Guild Wars 2

Just wondering, which spec dishes out the most confusion?
Is it pistol trait + ethereal fields? Or? I’m just curious, because I would really like to try out a high condi confusion build

Blackwater build (which uses perplexity runes) would probably be your best choice. Start there. You can also switch out the staff for sword+pistol.

Applying confusion really has nothing to do with spec (besides duelist IX, if you say so). It’s more about which utility you have and which skill combos you’re using. Mesmer can’t spam confusion through interrupt. Staff 5 is an aoe 25% interrupt so who cares… talking about 1vs1 fight, it’s very hard to land an interrupt so I wouldn’t call it reliable. Even sword#4 with adjusted speed is still too slow. And Mantra of Distraction is not worth taking. Interrupt confusion is a hit or miss strategy for mesmer. It works wonder sometimes and crappy in another.

Still, pistol combo is just one way. Combine that with CoF you can reach 8 + 8(assuming you take IP), supposing the rune proc, it will ad another 3 then scepter #3 for another 5. That’s 24 but it won’t be 24 cuz some of the stacks will be gone before you finish the combo. And your enemy will not stand there waiting for you to stack. In a team fight you might get free casting but most likely you won’t.

And from my experience, you enemy will start getting panic and clear condi once the stack reach 10-15. So there you go… ducking.

It takes passion to run high confusion build. It’s pretty and all but it’s not as reliable as bleed/clone death hybrid coni build. Is that enough for you?

Pistol trait with ethereal fields combined with the mantra of distraction and perplexity runes will probably be your best bet.

That being said, confusion bomb builds suck. The foolproof method of beating a full confusion bomb build is /dance. They have to kill themselves, you have no active condition pressure.

Ahh that’s sad though, I was kinda hoping there’d be a good confusion bomb build

Dietzen.6127:

Ahh that’s sad though, I was kinda hoping there’d be a good confusion bomb build

Sure there is. Back in the day I used to run shatter confusion bombing.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNArfWlwzqpHTzpGb9IiJFEHyh6x2ldfXJF22FC-jEDBohCiINJjWQZkEJQ5QFRjtEMalhDhVdDTHjIq2cTRzkL1mdACBsYNA-w

Through constant up close and personal shattering you can keep constant confusion stacks on the target with high bursts every now and then. Spawn three clones – shatter. Keep in close proximity dodging around.

That said, the condition meta has changed things now and you’ll probably have a hard time in this spec. Confusion also isnt what it used to be, so you’ll run into other problems like inability to chase/cc etc.

Pretty much the answer to your question is “Any build that makes use of perplexity runes”. Why do you think the first response mentioned Blackwater? It, and other builds like it, rely entirely on the perplexity runes for its confusion damage power.

Perplexity are pretty op right now, for a good reason. Fought a warrior some hours ago and got as high as 12 stacks of confusion with a single interrupt (warriors get an additional 4 stacks via trait + the random 3 stack proc).

DavyMcB.1603:

…Mesmer can’t spam confusion through interrupt. Staff 5 is an aoe 25% interrupt so who cares… talking about 1vs1 fight, it’s very hard to land an interrupt so I wouldn’t call it reliable. Even sword#4 with adjusted speed is still too slow. And Mantra of Distraction is not worth taking. Interrupt confusion is a hit or miss strategy for mesmer. It works wonder sometimes and crappy in another….

A lot of this isn’t entirely true, and depends on your level of practice with lockdown play. Its much easier to land interrupts when you’re aggressively shutting down an opponent(like how Warriors do) rather reactively looking for a chance. Sword 4 has a very short cooldown and is actually good for interrupts, and Daze Mantra is fantastic for interrupting, especially enemy heals and channeled attacks. Diversion with staggered clones (Ex: One sword clone and one ranged clone) can have a surprisingly high interrupt chance as well.

Chaos Storm in this situation serves two purposes: Potential interrupt (mostly for stomps or other things with a long channel) AND for the confusion bomb.

Traited iduelist + ethereal field + scepter 3 + cof is the best way to apply confusion imo. Confusion on interrupts i think are a good way to support confusion bombing. And with confusion on clone death i wouldnt even bother (low stack, to short and no control over it).

But ye like all condition builds on mesmers they share same problem no pressure whatsoever. Your opponent has to commit to a fight. In my experience thieves for example tend to commit always to a fight, because they kind of feel save with stealth.

I dueled a mesmer who focused pretty much his whole build on the duelist, glam combo. He dumped 25 in illusions, grabbed glam mastery, phantasmal fury, sharper images, duelist’s disicpline, and phantasmal haste. His weapons were Scepter/Pistol + Staff. This allowed him to setup two or more hasted duelists constantly with three fields to play in which resulted in a crazy amount of conditions. My build had duelists out as well… it sounded like a machine gun battle. The end result, he was able to more consistently push single target conditions which worked well for dueling.

Helios.3598:

I dueled a mesmer who focused pretty much his whole build on the duelist, glam combo. He dumped 25 in illusions, grabbed glam mastery, phantasmal fury, sharper images, duelist’s disicpline, and phantasmal haste. His weapons were Scepter/Pistol + Staff. This allowed him to setup two or more hasted duelists constantly with three fields to play in which resulted in a crazy amount of conditions. My build had duelists out as well… it sounded like a machine gun battle. The end result, he was able to more consistently push single target conditions which worked well for dueling.

Ahh!! So you can make it work

You can keep pressure steady in 1v1, but the problem (among others) with this type of build is that getting out of dueling, 1v1 situations you start to have real difficulty bringing multiple opponents down.

ahh yeah, hadn’t thought of that. I only solo roam in wvw, so I’m always looking for 1v1 fights.. maybe 1v2, but I see what you’re getting at.

Confusion bomb builds are best used in small groups, combine a Mesmer running scp/pistol with the traited Duelist, a condi Engi and a Necro and fun things start to happen. When you Epidemic 15+ bleeds, 15+ confusion and 10-20 seconds of burn fights tend to swing in your favour pretty quickly. If the guy you unload on does what Pyro suggests and /dance even better that way you don’t have to waste your Magic Bullet to ensure the Epidemic is not dodged.

Helios.3598:

I dueled a mesmer who focused pretty much his whole build on the duelist, glam combo. He dumped 25 in illusions, grabbed glam mastery, phantasmal fury, sharper images, duelist’s disicpline, and phantasmal haste. His weapons were Scepter/Pistol + Staff. This allowed him to setup two or more hasted duelists constantly with three fields to play in which resulted in a crazy amount of conditions. My build had duelists out as well… it sounded like a machine gun battle. The end result, he was able to more consistently push single target conditions which worked well for dueling.

I am currently running a wvw build that is much like that mentioned, and if you are going to get 25 points in illusion, do it only after reading this:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Illusionists_Celerity

You might want the extra Cdmg, or shatter cdr (you shouldn’t want it, though, but shorter distortions are always good), but unless this has been fixed, those 5 extra points could go elsewhere

Gizuko.5734:

Helios.3598:

I dueled a mesmer who focused pretty much his whole build on the duelist, glam combo. He dumped 25 in illusions, grabbed glam mastery, phantasmal fury, sharper images, duelist’s disicpline, and phantasmal haste. His weapons were Scepter/Pistol + Staff. This allowed him to setup two or more hasted duelists constantly with three fields to play in which resulted in a crazy amount of conditions. My build had duelists out as well… it sounded like a machine gun battle. The end result, he was able to more consistently push single target conditions which worked well for dueling.

I am currently running a wvw build that is much like that mentioned, and if you are going to get 25 points in illusion, do it only after reading this:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Illusionists_Celerity

You might want the extra Cdmg, or shatter cdr (you shouldn’t want it, though, but shorter distortions are always good), but unless this has been fixed, those 5 extra points could go elsewhere

Celerity and duelist should stack though, from what I’ve seen the CD does go down to about 12 or w/e it is. It’s a bug in the skill tooltip CD. If you have the two none of the phantasm tooltips show double reduced CD’s. But you should indeed see the reduced CD when casting.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

DavyMcB.1603:

…Mesmer can’t spam confusion through interrupt. Staff 5 is an aoe 25% interrupt so who cares… talking about 1vs1 fight, it’s very hard to land an interrupt so I wouldn’t call it reliable. Even sword#4 with adjusted speed is still too slow. And Mantra of Distraction is not worth taking. Interrupt confusion is a hit or miss strategy for mesmer. It works wonder sometimes and crappy in another….

A lot of this isn’t entirely true, and depends on your level of practice with lockdown play. Its much easier to land interrupts when you’re aggressively shutting down an opponent(like how Warriors do) rather reactively looking for a chance. Sword 4 has a very short cooldown and is actually good for interrupts, and Daze Mantra is fantastic for interrupting, especially enemy heals and channeled attacks. Diversion with staggered clones (Ex: One sword clone and one ranged clone) can have a surprisingly high interrupt chance as well.

Chaos Storm in this situation serves two purposes: Potential interrupt (mostly for stomps or other things with a long channel) AND for the confusion bomb.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to interrupt. I’m saying it’s harder to make that interrupt come into real use. One of your utilites will be feedback or null field at the very least. Now say, you use mantra of distraction. What will you use for the other utility? Most mesmers will use blink or portal to get some mobility. If you go with this setup, what will happen when your enemy uses stability? War has long stability, ranger has long stability, GD has long stability, thief has no stability but they can vanish in stealth and wait for the stack to go off and goodluck trying to interrupt their 0 casting time skills, Engi has transmute, elixir and condi immune at 25% hp that you have to consider, necro can send back 25 stacks of confusion at you in an instant, ele has stability and cure condi on every dodge. Those are just the basics that can help deal with confusion. If you’re using OH pistol for combo confusion then you can’t use OH sword. Otherwise, you’d lose staff which is a must for condition build. And if you use mantra of distraction then you lose Mirror which is essential for shatter chain because Pistol combo is not enough and if you use both IX and X in duelist then your condition dmg is kitten which will make the build something else, not confusion focused. If you’re using nullfield(or feedback)/mantra of distraction/mirror then you’re a dead corpse walking. If you’re using nullfield(feedback)/mantra of distraction/blink then you can’t maximize your confusion stack. Also without Signet of Domination, your confusion dmg is not maximized.

Constantly blowing up your interrupt is pretty much the same as thief’s 22222222 strategy. It only works on dumb enemies, is chance based, and unnecessarily puts your skills on long CD.

Interrupt Confusion mesmer has its use, but only in a big zerg fight where your RNG interrupt works better because of the bigger sample size.

Dietzen.6127:

Just wondering, which spec dishes out the most confusion?
Is it pistol trait + ethereal fields? Or? I’m just curious, because I would really like to try out a high condi confusion build

when i had a Confusion build:

6/6 Perplexity
25Points Dueling
5Point Illusions (could go 10 for longer duration)
Scepter Main Hand
Torch off hand (i didnt use it but its more confusion)
Pistol Off hand is nice as well traited Duelist gives nice confusion into fields

Dietzen.6127:

Celerity and duelist should stack though, from what I’ve seen the CD does go down to about 12 or w/e it is. It’s a bug in the skill tooltip CD. If you have the two none of the phantasm tooltips show double reduced CD’s. But you should indeed see the reduced CD when casting.

Yeah, you are right, I just checked it and it’s only the tooltip!

Thanks for this, I actually thought the tooltip was right

Gizuko.5734:

Dietzen.6127:

Celerity and duelist should stack though, from what I’ve seen the CD does go down to about 12 or w/e it is. It’s a bug in the skill tooltip CD. If you have the two none of the phantasm tooltips show double reduced CD’s. But you should indeed see the reduced CD when casting.

Yeah, you are right, I just checked it and it’s only the tooltip!

Thanks for this, I actually thought the tooltip was right

No prob, I thought so too, until I had cast the duelist and saw the CD, I was like whoah! They both DO stack :P

I have been using a 0/30/20/0/20 with carrion gear+Perplexity+carrion weapons and rabid accessories and was very happy with the result. Null field, feedback, decoy and MI the utilities. Sc/ps + staff weapons. Battle sigil on both setups and +15% longer stun on pistol.

All I read is that playing confusion isn’t good because of how unreliable interrupts are for mesmers, which I agree. If it happens that’s all good, but the build should focus on stacking confusion via duelist+combo+clones death via DE and longer confusion from runes and trait. Plus straight damage from carrion+good crit rate from duellist tree and rabid accessories and bleeds. I say that playing to achieve the most interrupts is not worth, besides the runes set gives 3 bonuses: why play around the third one only?

The build and its variations is absolutely viable, even more when considering that there is no build out there that let you do everything successfully and faceroll any profession: you’ll be deadly to someone and hopefully not too weak to others. That’s called balance.

To the OP. If you want a confusion build try mine, or sentoxil’s one or make your own by using traited pistol which is the best a Mesmer has to stack confusion and decide yourself if it is viable. Don’t let others tell you that isn’t good without trying it. My two cents.

Dietzen.6127:

Ahh that’s sad though, I was kinda hoping there’d be a good confusion bomb build

hmm before the nerf the confusion bomb used to be the glamour build:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N736Yg57RcQ

u can still use it in a hybrid version with perplexity, but nowhere near as strong as it used to be