Guild Wars 2

I have attempted to do a confusion build before (I run normally GS – Sword/Pistol atm) and i had not luck (Think at the time i was sceptor/ward – Staff (Unsure))… I was curious if i was simply doing it wrong or is it weak for the time being?

If you rely on Confusion as your main source of damage, you will fail. The Mesmer cannot spam Confusion and the condition itself is unreliable and situational.

If you plan to use Confusion it should always be a secondary damage source. Your primary damage source is Bleeding, from Winds of Chaos and Sharper Images.

In pve, not viable in the slightest. Enemies simply won’t trigger it frequently enough and it’s extremely difficult to maintain a significant number of stacks. In pve it’s probably the weakest condition.

In pvp it depends on your opponent. If they don’t know what they’re doing players will kill themselves with things like unload rather quickly. If they do know they’ll either wait a few seconds for the stacks to drop to trivial levels, use a condition removal, etc. Like Embolism said, it’s not a primary damage source.

Gotcha, Danke for the info!

I’m sorry, I’m probably going to start a couple fires from this, but I have to say something. I hope you read and consider this.

Confusion in dungeons is simply the best. It does at least 3 times the amount of damage bleed does. Monsters in this game like to chain attacks and are predictable. Every couple of swings monsters do literally take off thousands. It’s amazing on bosses and it is spammable. Mesmer is the only class that can stack it reliably. Their ethereal combo field craps out confusion on projectile finishers. Scepter 3 is only on a 15 second cool down. There’s even a trait which adds 50 condition damage and CD reduction for scepter skills by 20%.

Here’s the damage calculation:
10 + (1.5 * Level) + (0.15 * Condition Damage) per stack per skill use
compared to bleeding:
2.5 + (0.5 * Level) +( 0.05 * Condition Damage) per stack per second

So a level 80 Mesmer with, say, 315 condition damage will do 177 damage per stack and bleeding will do 58 damage per stack. Scepter 3 will add 5 stacks for 5 seconds resulting in 885 damage per attack. The Illusion trait line is practically made for shattering and adding confusion. In one go, you can apply up to 13 stacks of confusion by yourself in one burst (Cry of Frustration (6) + Illusionary Mage (1 constantly) + Confusing Enchantments (1) + Confusing Images (5)). That’s 2301 per enemy attack in this example. Sharper images needs you to keep your illusions alive, but keeping illusions alive reliably is laughable at the moment with various glitches in traits and utility skills. Winds of Chaos randomly procs only 1 stack of bleeding.

Don’t let people tell you that confusion builds aren’t viable. They’re completely wrong. As it stands, Confusion is a very misunderstood and underrated status. Even with the glitches in duration, it’s still amazing. Leave the confusing to the Mesmers and the bleeding to the other classes that can apply it more reliably than us. It’s one of the only status attacks that we really even have.

Last I checked Scepter+Pistol was the way to go for confusion.

I never posted weapon combos. Anything+Pistol would definitely be used for bleeding builds because Phantasmal Duelist is a machine gun that has 8 chances to crit. I consider both offhand sword and pistol to be equally viable for confusion. If you find yourself getting attacked often, the two blocks that spawn clones is useful. Both the sword and the pistol’s phantasms hits hard and generally stay away from combat. The pistol stun is kind of useless unless you like removing 1 stack of Defiance every 25 seconds from a boss.

The iDuelist isn’t there just for the bleeds, try some ethereal fields.

Got me there. I guess you can quickly stack 8 confusions with that.

Edit: Oh, but I forget whether or not the phantasms also take your condition damage stats. It might be still glitched. I don’t know.

They get your malice…other than that, some people say they get the % increase of the power line…I haven’t been able to verify it.

Anything else they probably don’t.

They sadly don’t the get +33% duration from 10Illusions :S

cry of frustration is bugged atm, only giving 3 seconds confusion instead of the stated 4+ seconds.