Guild Wars 2

Hello GW2 Community:

I never fully understood, but how exactly does confusion affect NPC’s? My main concern is with those in WvW, though I would assume the mechanics are the same throughout both PvE and WvW aspects of the game.

Thank you,
~Felix Pantherae

It affects NPCs the exact same way it affects players: Damage on skill use, aka nearly useless.

Ok, thank you for your response.

Don’t forget, WvW is 50% of the damage of PvE. So, nearly useless for standard mesmer mechanics in both instances.

Confusion is bad in PvE because most mobs don’t spam skills the way some players do. Confusion does have a niche in WvW but it mostly relies on your target being
a) not too bright
b) a skill spammer/quick auto-attacker, i.e. mostly thieves

With that said, confusion does punish any skill use, including active healing and it can serve as a cover condition for bleed spammers. It bascically comes free in some form with most condition builds so you might as well try to stack it up when you can. With the right timing it can offer a nice little spike that bleeds can’t. But again, it’s highly dependent on what your target chooses to do and thus hard to control.

There are classes with traits and some skills that result in increased damage per condition on target.

It can be very beneficial in situations with larger amounts of players to keep an extra condition on targets for this reason.

Obviously this would matter little in most 5 man situations, resulting in a 1-2% damage increase for possibly just one party member if even that, but just something to keep in mind.

Anet should make confusion useful in PvE. I love the confusion condition but in PvE it’s just worthless.

And no, even a 100% confusion damage or duration increase in PvE won’t make it more useful.