Guild Wars 2

You could buff these skills by 300% and they’d still be bad. Especially retaliation. You need to give them some actual utility desirable for PvE environments. Husks are not a good example of it at all as mentioned in the interviews, because husks attack so slowly.

There’s also the issue of confusion that the confusion centric class, the mesmer, is actually the worst at applying it. An engineer puts a mesmer to shame in confusion, and it’s all because of how impractical applying confusion as a mesmer is. An engineer does an instant swipe that does large amounts of direct damage and applies a large amount of stacks of confusion that has a good duration.

Mesmer confusion stacks lasts mostly a pitiful 3.5-5 seconds, it’s such a miserable duration and frontloading confusion as a mesmer is not really good, you need to pick up deficient traits and the terrible weapon that is the scepter (with its pitifully weak autoattack and a weak, low duration torment and a 1 second windup on its 3rd chain). Most mobs move very little in PvE so torment is even worse than bleeds in said scenarios.

Then you have the scepter #3, with a huge windup to apply the amount of confusion stacks a single prybar does instantly, and the engineer can even stack more confusion between prybar and pistol.

In fact if you ever make conditions a thing, the engineer will dwarf mesmers and necromancers in condition application with his ease of frontloading conditions, the wide variety he has not needing to use deficient weapons, and on top of having most of them covered with pistol/shield+grenade and bomb kit, he then brings immensely more utility via CC, the amazing healing turret (which is just a better water field than healing spring, whose duration you nerfed for pvp purposes), blinds and easy blast combos for stealth and fire blast finishers.

I’m really trying in seeing the use of retaliation on phantasms, when you don’t want them hit to begin with because they’re all a mesmer’s damage in pve so their death is a huge detriment, or the retaliation on necromancer’s axe #3 (doing 400 damage back to mobs with vast hp pools per time they hit you is a joke).

Not saying confusion is all that great, but cool video

Jerus.4350:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNepDf9hBHU

Not saying confusion is all that great, but cool video

That’s a bug exploit. And even with an exploit it’s slower than some zerker solo kill.

Zenith.7301:

Jerus.4350:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNepDf9hBHU

Not saying confusion is all that great, but cool video

That’s a bug exploit. And even with an exploit it’s slower than some zerker solo kill.

lol?

So confusion is an exploit now? ok then…

Artemis Thuras.8795:

Zenith.7301:

Jerus.4350:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNepDf9hBHU

Not saying confusion is all that great, but cool video

That’s a bug exploit. And even with an exploit it’s slower than some zerker solo kill.

lol?

So confusion is an exploit now? ok then…

I think he was referring to the “not even dodging, moving, or using any defensive skills, but taking no damage” part, not the “I killed the boss using only Confusion” part.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Artemis Thuras.8795:

Zenith.7301:

Jerus.4350:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNepDf9hBHU

Not saying confusion is all that great, but cool video

That’s a bug exploit. And even with an exploit it’s slower than some zerker solo kill.

lol?

So confusion is an exploit now? ok then…

I think he was referring to the “not even dodging, moving, or using any defensive skills, but taking no damage” part, not the “I killed the boss using only Confusion” part.

I had thought of that.

That is how alpha was designed though.

So my reply has to be:
Working as intended is now an exploit? ok then..

I laughed when they talked about buffing confusion by 33%!

Until mobs attack with the same speed players do, then confusion won’t be a big hit….

And they will never attack at the same speed players do because mobs in things like fractals autoattack for as much as 4k+ a hit. Player healthpools are too small to support the whole “do damage to the mob for hitting you for 1/4 to 1/3 of your health”.

They just need to retool the way confusion works. Make it like the GW1 mesmer hexes where when you attempt the skill it interrupts you and detonates for a chunk of damage. Retaliation needs to reflect back a set percentage of the damage back at the target (balanced separately for pvp and pve of course). That way it’s not broken against mesmer greatsword and ranger bows but it’s useful against all attacks.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Artemis Thuras.8795:

Zenith.7301:

Jerus.4350:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNepDf9hBHU

Not saying confusion is all that great, but cool video

That’s a bug exploit. And even with an exploit it’s slower than some zerker solo kill.

lol?

So confusion is an exploit now? ok then…

I think he was referring to the “not even dodging, moving, or using any defensive skills, but taking no damage” part, not the “I killed the boss using only Confusion” part.

I had thought of that.

That is how alpha was designed though.

So my reply has to be:
Working as intended is now an exploit? ok then..

Don’t be stupid, that’s about as intended as abusing the hitbox on lupicus for the projectiles to not hit you or not trigger his p3 attacks.

The point is with that bug he was able to also reliably channel scepter 3 for confusion upkeep, whereas in any encounter where you can’t channel it reliably since you need to dodge, a mesmer confusion build does not have good confusion upkeep as in the video — which is pitiful because even by cheesing the encounter to easily have 25 stacks of confusion the kill speed is miserable.

Zenith.7301:

And they will never attack at the same speed players do because mobs in things like fractals autoattack for as much as 4k+ a hit.

You think they can’t change that?

Wait, you really think the ranged projectiles on lupi are intended to hit you in melee? I mean holy hell that’s a HUGE oversight if so, I can’t remeber ever seeing anyone make that assertion before, thought it was pretty obvious that it was a ranged attack meant to be avoidable in melee.

As for interrupts from confusion, how would that work with the new defiance system? How would the damage differ if it was still triggers on skill activation?

@thefantasticg confusion is nothing to scoff at, I can get quite a bit of extra dmage out of it on Lupi when I do my Engi Solos with p/s + toolkit. Great no, but it’s something and with lupi attacking pretty consistently in the later phases (you know that ranged projectile that we’re exploiting by avoiding in melee )

And that’s the problem with confusion, the variable attack speeds really make it hard to balance, make it high damage to scale for a boss that attacks every 3s, now put it on a boss that attacks every 1s, well now you have 3X the power. It’s simply bad design for PVE

The buffs to those conditions are more of a buff for the creature to use against the players than the other way around.

Which could be a ‘buff’ to condition removal and boon stripe in the pve side of things.

Zenith.7301:

And they will never attack at the same speed players do because mobs in things like fractals autoattack for as much as 4k+ a hit.

So change some mobs to do many fast attacks, each of which do little damage. Ta-da, confusion and retaliation become useful in PvE.

The issue with those two isn’t that they’re weak. It’s that PvE is poorly designed and has the same kind of enemy over and over – enemies with very slow and very high damage attacks.