Guild Wars 2

The Master Trait Blinding Befuddlement has an internal cool down of 5 seconds. Now I am wondering why that is. The base duration of confusion it applies has 4 seconds. The duration can be made longer. Given that there are ways to repeatedly cause blinding for a certain duration, this trait would still only allow you to hold one stack of confusion up.

It makes it not really worth to take it, given the alternatives are way better. The trait design just doesn’t make much sense. On stack of confusion every 5 seconds in the most ideal case? Who thought that is a good idea?

I would either remove the internal cool down or increase the number of confusion to 3 to 5 maybe to make it worth it. I mean the most consistent way to cause repeated blinding is Chaos Armor. This skill is already ultra obvious and has a short duration so people should be punished for ignoring it…

Well it used to be a very strong and useful trait, but Anet decided to nerf it to the ground and reduce mesmers to a portal/veil bot in WvW while also nerfing confusion damage across the board.

They 100% killed what was probably the best and most viable condition damage spec to ever exist in WvW and now its hard to get loot bags on a mesmer as a result. Its also made confusion weaker in pvp, so this is an example of total over balancing that hurt the mesmer quite a bit.

Confusion is pretty terrible on a mesmer right now. My engie gets more use out of confusion in PvP…

Oddly enough it seems that the Mesmer is meant to be the worst profession for applying confusion (out of all the professions that have access to the condition).

It makes no sense to me.

I really want the mesmer to be a good profession for applying confusion without relying on perplexity runes (one of the lesser thought through features of the game). And reading the description of the Mesmer, we should be the trademark profession for confusion:

“Mesmers are magical duelists who wield deception as a weapon. Using powerful illusions, clones, and phantasmal magic to CONFUSE and distract their foes, mesmers make sure every fight is balanced in their favor and their opponents can’t believe their eyes.”

I do too. I think confusion and torment are the coolest conditions in this game and we suck at both of them. I do think torment is more fitting a necro but there is no question we should be the undisputed masters of confusion.

Design does not align with the flavor/lore at all.

They are the coolest, because they punish the player not paying attention to them. It is to a big amount the fault of the receiving player, if he suffers too much from those conditions. Burning always burns just like burning burns. But confusion and torment require the target to manage those. And in the right circumstances the one suffering from confusion might not even suffer from one confusion hit, or he dies in seconds when he ignores it… sadly mesmer can’t really force that decision atm.

The ICD was added for server performance reasons. The trait was used as a wvw zerg buster, so adding an ICD was a big savings. It was nerfed around the same time that anet was working to improve the wvw culling/lag situation.

There was also a witch hunt going on for confusion in wvw (it used to be twice as strong), so the nerf was a win-win for the devs.

I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been counter buffed, but that was the situation that led to the nerf.

Yup. Every other condition is just defeated by maybe having a condi removal skill ready. The only tactical decision for the defender is if using that condi removal at that moment is a good value. I love that confusion and torment can both be “beaten” without a cleanse but at the expense of basically dazing of immobilizing yourself.

@cyyrix.6105:
Not saying that it wasn’t a good idea to improve server performance, but they nerfed the trait for technical reasons, so why not compensate with more confusion stacks? Or would that hurt performance the same?

It wasn’t thought through well enough and it became a balance nerf along with nerfing confusion. They have destroyed this way a big part of the mesmer beauty.

I never realized it was nerfed for lag reasons. That’s actually kinda hilarious.