Guild Wars 2

What’s the community’s thoughts on confusion builds post expansion? Since it’s designed to hurt an enemy the more often they attack, won’t applying slow on the target decrease your damage, because they’re attacking less frequently? In addition to the enemy being otherwise crowd controlled by other players (or my interrupts) and also not being able to attack and the introduction of resistance, I’m starting to become hesitant to mess with a confusion build too much because of all of the potential for confusion do to too little damage compared to other conditions, which are not affected by the enemy’s actions. Unfortunate, because it’s also one of my favorite play styles!

With the exception of the glamour build, pure confusion builds have always been awful. They have little to no real pressure and are countered incredibly easily. This hasn’t changed ever, and is still the case. Confusion is a condition that you happen to apply a decent amount of as you apply pressure in other forms, not something you can actually base a build around. Slow only exacerbated the problem, it didn’t cause it.

Story.4093:

What’s the community’s thoughts on confusion builds post expansion? Since it’s designed to hurt an enemy the more often they attack, won’t applying slow on the target decrease your damage, because they’re attacking less frequently? In addition to the enemy being otherwise crowd controlled by other players (or my interrupts) and also not being able to attack and the introduction of resistance, I’m starting to become hesitant to mess with a confusion build too much because of all of the potential for confusion do to too little damage compared to other conditions, which are not affected by the enemy’s actions. Unfortunate, because it’s also one of my favorite play styles!

There’s relatively little overlap between condition builds and slow-heavy builds.

Confusion-heavy chrono builds tend to focus on getting as many high-illusion shatters as possible as fast as possible. Illusionary Reversion and Chronophantasma are practically tailor-made for this objective, leaving no room for Lost Time. At adept, it’s conceivable that condi-shatter might take slow on interrupt over super-speed shatters, but unlikely: condi builds aren’t generally heavy into interrupts, and super-speed shatters are frankly a wonderful QoL improvement I wouldn’t want to do without.

The only build I can see that might find themselves crossing streams are interrupt builds based around Rune of Perplexity and Magic Bullet, but even that build is hard to make work with Chrono: you want Illusions for confusion/torment on shatter, chrono to be a chronomancer, dueling for Duelist’s Discipline (and DE while you’re at it), domination for vulnerability on interrupt/daze, and chaos for Chaotic Interruption and Chaotic Transference.
Since you can only have 3 of those 5, which do you choose to let go of?
Chrono provides more shatters, but its only interrupt trait causes slow, which you rightly pointed out reduces confusion damage.
Giving up chaos gives up immobilize, boons and cover/penalizing condis on interrupt, not to mention a hefty condition damage and condition duration boost (and some much-needed defense, for a chrono).
Giving up domination just straight up cuts your potential dps, as vulnerability now affects conditions
Giving up dueling gives up recharge of magic bullet on interrupt, which is one of the most potent synergies an interrupt build can have, not to mention the loss of bleeds from Sharper Images and extra shatter-fodder from Deceptive Evasion (or confusion on interrupt, if you really went gung-ho and took Mistrust).
Giving up Illusions is…not a good idea. Good luck with that one.

So with Illusions pretty much mandatory, you’re left dumping at least 2 specs, and the weakest link is actually Chronomancer.

Thanks for your feedback – I actually am playing with an interrupt build and was running into that same question, how to fit chronomancer in. While good for soloing, it does seem like in small parties or random world content there is too high of a chance that someone else will be casting slow/stun/knockdown/chill etc that will both decrease confusion ticks and make it harder to interrupt (if they’re already stunned) – too much potential for being kitten by things that are supposed to be helpful. I think I’ll opt for more guaranteed damage with a sword/chrono build, especially since using wells will also benefit the melee ranged sword phantasm, and then switch to condis on occasion for fun or in certain situations. Having phantasms with alacrity could be fun too – maybe with the pistol! Looking forward to trying all of this out with the new content.

If we’re talking about PvE bosses…slow and chill don’t work on break bars atm and it seems like devs inclined to move from defiance to break bars. Plus interruption build is generally bad in PvE (except that period of power block on mobs huehue).

Anyway I think traited alacrity wells + double time warp makes chrono very useful to parties in PvE setting, and it won’t collide with your preferred phantasm build as well.

I played interrupt Chrono without Dueling in PvP/WvW, because I was using Staff/Sw+Sh and I used all the Slow related traits. It was power based though so I did not worry about confusion. I did miss DE and blind on shatter, but it was fun and shield block looks a lot like chaos armor so thieves were hitting it all the time, becoming slow and squishy targets