Guild Wars 2

So everybody has heard about the stability changes right? Changing it from a catch all duration boon to a stacked boon so that it rewards prediction, reaction, and all around good play while giving the control roll a little more breathing room.

What I don’t understand, is people have suggested this same change for confusion for a very long time, it has always seemed like such an obvious change for the good health of the mechanic and its most thematically tied class, the Mesmer. Heck I remember people suggesting it back in the first few months of the game when most everyone still thought the Mesmer was worthless in PvP.

Confusion should act like a stacking version of blind, you place stacks on an opponent, and those stacks ‘pop’ when that opponent successfully uses an ability, both clearing and dealing their damage. Additionally, those stack would scale upward in a curve rather than linearly like most conditions. What this does for confusion is:

• First and foremost, creates counterplay, moving confusions ‘burst’ in to a window of danger rather than an extensive period gives opponents a clear window of opportunity to be taken advantage of to escape, evade, or resist the damage. As well as rewarding not oft used stick-to-it builds that are more reliable in consistently popping the lower damage stacks.
• Opens two methods of use. The first ‘burst’ version, rewards you for daisy-chaining dazes, evasion, invulnerability and other defensive mechanics together while you increase the stacks. And the second lighter but consistent DPS through regular application of 1-3 stacks of confusion, popped by your opponents regular skill use.
• Prevents contradictory mechanics. Mesmers like to daze people, dazed people don’t take confusion damage. Now these mechanics actually work in harmony rather than against each other.
• Confusion can finally be useful in PvE, rather than being punished by the less regular attacks of PvE mobs confusion users can take advantage of that difference to apply heavy confusion damage against mobs, champions, and bosses.
• With the newly available counter-play confusion could and likely would see buffs throughout the game.
• We could see the return of the scepter as a confusion weapon.
• One demerit, this still doesn’t fix the 25 max stack problem. Get on that already…

EDIT: Also, while it isn’t absolutely necessary, I would recommend moving confusion to proc upon skill affect, rather than on cast. For example, currently if you use your heal skill with confusion stacks, the confusion will deal damage before the heal, meaning you can down yourself and never get the heal. Having both proc simultaneously would cause one to take both the damage and the heal, rather than one overwriting the other.

Well…. I see what you’re saying, except that what you seem to think is skill, is really just “you must turn autoattack off to avoid getting one shotted by mesmers now”
Also, where do you cut off? If a mesmer is going to keep applying confusion to you, do you let them and wait to do anything while they wale on you, or should you clear it quickly (like maybe with an auto attack?) before it stacks high enough to do real damage. The better option is probably to just ignore the confusion all together which leads to the second point.

It would just make it a hhhuuuggggeee pain in the kitten to use because it would either be stupid OP or you’d have to CC someone and stack up enough confusion to actually be noticeable. In the end all you would have achieved is more time that a person spends controlled because if they’re smart they just don’t do anything. If you’re a condi mesmer and your main source of DPS is confusion, you’re screwed.

Confusion as it is now works because it can just sit on a target and they tend to ignore it while it deals damage to them. It eats away at your enemy without them even really noticing, but if it were changed to how you suggest it should be it would only ever be important passed a certain amount of stacks, at which point you would halt dps for a few seconds while the mesmer cries because they blew their “burst” (which was getting all that CC on you and all those stacks of confusion) and then nothing happened. Not to mention that anything with a stun break or anything like arcane blast that you can use while stunned would kinda invalidate that because you could clear stacks while being CC chained.
That also isn’t even touching resistance. Only thing worse than a person doing nothing, would be them getting resistance and laughing as they completely ignore your confusion.

While the GW1 mesmers feature hexes that worked the way you describe, doing the change in GW2 is a risky move that will require a lot of work without being sure the “problem” will be “fixed”.

Currently I only see a problem for confusion in PvE, but this is a “condition problem” rather than a “confusion problem”.

In PvP it works alright. As the old saying claims : “don’t waste time trying to fix something that is not broken”.

CynicalFred.9135:

Well…. I see what you’re saying, except that what you seem to think is skill, is really just “you must turn autoattack off to avoid getting one shotted by mesmers now”
Also, where do you cut off? If a mesmer is going to keep applying confusion to you, do you let them and wait to do anything while they wale on you, or should you clear it quickly (like maybe with an auto attack?) before it stacks high enough to do real damage. The better option is probably to just ignore the confusion all together which leads to the second point.

It would just make it a hhhuuuggggeee pain in the kitten to use because it would either be stupid OP or you’d have to CC someone and stack up enough confusion to actually be noticeable. In the end all you would have achieved is more time that a person spends controlled because if they’re smart they just don’t do anything. If you’re a condi mesmer and your main source of DPS is confusion, you’re screwed.

You didn’t read the entire description, I stated, unlike other conditions confusion would curve upward in its scaling. Meaning that doing nothing would never be a better option against consistent confusion application because low stacks would be no more higher consistent DPS than a middling auto-attack. Doing nothing and dropping back would, however, be an option with higher stacks, however, that is an option now just the same, so that is a non-issue really.

CynicalFred.9135:

Confusion as it is now works because it can just sit on a target and they tend to ignore it while it deals damage to them. It eats away at your enemy without them even really noticing,

What, how? How thick do you have to be for that to happen? Your head blows up in a flourescent pink mushroom cloud for cripes sakes. I can’t think of any time that has ever happened playing on or against a confusion build. Plus, even if that were true, which it may be for the most very unskilled section of the playerbase, that lack of clarity is not a feature, it is a design flaw.

CynicalFred.9135:

but if it were changed to how you suggest it should be it would only ever be important passed a certain amount of stacks, at which point you would halt dps for a few seconds while the mesmer cries because they blew their “burst” (which was getting all that CC on you and all those stacks of confusion) and then nothing happened.

Again no, every thing you are claiming will inherently be a problem is due to your own assumptions about both uptime and scaling, neither of which I have even given a single number for. Why can’t anyone on these forums operate under the assumption that the developers actually know what they are doing and would not without exception break the game with any and all changes?

CynicalFred.9135:

Not to mention that anything with a stun break or anything like arcane blast that you can use while stunned would kinda invalidate that because you could clear stacks while being CC chained.

Is it so terrible that bringing multiple anticontrol and anticondition skills would naturally give you resistance to a combination of conditions and control? You seem to be missing that the very first point I stated about this change: to give confusion more counterplay, everything else is secondary to that goal.

CynicalFred.9135:

That also isn’t even touching resistance. Only thing worse than a person doing nothing, would be them getting resistance and laughing as they completely ignore your confusion.

I did mention resistance actually, and think it would be a great addition to alongside this change, proper timing could negate the confusion condition entirely. But at the same time knowing an opponent is going to pop that confusion in that window of opportunity gives you the play option of preventing it.

You do know this would require a reworking of duration and how much you can apply it in general right? I mean, all of what i’m saying is going on how it is now in terms of application because yes, you could change it to make it balanced, but there’s no good reason i can see to do so.

If any one thing was unarguably going to kill this idea it would be the sheer amount of work required to balance it, and why do it when it’s already fine as is? It punishes people for bursting (performing a lot of attacks in a short window) that’s what it’s good at and i dont get why you’d want to change it to give it two counters, because you’d have to chain CC to get high enough stacks to be formidable, according to you, which means both any CC breaker or Condi clearing could effectively counter confusion.

Or to put it simply, you’d have to be kinda stupid or a glutton for punishment to let it stack high enough to be a threat.
Sounds like a sneaky nerf to me. Also allows a ranger (for instance) to pop quickness and just go nuts on your squishy kitten without fear, the great thing about confusion now is that it forces you to take a step back and either clear it or at least start to play very defensively. As a matter of fact this would flip the role of confusion entirely on its head, because instead of forcing offensive players to take a step back it punishes anyone with a slow attack speed or anyone who doesn’t have CC breaks and condi clears for not having CC breaks and condi clears. Those players see enough punishment, and there really isn’t to much that counters a LB ranger popping quickness and raining arrows on you from on high, except for dodging and immunities but you’ve only got so many (if any in the case of immunities) of those.

I have to agree that confusion isn’t a problem and shouldn’t be ‘fixed’ at all! Particularly in PVE in which confusion often is the only thing helping certain classes with some of the changes coming down the line for combat with PVE.

Confusion is fine in PVE and shouldn’t be nerfed for the sake of PVP.