Guild Wars 2

Personally, I’m a huge fan of the gameplay mechanics related to the confusion condition. It’s a much more interesting condition than just a traditional DoT as it presents an opportunity for interesting play/counterplay scenarios. Once inflicted with confusion, you’ve got the option to use a skill and take damage or not use a skill and take zero damage.

I’ve posted this here in the mesmer section as I feel like cofusion could be a good fit with the concept of the lockdown mesmer. It’d be interesting to see confusion, in general, revamped and implemented in such a way as that professions would be able to quickly stack confusion on an enemy but only for a very short duration. For example if an enemy is going to burst on you or an ally, and you were able to quickly apply several stacks of confusion for a couple of seconds it presents them with the choice of continuing their burst skill rotation/chain and eating the damage, or delaying the burst to avoid the confusion damage. Rather than a hard cc like a stun, daze (or even blind) which takes away a player’s control/options, confusion if implemented in this way would present a counter play option. This counter play option also does not require the use of condition removal (though the target could use that as well) which already is under tremendous pressure as its the counter play to both otherwise guaranteed damage conditions such (bleed, torment, poison, burning) as well as soft cc’s.

I realize that this change would require confusion and its application to be looked at on all classes, not just the mesmer, and changes most definitely would need to be made. For example, flat duration bonuses like those from Master of Misdirection (+33% confusion duratoin) would need to go entirely. Ideally, I’d like to see the mesmer’s skills/traits tweaked so that ways to apply small amounts of confusion for longer durations (i.e. 2-3s or greater) would become a thing of the past, and instead a mesmer could ‘lockdown’ an enemy through alternative means than stuns and dazes.

In it’s current state of implementation confusion is generally applied in small doses with longer durations and hence plays much like the other DoTs. E.g. Illusionary Retribution, Blinding Befuddlement, Confusing Combatants all apply one stack of confusion and cannot be used/combined to stack confusion on a target quickly enough to present a high enough threat of damage on skill use required for a lockdown scenario. I believe with a bit of tweaking to confusions implementation it could be much more interesting.