
(NO hotstring)
alt-4

macro:
/cast [mod:alt, target=focus,exists,nodead] Lava Burst


The reason I like them all on modifier keys is that I want maximum control, I only want to cast on my focus when I have the opportunity to take him out with a huge LB->CL or LvB->CL combo

Let me know if something doesn't make sense