Guild Wars 2

Try https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/PvP-WvW-Lockdown-Shatter-Shatterlock/first#post3376894 or go 30/30/?/?/? with 10 somewhere (traited interrupt/daze). There are many variant of interrupt mesmer, Chaos line is giving nice buff. In PvP, I mostly go 30/10/30/0/0 for interrupt.

Confusion is bad in PvE. Mesmer GW1 and GW2 are 2 different kind of profession (which is a little upsetting). Halting Strike is doing an okay damage, but I wish it would punish more.

+1 Cofusion at it current state sucks, but i dont like idea to only boost dmg. Confusion mesmer main source of dmg should be confusion, increasing dmg occur that condi spec will be extremely op. Confusion should be reworked, maybe something like that: dmg increase, it should be changed into CC and gets debuff “when you applay confusion your condi and direct dmg is decreased by…for confusion duration time” ofc we should also think about sources of confusion and balance them.

Halting Strike damage is calculated in a very weird way, it can be pretty meh with numbers around 800, but I’ve also had impressive 5k+ hits (in PvP, thus even inferior stats compared to WvW).

Confusion is alright in PvP in WvW, i just find it weird that engi’s can apply it easier than us.

FranzM.1298:

Lately I’ve been trying out confusion builds for mesmer and i came to the realization that confusion doesn’t do as much damage as it should.

Once upon a time, in the land of common sense… fast-attacking, bursty professions (or playstyles) had hard counters called retaliation and confusion. Sadly, many thieves and warriors (and even a few rangers) invaded the land of common sense and cried loudly for the ability to win more easily against such counters, arguing that they should be allowed to deal 10-20,000 damage without impunity or risk… and they won.

Confusion and retaliation have both been severely nerfed.

Hopefully, Guild Wars 2 will not need its “n00b tube” professions/play styles forever and things will return to balance… all styles should have a counter-style.

Aneirin Cadwall.9126:

FranzM.1298:

Lately I’ve been trying out confusion builds for mesmer and i came to the realization that confusion doesn’t do as much damage as it should.

Once upon a time, in the land of common sense… fast-attacking, bursty professions (or playstyles) had hard counters called retaliation and confusion. Sadly, many thieves and warriors (and even a few rangers) invaded the land of common sense and cried loudly for the ability to win more easily against such counters, arguing that they should be allowed to deal 10-20,000 damage without impunity or risk… and they won.

Confusion and retaliation have both been severely nerfed.

Hopefully, Guild Wars 2 will not need its “n00b tube” professions/play styles forever and things will return to balance… all styles should have a counter-style.

Ironically, if there are noob tube builds in gw2, they are the tanky condition specs such as spirit rangers and pu mesmers. Glass cannons are a lot more difficult and less forgiving to play.
Confusion or retalation also never were good counters against burst thieves.

Exactly. Their concepts are good, but currently combat is too fast to make high-damage Retal/Conf viable. You’d need a more tactical, more planned type of combat where each side has side to evaluate the combat state and decide which action to commit to.

With some multi-hit abilities ingame, by the time you realize you have to react, it’s too late. Example existing right now in the “nerfed” state? Grenade Engineers. By the time they see the Retaliation damage when throwing into a group at 1500 range, the group could down them by intentionally standing so that all grenades hit 5 people with Retal. Too many in the air.

You can try all you like, Diplomat Tarban will still have more confusion.

Master of Timespace.2548:

Confusion or retalation also never were good counters against burst thieves.

Disagree with this completely. A burst thief’s health pool is tiny, and when confusion was doing its original WvW damage, 5-8 stacks would consistently down the ones who didn’t pay attention. It would take them 3-4 actions that caused confusion to tick and they’d be done.

That sounds like a pretty good counter to me – better than just about every other thief counter out there now, matter of fact. LOL

I think “original WvW damage” was the key line in your post Dhampyr.

Absolutely true – I just didn’t agree with the “never” from what I quoted. Confusion, pre-nerf, was a pretty good thief counter, imo.

Aneirin Cadwall.9126:

FranzM.1298:

Lately I’ve been trying out confusion builds for mesmer and i came to the realization that confusion doesn’t do as much damage as it should.

Once upon a time, in the land of common sense… fast-attacking, bursty professions (or playstyles) had hard counters called retaliation and confusion. Sadly, many thieves and warriors (and even a few rangers) invaded the land of common sense and cried loudly for the ability to win more easily against such counters, arguing that they should be allowed to deal 10-20,000 damage without impunity or risk… and they won.

Confusion and retaliation have both been severely nerfed.

Hopefully, Guild Wars 2 will not need its “n00b tube” professions/play styles forever and things will return to balance… all styles should have a counter-style.

well, confusion was the ultimate punishing skill. it stopped mindless button spammers cold. yes it was strong, but also hard to stack and if u pressured a glam mesmer a little after they are all on cooldowns, the glam mesmer was done for. after this massive nerf, anet has left the mes without viable aoe. yes we got phantasms left, but our role as punishing light armor class has been taken away. in wvw we are still veil, tw, feedback bots and thats it. if u wanna deal dmg and survive in a zerg, mes sure is not what u are looking for atm.
however, we still destroy people in 1v1’s. i dont mind being a good duelist, but for a light armor class, thats not enough. i would love to see more punishing skills that are not ai based. yes button spammers will be crying a lot again, but i think its a good thing if a player has to slow down his game play and be more careful.
as a light armor u need something to keep the heavy pressure off your back. i made a necro a week ago and gotta say. its easy to put pressure on heavies while having survivability. now mes needs something that makes up for being squshy too. only phantasms and shatters isnt the answer. also mantras in wvw would still require to get close to an enemy to work. we need ranged pressure that punishes like the gw1 mes did.

Speaking of WvW I think, Confusion as well as Retaliation are the victims of far too much AoE damage going on in this game. Since it was so easy to stack Retaliation or a few Mesmers could easily plaster the whole battlefield constantly with their Confusion stacking Glamour fields and change the whole meta game of WvW doing this, they (ANET) had to tone down this kind of damage/lockdown to a state where it’s even in a 1 one 1 situation almost negligible, well maybe not negligible but maybe not as class defining as for instance a Mesmer would like it to be.
In case you don’t agree with my opinion, I’d like to hear your thoughts on this.

Regards Konsul

Just improve some of the traits that we have right now like dom 25 and dueling 25. Both are GM minor traits but they feel a bit lackluster.

@FranzM I kinda like your idea of confusion being more like Ineptitude was in gw1 where you pretty much negate the next attack and take damage, and with multiple applications it could scale the damage, but the stacks would be removed once used.

You’d have to look into balance issues but you could also word it like “interrupt next skill your opponent uses and deal X damage” and it would provide more synergy with interrupt builds.

Either way it needs to be looked at seeing as we have traits and class mechanics based around this condition (ahem, Cry of Frustration), and with it being nerfed it put a lot of those traits ect in a bad spot.

xithorN.2380:

“interrupt next skill your opponent uses and deal X damage”

You just described some of my favorite GW1 mesmer skills.

• Wandering Eye
  For 4 seconds, the next time target foe attacks, that attack is interrupted and all nearby foes take 30…94…110 damage.

• Mistrust
  For 6 seconds, the next spell that target foe casts on one of your allies fails and deals 10…82…100 damage to that foe and all nearby foes.

• Wastrel’s Demise
  For 5 seconds, target foe is hexed with Wastrel’s Demise. Each second while hexed, target foe and all foes adjacent to that foe take 1…8…10 damage and an additional 1…8…10 damage for each second this spell is in effect. This hex ends prematurely if target foe uses a skill.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what mesmer will have available in 2014-15…

Still kinda miss these guys, too, while we’re at it. My current GW1 mesmer (with 7 heroes, all R/N and N/Rt) is the destroyer of all things PvE using these two skills (and a few more, of course).

Yeah, that’s one thing I dislike about Gw2, the skills feel really, really basic.

Basically do X damage / Apply X Condition(s) / Remove X boon(s)

Gw1 tooltips were full of different special effects and worked wonders.

I really like a punishment style of play. I run a build with a decent amount of blocks via scepter/torch and sword/sword, the blocks either apply damage or conditions along with1 second of burning due to my guardian rune set. Mimic works great with this set up (thank you for the heads up Zerg Mower build) as well, you just have to make sure you absorb a projectile to activate the block portion (the torch phantasms projectile will do this for you). Mix that with the confusion from scepter 2 and retaliation on block (from the dueling line, I forget which trait number it is) it has that kind of punish people for their actions just as much as the damage you put out.

FranzM.1298:

Razamatazz.9628:

I really like a punishment style of play. I run a build with a decent amount of blocks via scepter/torch and sword/sword, the blocks either apply damage or conditions along with1 second of burning due to my guardian rune set. Mimic works great with this set up (thank you for the heads up Zerg Mower build) as well, you just have to make sure you absorb a projectile to activate the block portion (the torch phantasms projectile will do this for you). Mix that with the confusion from scepter 2 and retaliation on block (from the dueling line, I forget which trait number it is) it has that kind of punish people for their actions just as much as the damage you put out.

but the consistency isn’t good enough in my opinion because of useless this is in PVE. In PVE monsters do not spam attacks which is why they need to fix it and give us more variety in that aspect.

Very true, I only had WvW in mind, I switch builds completely for PvE. I think conditions are weaker across the board in PvE.

How about giving confusion and retaliation better damage scaling but some sort of ICD on how often they can proc? Then both would be a lot better because it brings up the bottom end performance without allowing top end performance to go bonkers.

i have to say the guy who said confusion should be like ineptitude is spot on.. interupting the next attack and dealing damage is much better than the way it is now.. for both pve and pvp.. even better if it made the skill go on cooldown.. so they would have to pay attention or they could lose a good skill.