Guild Wars 2

I posted this in the suggestion forum but figured I’d see what my fellow mesmers think: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Confusion-in-PvE/first#post3126116

My main is a mesmer and I love confusion, it’s my favourite condition in the game and thanks to rune of perplexity I’m able to keep 5-15 stacks of confusion up nearly constantly.
But…

It feels so weak in PvE. I get +15 stacks of confusion up on a target and wait for that sweet huge confusion damage to pop only to see the enemy run around and/or charge up some attack and by the time it actually attacks half the stack has vanished.
So I had an idea to make confusion a bit more viable in PvE.

Confusion would act similar to Torment that it ticks for damage every second, more damage for each stack obviously. Say the target has 5 stacks of confusion with how it is now, if it would use a skill it would take 1000 damage. With the changed confusion the target would tick for 500 damage every second and take 1000 damage upon skill use but would lose stack(s) of confusion depending on the number of confusion applied, the more confusion stacked the more would be reduced on skill use.

If that makes any sense.

Current Confusion: 5 stacks = 1000 damage on skill use
New Confusion: 5 stacks = 500 damage ticks per second, 1000 damage on skill use and stack is reduced by X.

Completely hypothetical numbers of course.
Again this would be how it worked for PvE only, not PvP/WvW.

Good or bad idea?

Bad idea. Here’s why.

Doing that would be an incredibly massive split in basic game functionality between pve and everything else. This is confusing to players, nearly impossible to denote on tooltips, and makes balance changes doubly complicated.

That is the basic problem with any sort of massive pve overhaul to confusion. The changes need to be so large that the resulting condition simply isn’t confusion anymore, it’s something completely different, and that’s simply not something that can or will be implemented.

I believe Anet has spoke about improving confusion – or maybe condition damage in general – in PvE, though I don’t remember the source.

There are a lot of different things they could do. One I’ve thought of that would keep the condition untouched between playable formats is to have foes attack faster, but deal damage with each attack at a slightly less ratio than current. So after 10 seconds if they attacked twice like today, with the change they would attack 4 times in that span for the same amount of damage.

I’m sure it’s not that cut and dried and would present some challenges depending on attack mechanics, but will be interesting to see how Anet addresses this (if they ever do).

Confusion has its places in PVE but not everywhere. Mostly for fighting bosses that do multiple attacks in a short duration.

It’s a pvp-oriented condition and it will stay that way.

DavyMcB.1603:

Confusion has its places in PVE but not everywhere. Mostly for fighting bosses that do multiple attacks in a short duration.

It’s a pvp-oriented condition and it will stay that way.

From my experience, confusion works great against aetherblade mobs since they attack very fast and furious. So yeah it certainly has its place in PvE, although at the moment, its a small place.

I have a feeling that Anet is introducing even more new hard-and-fast hitting enemies in PvE as well.