Guild Wars 2

I’ve gone pretty in depth on the numbers and some additional advantages here. Give feedback and criticism. I will correct anything if you find an inaccuracy.

Looking at the confusion damage another way: even halved it will do the same damage as equal stacks of burn with 1-2 skills used. Burn is the highest damage condition by far pound for pound and is balanced by the fact it scales in duration instead of intensity.

Getting into the numbers. All damages are base damages, confusion numbers are the new sPVP numbers.

Base Damages:
Burn = 325 base damage per stack per second.
Bleed = 42.5 damage per stack per second. So 7-8 bleed stacks = 1 burn tick.
Confusion = 65 damage per skill activation. So 5 stacks of confusion = 1 burn tick per skill activation.
Poison = 84 damage per second but lowers healing by 33%.

Scaling:
Burn = condition damage * 0.25.
Bleed = condition damage * 0.05
Confusion = condition damage * 0.075.
Poison = condition damage * 0.1

Damage gains with 1,000 condition damage:
Burn: 250 additional damage per second
Bleeding: 50 additional damage per second per stack
Confusion: 75 additional damage per stack per skill activation
Poison: 100 additional damage per second.

(Total damages with 1,000 condition damage:
Burn: 575 per second
Bleed: 92.5 per second per stack (6 stacks = 1 second burn)
Confusion: 140 damage per stack per skill activation (4 stacks skill use = 1 second burn)
Poison: 184 damage per second but lowers healing by 33%.

Initially burn seems the clear winner in conditions, but you’ll noticed while other require stacks and have lower bases and scaling, they actually more than double their damage while burn gains less than 50%. Furthermore burn cannot stack more than that set amount per second and bleed and confusion can stack to 25. All other conditions actually become MORE competitive with burn with additional condition damage despite lower scaling.

So we can see that straight damage wise confusion in a clear winner assuming you can apply 4 – 5 stacks. Even more so if you consider that vs classes with instants or fast attacks confusion can activate more than once per second.

But we have a caveat, condition removal. People say so much about condition removal = lol confuse worthless. This is actually less true of confusion than it is of other conditions. Confusion faces condition removal and convert condition to boons skills. All other conditions face all of that PLUS a few class counters. List of known counters: Thief: Pain Response and Slowed Pulse, Ele: Stop Drop and Roll, Ranger: Oakheart Salve and Evasive Purity, Guardian: Inner Fire (Burning gives them Fury), Engineer: Leafy Bandage (toolkit skill of Healing seed Sylvari Racial),

So if you look at the numbers, the counters, and the capabilities confusion is still superior to other conditions even post nerf. Confusion is also kinda nasty in the way it sneaks up on ya. Bleeding, burning, and poison put lots of numbers above your head and you quickly counter it if you have counters. It also typically takes several seconds to get alot of bleeding, poison, or burning on someone. If someone puts confusion on you though you typically take a couple skill activations before realizing it in a hectic fight. In doing that you’ve already done the full damage the other conditions would have done many times. They depend on constant reapplication, confusion does alot of damage up front.

It was nerfed because it was needed. Confusion is still the best condition even after a 50% nerf lol.

Additional notes:

Keep in mind that you may average more damage in the long run because people may not choose to blow their condition removal on your confusion anymore. 1 more activation on average brings you right back up to pre-nerf levels.

Burning, bleeding, and poison take time to stack and take time to deal their damage. Confusion deals alot of damage up front and confusion is applied in short order allowing you to do other things. In many cases confusion deals it’s damage where other conditions simply do not, though other conditions may be applied more frequently.

One last thing. Because bleeding, poison, and burning are applied frequently classes that can convert conditions to boons or send conditions to enemies can actually benefit alot more heavily from them. Great example is the popular Warrior War Horn traited. With proper War Horn support condition damage dealers are actually making the enemy zerg stronger by giving them boons.

Dealing all of your damage in one occasionally applied condition up front is actually a significant benefit against well made enemy team comps. It strikes a good balance between getting a chance to deal your damage and not empowering the enemy zerg.

Hah, yes cause we have a reliable way to cause bleed/burn/poison right? THE reason to go condition as a Mesmer was confusion. Now it’s time to dust of the p/v/t/ and decide how much crit to mix in. Phantasm or Shatter, decisions, decisions!

Excellent informative summary.

Stygia.3715:

Hah, yes cause we have a reliable way to cause bleed/burn/poison right? THE reason to go condition as a Mesmer was confusion. Now it’s time to dust of the p/v/t/ and decide how much crit to mix in. Phantasm or Shatter, decisions, decisions!

Confusion mesmer and condition engineer duos are (or perhaps, were) extremely popular for a reason.

In order to provide a “true and accurate” analysis you also have to analyse how the Conditions in question are applied, how easy or hard it is to maintain the Conditions, and the benefits or costs of the Builds needed for that.

For example, my Axe/Shout Warrior can by himself sustain 10-12 stacks of Vulnerability and burst to 21-23 with “On My Mark” greatly increasing his damage. At the same time he can apply Bleeding from Crits and Off-Weapons if he so chooses.

On the other hand my Mesmer can maybe maintain 1-3 Stacks of Confusion occasionally Bursting to 10-12 for a 2-3 second window (you analysis also doesn’t take Condition Duration into account and Confusion has arguably the lowest Duration of any Condition in the game) and can only do that if using a Scepter which is an incredibly weak Main Hand Weapon. The only other Condition I really get out of my Build is Blind (which also received a Nerf in this Patch) so I have little to no “cover” for Confusion against strong Condition Clearing Builds.

In other words, yes looked at in a vacuum Confusion is still a very powerful Condition but in the overall context of how Mesmer Confusion Builds work this was a very heavy-handed Nerf with no offsets or benefits to a Condition Mesmer.

As others have said, a Nerf to Confusion was likely called for, but it really was a failing on ANet’s part to not provide any offset to keep a Condition Mesmer viable outside of a Zerg.

What a useless study. The conclusion is that confusion was and is still better than other conditions (which didn’t need all this math with a little common sense). It’s nothing more than a condition vs condition comparison, with absolutely no analysis on its practicality in combat. There’s no merit in saying confusion does more damage than any other condition, when confusion as a primary damage source of ie. condition Mesmers can’t compete with other competitive power/condition builds intra-/inter-professions.

The major complaint of this 50% nerf is not whether or not it’s competitive between other conditions (which is ridiculous because condition builds rely on multiple conditions to deal damage so it’s not “pick one or the other”), but whether this nerf has reduced the overall damage potential (aka all the conditions added together) of condition builds that heavily rely on confusion damage to the point that it simply can’t kill anyone unless the enemy deliberately spam keys to suicide.

TL;DR This study was a pointless waste of time.

Shut the kitten up … mesmer is dead : _ (

ErlendR.6107:

Shut the kitten up … mesmer is dead : _ (

Let each mesmer pick up arrow cart

Confusion damage is just laughable now. I literally do not care if I have it on my characters. Why even bother wasting energy trying to dodge that stuff when I can just keep attacking anyways and have no problems.

A condition mesmer is totally unviable now in WvW. The damage from non-confusion conditions is stupidly weak. Thankfully I still have my power set for my mes.

RIP cond mesmers.

My Eng is still fine without it though :P

Confusion should and always will do more damage than burn cumulatively, simply because its damage can be completely mitigated by opponent inactivity. Burn, poison and bleeding however, will always tick no matter what you do, until they wear off or you cleanse yourself. Therefore I don’t really understand how this study is relevant to the issues brought up with the recent confusion nerf. It wasn’t that people were worried that confusion would be too weak in the context of other conditions, but that confusion would be too weak in the context of WvW and the Mesmer class in particular. Whether or not that is the case, well, we’ll just have to wait and see whilst we get used to the new changes.

Despite my reservations, I think the you’ve written a really nice post and many will benefit from seeing the new numbers.

Aberrant.6749:

Confusion damage is just laughable now. I literally do not care if I have it on my characters. Why even bother wasting energy trying to dodge that stuff when I can just keep attacking anyways and have no problems.

A condition mesmer is totally unviable now in WvW. The damage from non-confusion conditions is stupidly weak. Thankfully I still have my power set for my mes.

RIP cond mesmers.

My Eng is still fine without it though :P

QFT. Switched my mesmer to power. Confusion is no longer effective ENOUGH for what is sacrificed.

Ralathar, I appreciate your effort in breaking down confusion by the numbers, but I wish you had avoided the obvious bias, on top of only using best-case calculations.

As others have already mentioned, confusion suffers from being the only condition that can be 100% negated by doing absolutely nothing. That, coupled with a relatively short duration gives some semblance of balance when you consider the scaling.

Again, I appreciate the effort, but to do an honest breakdown we need to go a bit further and account for more variables, and the conclusions we reach then may or may not be different.

This nerf is awful. I run a condition shatter build and had a warrior running around me spamming auto attack and letting me do as much dmg as i possible could. He would just heal and laugh at me…. Needless to say i died shortly after

This is wrong Anet, just wrong

I apologize for wanting to belittle your work; you’ve put a lot of effort into this and the numbers are solid.

Confusion is a class mechanic for Mesmers. Burning and bleeds are not. (Citing poison is a joke here.)

I miss the Guild Wars 1 times, where people that spammed attacks and skills while having Empathy and Visions of Regret on, were simply the ones that were meant to die because of their stupidity – people on your team would even shout not to do anything while you have them on…
And here? “let`s promote face rolling ftw! zergzergzerg trampletrampletrample”
Apart from the fact that conditions that scale with condition DAMAGE are somewhat expected to deal DAMAGE, so even this one or few hits of confusion is meant to hurt a little if you are forced to use a skill(for example a heal).
It`s as if people started to rage and beg for a guardian(put any calss here) nerf, because one can hit you with a weapon! :O
Confusion is GW2’s Empathy. Empathy hit hard, so should confusion. I see no reason why it should be softened, especially because some people simply can`t play. It`s weird to see that unskilled players are being rewarded and skilled(well, normal, I`d say, but…) are being punished for the first`s foolishness.

ps. I`ll add a reference for people that didn`t play GW1:
both Empathy and Visions of Regret used to take around 1/5th of your HP solely, depending what was your max hp. It sometimes happened that you had both of them on you and nobody was whining about this fact.
In GW2 it wouldn`t even take 10% yet it was OP.

This nerf is awful. I run a condition shatter build and had a warrior running around me spamming auto attack and letting me do as much dmg as i possible could. He would just heal and laugh at me…. Needless to say i died shortly after

if you can ignore the confusion damage then it means that it actually needs a buff.

ps2. why can`t I see anybody flaming about necros putting on you 12 stacks of bleeding instantly?..

The bias is strong with this post. If you want to appear objective, don’t conclude all your points with “lol”.

While you point out that the other conditions face a handful of condition counters, you neglect entirely to mention that every other damage-dealing condition is buffed by a sigil and a number of runes. Burning and poison also benefit directly from certain food items. On top of that, there are traits that improve damage to players affected by these specific conditions, there’s no such traits for confusion.

You also make the claim that confusion can do its damage up front because people won’t notice it, which is absurd. Confusion has a special visual indicator; on top of that, you should be aware of when you might be affected by confusion because it’s almost exclusively applied by mesmers and engineers. Anyone who runs a confusion build will tell you that only bad players are destroyed up front – against someone who knows what they’re doing, confusion is best used as a source of pressure.

Burning can be constantly applied through a fight to maintain pressure despite cleanses; high stacks of bleeding have no counter for someone whose cleanses are on cooldown, while high stacks of confusion can still be countered by not doing anything. Both can be applied more easily and consistently, which is the main criticism of your analysis.

SoggyFrog.4170:

The bias is strong with this post. If you want to appear objective, don’t conclude all your points with “lol”.

While you point out that the other conditions face a handful of condition counters, you neglect entirely to mention that every other damage-dealing condition is buffed by a sigil and a number of runes. Burning and poison also benefit directly from certain food items. On top of that, there are traits that improve damage to players affected by these specific conditions, there’s no such traits for confusion.

You also make the claim that confusion can do its damage up front because people won’t notice it, which is absurd. Confusion has a special visual indicator; on top of that, you should be aware of when you might be affected by confusion because it’s almost exclusively applied by mesmers and engineers. Anyone who runs a confusion build will tell you that only bad players are destroyed up front – against someone who knows what they’re doing, confusion is best used as a source of pressure.

Burning can be constantly applied through a fight to maintain pressure despite cleanses; high stacks of bleeding have no counter for someone whose cleanses are on cooldown, while high stacks of confusion can still be countered by not doing anything. Both can be applied more easily and consistently, which is the main criticism of your analysis.

I overuse LOL. It’s a personal thing, get over it lol.. Also you right it has no specific confusion damage boosters, it has a visual indicator, and has no sigils or runes. I believe confusion sigils and runes, like condi/toughness/vit armor are something that should be in game. I don’t think they are the only equipement missing by a long shot either cough healing/toughness/vitality cough. I don’t think it needs damage boosting trait because that only function on direct damage and confuse is meant to be short lived.

The visual indicator is also there to make sure people don’t accidentally destroy themselves because they didn’t eagle eye their buff bar. Something only retaliation has the same situation as, which is why it got a visual indicator. You are right only bad players get destroyed by confusion. The same is true with all other conditions.

You are also right that burning can be applied constantly throughout a fight. But this can easily count against you. Warrior with Warhorns, Engineers with Elixir C, Mesmer’ with arcane thievery, Plague Signet, and more can make your burning not only do no damage, but actually HELP the people you are fighting. Worse if you combine these people together in a zerg working together (wow, it’s almost like teamwork!!).

My observations over the last few weeks actually have me questioning the wisdom of any long duration condition damage in WvW at all against a properly formed group. See you are looking at things in small scale, but that is not WvW which is what this is affecting. Properly made groups run multiple hammer/shout warriors with soldier runes, guardians, and a smattering of other things. I regularly see my conditions disappear and my boon bar filll up. Even my Glass cannon Longbow warrior runs sword/war horn because the grouping power of the traited war horn en masse is ridiculous.

Honestly I’m concerned that there may be too much conditional removal in a well made WvW group for conditions to be viable atm. Much less something like burn that relies on long durations of steady damage when 20 seconds can be cleansed as easily as 5.

In small scale confusion is a far burstier source of damage that can be reapplied before the cleanses. In large scale confusion is the only condition that stands a chance of doing any real damage against a well made group and in the case of glamor mesmer has many other benefits. Your average pug of course can be killed via dang near any means and confusion is extra effective agianst them lol.

Seriously, confusion is the one thing unique to mesmers, I play an ele and I don’t want it nerfed and never felt it was overpowered. So many unnecessary nerf and unjustified boost.

Mister Mustard.7203:

As others have already mentioned, confusion suffers from being the only condition that can be 100% negated by doing absolutely nothing.

I’ll take an enemy that does nothing.

I’ll take an enemy that shoots projectiles at my Feedback bubble.

I’ll take enemies with boons nullified.

Heck, I’ll take an enemy that thinks a condition isn’t worth cleansing and takes the damage anyway.

yeah just tried out my confusion build in wvw and it was a joke!all my gear is useless and mesmers have like 3 viable builds left, that arent really good vs zergs. anet ruined my gameplay completely.hey but at least we got moas now….and apart from ele all other classes can destroy u.great.i aint gonna be nerfed down to kitten portaling service!because thats the only thing left in wvw for a mesmer. all youQQ’er go ahead and walk your kitten golems!

Thief: “Holy s***! I have 5 stacks of Confusion on me!”
Mesmer: “Hope he does not realize I suck now”
Thief: “Take that Heartseeker! Holy Moly! I was just hit by 1k! But wait a sec, I hit the Mesmer for 7k!”
Mesmer: “Oh crap! He found out”

End of story: Thief is alive, Mesmer is a loot bag.

Xillllix.3485:

Seriously, confusion is the one thing unique to mesmers, I play an ele and I don’t want it nerfed and never felt it was overpowered. So many unnecessary nerf and unjustified boost.

ty for understanding.i’m very very upset atm as all my gear that i got over the past 6 months is useless right now.80 to 120 g with the abyssal scepter and then all he laurels and ascened gear is useless.

Luckily, most of my gear was bought with either Karma, Laurels or dungeon tokens.

But if you went full Khilbron, well… my deepest condolences.

Devilsmack.5736:

Luckily, most of my gear was bought with either Karma, Laurels or dungeon tokens.

But if you went full Khilbron, well… my deepest condolences.

well i did, including abyssal scepert! and even before glam mersmer i was using p/v/c gear that will be useless too after this horrible patch that destroyed 80 percent of the mesmer builds.

Honestly, the flaw in the logic here is that anyone is going to use a skill once per second. When you consider that channeled skills only tick once, regardless of duration, and also that a lot of classes naturally do everything at a slow pace than that, it’s more honest to put the rate at 1 skill use per 1.5 seconds.

Also, while it’s possible for a necromancer to maintain 9 stacks of bleed by auto-attacking (along with poison), confusion can’t be applied without burning cooldowns, and I don’t believe it’s possible for one character to stack confusion past 16 under any conditions. The highest number of stacks than can be maintained over time reasonably is 4.

Let’s apply the math to that:
9 stacks of bleed with 1,000 condition damage = 832.5 damage per second

4 stacks of confusion with 1,000 condition damage and 1 skill per second = 560 per second

4 stacks of confusion with 1,000 condition damage and a more realistic 1 skill per 1.5 seconds = 373 damage per second

Note that pre-nerf confusion was better, post nerf it’s about 3/5 as good as bleeding.

Blinding Defubblement is gone.

You can place 2 stacks of confusion (1-2 more if the target is jumping in and out your field), they wear off in 2-4 sec, end of your dmg for 45 sec.
Oh, and he could just not use skills for 3 sec…or cleanse…or don’t run in you fields…

Tooootally balanced now… (no. It’s rubbish.)

Nice, just shows you can prove any old rubbish with maths when you start off with the wrong assumption.

Confusion has a short DURATION, you can’t stack it easily like bleeds, it doesn’t work if you don’t attack, etc and it wears off very fast and then you have long cooldowns on your main glamour related confusion.

In the meantime players can continue to stack burn, bleed, etc until the cows come home, and retaliation is permanently on most players making using barrage a ‘not so much fun’ experience.

I accept duel challenges from any confusion mesmer who thinks it’s still viable. Not really to prove a point, but I wanna see how big the difference is as I never found them that hard to fight against. Just whisp me in game, I’m from Gandara. :P
I will probably be shatter mesmer or p/d thief, but we can do more than one duel.

greyblue.4962:

Honestly, the flaw in the logic here is that anyone is going to use a skill once per second. When you consider that channeled skills only tick once, regardless of duration, and also that a lot of classes naturally do everything at a slow pace than that, it’s more honest to put the rate at 1 skill use per 1.5 seconds.

If people are not using 1 skill per second on average then they are either being less effective than they could be or they are a sitting duck while they cast long duration and interrupt-able skills. As a Staff Elementalist main I can tell you that there are many times where Meteor Shower is not a valid option and would be a death sentence. Also vs good groups I will get interrupted alot if I do not carefully choose when to use those long casting abilities.

I’d say 1 second per skill is a fair long term average. Even channeled abilities like Rapid Fire (5 seconds) and Barrage (2 3/4 seconds) get balanced out by other abilities like dodge rolls, Long Range shot (3/4 second auto-attack), Hunter’s Shot (Instant) and Point Blank shot (3/4 second). Over the course of 30 seconds you can use Barrage once and Rapid fire 2 times (12 3/4 seconds total). Assuming Long Ranged shot only is used and no instants, Point Blanks, or dodges are used you get 23 Long Ranged shots used in that time. 26 abilities in 30 seconds on a severly conservative estimate that assume you do not dodge roll, use your instant (no brainer) twice, and stay only in longbow so 1 second per activation is easily possible for nearly all situations.

That is one of the worst examples in the game and assumes no weapon change, yet still averages near 1 activation per second. Staff Ele doesn’t even come close since only Meteor Shower (4 1/4), Eruption (1 3/4), and Lightning Surge (1 1/2) take longer than 1 second to channel. Also in that example the two big confusion users: Mesmer and Engineer both have the easy ability to reflect rapid fire back at the Ranger or interrupt it easily forcing more activations. It’s built into their confusion builds quite literally.

Your statement = debunked by cold hard truth. Activations are far more frequent than you state.

Also, while it’s possible for a necromancer to maintain 9 stacks of bleed by auto-attacking (along with poison), confusion can’t be applied without burning cooldowns, and I don’t believe it’s possible for one character to stack confusion past 16 under any conditions. The highest number of stacks than can be maintained over time reasonably is 4.

Let’s apply the math to that:
9 stacks of bleed with 1,000 condition damage = 832.5 damage per second

4 stacks of confusion with 1,000 condition damage and 1 skill per second = 560 per second

4 stacks of confusion with 1,000 condition damage and a more realistic 1 skill per 1.5 seconds = 373 damage per second

Note that pre-nerf confusion was better, post nerf it’s about 3/5 as good as bleeding.

You are right you have more steady application. But this is both an advantage and a possible severe weakness. Maintaining that damage requires your constant time, prohibiting you from maintaining that DPS AND doing other things like confusion application builds do. You do other things, you lose DPS, we do not.

Second weakness is that your constant application of conditions makes you extremely vulnerable to condition > boon conversion. Confusion builds bursting their confusion does not expose them much to those conversions. In a zerg 4 warriors with war horns traited can make your necro a liability instead of an asset.

It’s not uncommon for my warrior to end up with full boons in battle thanks to the possible overpowered nature of the war horn trait used by multiple warriors. I actually welcome most conditions for this reason.

Confusion needs a 25% increase in damage IMHO

Engaging Confusion Mesmers now follows a pretty simple action flowchart now: See Confusion Mesmer, Laugh, power through and ignore the Confusion, collect loot bag.

It has the feel of sPvp now in that Confusion is a condition you can completely ignore.

Victory.2879:

Nice, just shows you can prove any old rubbish with maths when you start off with the wrong assumption.

Confusion has a short DURATION, you can’t stack it easily like bleeds, it doesn’t work if you don’t attack, etc and it wears off very fast and then you have long cooldowns on your main glamour related confusion.

In the meantime players can continue to stack burn, bleed, etc until the cows come home, and retaliation is permanently on most players making using barrage a ‘not so much fun’ experience.

pretty much this, plus u gotta see our cooldowns they are huge!

Ralathar.7236:

You are right you have more steady application. But this is both an advantage and a possible severe weakness. Maintaining that damage requires your constant time, prohibiting you from maintaining that DPS AND doing other things like confusion application builds do. You do other things, you lose DPS, we do not.

Second weakness is that your constant application of conditions makes you extremely vulnerable to condition > boon conversion. Confusion builds bursting their confusion does not expose them much to those conversions. In a zerg 4 warriors with war horns traited can make your necro a liability instead of an asset.

It’s not uncommon for my warrior to end up with full boons in battle thanks to the possible overpowered nature of the war horn trait used by multiple warriors. I actually welcome most conditions for this reason.

1. Condition builds get their DPS out of stacking the conditions and maintaining them. Doing other things? Like what? Having a cup of digital coffee? If you stop attacking in power based builds, so does the damage and same applies to condition damage builds.

2. Confusion builds also are accompanied by other conditions. Despite the fact that for a mesmer they are a minor source of damage, condition->boon conversions are as effective on them as onother cd builds.

3. Confusion builds were mostly brought up vs enemy zergs, which presumably also had lots of cd removals (eg forementioned warhorns) resulting in the stacks disappearing quite effectively

I can`t really understand what makes people whine about confusion so much while retaliation gets almost unscatched. But perhaps now, with a striking indication that you`re being hit by retaliation will bring about QQ about it, as it`s as OP as confusion was, according to whiners(a.k.a. bad players).

My conclusion concerning your posts is that you`re too biased in this matter.
You are omiting aspects that are crucial to understanding the cause and drawing one-sided conclusions, purposely forgetting about other sides of the arguments you`re bringing, which would destroy the point of view you are trying to dragoon.
My guess is you must`ve taken a hard beating from manymanymany mesmers and engineers and their confusion stacks.

they nerfed confusion because everyone was QQing about how OP the supposedly “25 stack” confusion is, which is in reality not as easy to achieve as one would imagine, but did they nerf bleeding ?

bleeding on the other hand is very easy to achieve with 2/3 condition ranger/necro, and bleeding is unavoidable; one would have to remove it using condition removing skill.

with confusion one can simply stop doing anything or run away and not get damaged. with bleeding, even if you run away or stop doing anything you will still get damaged…

my point is they should have nerfed bleeding, and not confusion……

Mewa.5423:

Ralathar.7236:

You are right you have more steady application. But this is both an advantage and a possible severe weakness. Maintaining that damage requires your constant time, prohibiting you from maintaining that DPS AND doing other things like confusion application builds do. You do other things, you lose DPS, we do not.

Second weakness is that your constant application of conditions makes you extremely vulnerable to condition > boon conversion. Confusion builds bursting their confusion does not expose them much to those conversions. In a zerg 4 warriors with war horns traited can make your necro a liability instead of an asset.

It’s not uncommon for my warrior to end up with full boons in battle thanks to the possible overpowered nature of the war horn trait used by multiple warriors. I actually welcome most conditions for this reason.

1. Condition builds get their DPS out of stacking the conditions and maintaining them. Doing other things? Like what? Having a cup of digital coffee? If you stop attacking in power based builds, so does the damage and same applies to condition damage builds.

2. Confusion builds also are accompanied by other conditions. Despite the fact that for a mesmer they are a minor source of damage, condition->boon conversions are as effective on them as onother cd builds.

3. Confusion builds were mostly brought up vs enemy zergs, which presumably also had lots of cd removals (eg forementioned warhorns) resulting in the stacks disappearing quite effectively

I can`t really understand what makes people whine about confusion so much while retaliation gets almost unscatched. But perhaps now, with a striking indication that you`re being hit by retaliation will bring about QQ about it, as it`s as OP as confusion was, according to whiners(a.k.a. bad players).

My conclusion concerning your posts is that you`re too biased in this matter.
You are omiting aspects that are crucial to understanding the cause and drawing one-sided conclusions, purposely forgetting about other sides of the arguments you`re bringing, which would destroy the point of view you are trying to dragoon.
My guess is you must`ve taken a hard beating from manymanymany mesmers and engineers and their confusion stacks.

yeah people that whined about confusion dmg from glam mesmers, here a little info:we choose to attack with confusion only, not with power as we all speced into condition only. there is no dps apart fromconfusion so u coud see confusion dmg from a glam mesmer similar to a regular daggerstorm or meteor shower.now compare the dmg we do to what u do with dps…we don’t crit, we stack,but confusion doesnt crit at all, so looking at it that way our dmg seems pretty balanced to what other weapons could do.

our other dmg is not even noticable, my scepter hits for 213 so does my staff…my auto attacks= around that, look at what other classes do. plus glam fields have a cooldown of around 30 seconds you could do much more dmg with your autoattacks.

confusion was nerfed in spvp because shatterers could insta down an opponent with a confusion f2 shatter, but in wvw u face a ton of enemies with a ton of heals and cleansing tools, i even think in spvp the nerf was over the top, where as all they had to do was adjusting the dmg done by the f2 shatter.

now all a condition mesmer has left is dps as we don’t have any other condition left…i don’t even notice dmg done by other conditions and m am fully condition spec.

Stop reviving this thread and let it die already. The math in all the OP’s posts are completely useless and there’s already people misled to thinking it has actual meaning.

This thread is more relevant.

ExZee.8109:

Stop reviving this thread and let it die already. The math in all the OP’s posts are completely useless and there’s already people misled to thinking it has actual meaning.

This thread is more relevant.

it doesn’t matter… the mod will later merge all these threads about confusion nerf….. feel free to reply to any…..

ExZee.8109:

Stop reviving this thread and let it die already. The math in all the OP’s posts are completely useless and there’s already people misled to thinking it has actual meaning.

This thread is more relevant.

I give numbers, facts, and situations that can be verified and proven. That thread gives biased opinions and generalities based on an agenda. Ironically providing the raw information makes me the one who misleads with a numbers and concepts which can be scientifically verified and tested and summarily proven or dismissed?

Your world is a strange one sir. I can either be right or I can be wrong. There is no mislead or not here. You can test everything I said. Go test the DPS, Go test condition damage vs good groups. Go test the ability of a sword/warhorn warrior to turn constant conditions into a liability. Go test your ability to do other things while still applying your damage.

I am providing you everything you need to disprove me if I am wrong. Use it and come back with evidence instead of anecdotal opinions please. Evidence is far more helpful.

Everyone says “just stop using skills.” Sorry, but not using skills in a zerg might work. Stopping dead in the water in smaller encounters is as bad as taking massive amount of damage more than half the time.

Mewa.5423:

1. Condition builds get their DPS out of stacking the conditions and maintaining them. Doing other things? Like what? Having a cup of digital coffee? If you stop attacking in power based builds, so does the damage and same applies to condition damage builds.

Correction. Condition builds get more of their dps from conditions and maintaining them than normal builds. The base damage of attacks is still a rather important part of DPS. You cannot possibly ignore base damage as a part of DPS. Even completely bunker builds with no additional DPS can kill people. They just can’t kill people as fast.

Also, there is much more to a fight than DPS. If you doubt ask a thief that missed his backstab and yanked out of Shadow Refuge. Ask a Guardian that had his boons turned into conditions by necromancer. Ask a Ranger that just hit himself 4 times thanks to feedback.

2. Confusion builds also are accompanied by other conditions. Despite the fact that for a mesmer they are a minor source of damage, condition->boon conversions are as effective on them as onother cd builds.

That is entirely based on you. The glamor build relies on 2 conditions. Blind and confusion. With people attacking blind is consumed by a miss within a second nearly all of the time. Blinds CAN be converted, but the window is pretty short and so they will not be converted nearly as often as other conditions.

A glamor mesmer will apply almost exclusively confusion and blind. The exceptions to this are Staff Auto Attack and chaos storm. However one of the glamor Mesmer’s core abilities also strips boons. So this mitigates this somewhat. The only other popular glamor build condition is the burning from offhand torch’s “The Prestige.”.

All of this combined together does not even come near the frequency of condition application of any other condition damage build. Others apply conditions on a nearly constant basis so there is always a condition up to convert or drop, rendering them much more vulnerable to boon conversion.

In the damage comparison example you gave you listed a necromancer that would provide permanent up-time on boon conversion. 2 boons possible per every 1 1/2 seconds. Another if they used the cripple on the second scepter skill.. In no way could confusion builds possibly be this kind of liability vs a well built group.

2 warriors can convert 4 conditions to boons every 20 seconds, while freeing allies from movement impairing effects, giving them swiftness, and granting them vigor. 4 warriors can convert 8 conditions every 20 seconds. If you are based around conditions what do you think the odds of 2 warriors giving their front line boons from your potential damage are within 10 seconds?

If you are a glamor mesmer or condition engineer (only other major condition user) you’ve at least also contributed sizable utility. That necro however would be rendered impotent during the most important part of the fight.

3. Confusion builds were mostly brought up vs enemy zergs, which presumably also had lots of cd removals (eg forementioned warhorns) resulting in the stacks disappearing quite effectively

As mentioned above confusion builds also bring considerable utility. Other condition builds are not as lucky.

I can`t really understand what makes people whine about confusion so much while retaliation gets almost unscatched. But perhaps now, with a striking indication that you`re being hit by retaliation will bring about QQ about it, as it`s as OP as confusion was, according to whiners(a.k.a. bad players).

IIRC people are claiming a 33% nerf to retal That’s not precisely unscathed.

My conclusion concerning your posts is that you`re too biased in this matter.
You are omiting aspects that are crucial to understanding the cause and drawing one-sided conclusions, purposely forgetting about other sides of the arguments you`re bringing, which would destroy the point of view you are trying to dragoon.
My guess is you must`ve taken a hard beating from manymanymany mesmers and engineers and their confusion stacks.

I apologize if you feel I am one sided and biased because I consider nuance, tactics, counters, and context. The irony of your assumption is hilarious though as the glamor mesmers in my guild were utterly unconcerned with the nerf. They already knew they would still be effective.