Guild Wars 2

We’re getting some much needed changes to confusion in PVE in the upcoming balance patch on the 27.
Unfortunately, I’m dubious of the effectiveness of the proposed change. As the dev note rightfully points out, mobs don’t swing much and this contributes to how lackluster confusion is in PVE.
Simply increasing confusion’s damage doesn’t resolves this problem though, as it is the very nature of confusion that doesn’t integrate well in PVE vs mobs.
Even if the damage is increase, we’ll still be stuck with those times where confusion does very little (or nothing) because the mob only swung once (or not at all), or started moving just after applying confusion.
Controlling the mob and timing your attacks is important and should be rewarded, but in the case of confusion, its effectiveness is too random and dependent on such factors.

I propose that confusion should be changed to work similarly to Torment. A portion of confusion’s damage will automatically tick once per second, and the other portion will trigger upon action (current functionality).
This way there is a standard, a baseline effectiveness for confusion that you can rely on in PVE.

Id like to think there considering adding more “white” attacks to mob behavior (atm most mobs just repeat a hard hitting attack or a low damage attack with condis attacked to it..both are generally slow). However mordrem seem to show some altenrate behaviors.

Teragriffs auto attack quite quickly. ALthough I wish there duel swing auto attack acted like a chain attack for a player. so confusion would proc on each part of the “chain” but have that chain lead up to something quite painful. (Kinda like how a guardian hammer setup will lead to that protection symbol) seeing chain attack setups would be very nice IMO. and it would improve the health of confusion as a condition.

My only issue is that bosses seem to be moving further away from the white damage and more towards scripted attacks. Dont get me wrong scripted attacks are awesome as long as they do enough damage to be considered such. There a way of forcing the player to break out of there comfort zone and react. Which is fun. However those scripted attacks are often quite slow and lack the punishment attached to them. So they lose not only the thrill but the effectiveness of punishment such as retaliation and confusion.

I feel if a middle ground could be found between very heavy scripted attacks and middling rapid white attacks the bosses could not only be more fun but also be more in pace with the confusion there trying to buff. just me though. Kinda went off on a psuedo rant.

From what I understand, the condition damage modifier is getting the boost, not the base damage. So that means instead of 15% condition damage per stack in PvE, it is now 20% condition damage…

The most condition damage I will ever have is 300 from traits and I highly doubt that, with the current condition caps in place, I would ever run a full or even partial condition damage build in PvE.

To be honest, while I think it’s nice that confusion is getting a buff, I don’t think it solves the problem in that most enemies need to attack more often but with less damage. At least this way, we’d see confusion activating more often.

Instead of having to take special considerations in designing mobs just for the sake of a single condition, wouldn’t it be much easier to simply make that condition more flexible? i.e add a damage over time component to it
And it’s unreasonable to expect retroactive changes to most mobs in the game just to make confusion work better. So unless they forsake all old content, changing mobs isn’t going to be an effective solution.

Confusion will be still useless in pve imo.

The “proper” fix is much easier IMO: Instead of increase confusion’s damage in PvE, increase it’s duration.
That way, the issue of mobs attacking slowly is much more easily mitigated and the condition serves more as steady background damage instead of a burst condition (as it often is in PvP). But that use works much better in a PvE setting.

does this mean enemy confusion does more damage too?
People are gonna avoid reef Drakes like the plague now lol. (like they didn’t already)