Guild Wars 2

So, confusion seems to be becoming a DPS condition which acts like Torment in that it will tick every second, then double the damage per tick when the opponent uses a skill.

This has pros and cons.

Pros:
-Stronger PvE-ish
-Damage even when opponent isn’t using a skill
-Possibly higher durations allowed to us

Cons:
-No punishing burst when opponent spams skills[Thus allowing skill spam to continue and possibly weakening its effect on thieves]
-Set amount of damage where current confusion has a pseudo-random damage which can be potentially higher than any other damaging condition in the same amount of time.

Thoughts on this? Do you like the current confusion, or would you rather this torment-like revamp?

NOTE: This is speculative information based on the trait information ANet revealed a while back. No new news here.

Confusion has been virtually redundant since they nerfed it. Therefor any change that fails to hit the mark means nothing, and any change that improves things will be good. It can only go up from here?

Are we sure that it does the extra damage on a “tick?” From what I understood, it had a small DoT component, and then extra damage on an ability being used. Functioning sort of like retaliation.

Maybe I was making that up…

Sounds like a poor-mans Torment to be honest, since everyone is pretty much moving all the time, but not everyone is casting skills all the time. The damage would have to be MUCH better to compensate that. Or maybe triple the damage when using a skill. What happens when the skill gets casted between two ticks?

Still, as Ross Biddle said, even a poor-mans Torment is better than what we have currently.

Where’d you get the infos?

//edit: I’d prefer the version Tealots just mentioned :p

//double edit: I’d like to see some more traditional confusion mechanics, like a small percentage of your attacks being able to hit allies. Like, 1% per stack. Imagine confusion bombing a zerg, holy moly.

Confusion hasn’t been worth much for a long time, I’d say it’s pretty crap right now. I love this change as this will make it a more reliable damage condition. People stopped getting “spiked” with confusion long ago, at which point it became kitten.

This is going to make confusion much, much better for us.

where does all this info come from?

It raises the minimum damage that confusion will do as before it could do 0 damage if your opponent simply didn’t attack while they had confusion on them.

What it will do to the maximum damage has yet to be seen. We’ll need to playtest it. Right now we don’t even have the numbers for it nor how exactly it will function.

This is all based on the wording of confusion in the new traits ANet showed a while back, nothing new. And as it isn’t confirmed, this is speculation, though nothing new. I’ll add that to the original post.

Tealots.6095:

Are we sure that it does the extra damage on a “tick?” From what I understood, it had a small DoT component, and then extra damage on an ability being used. Functioning sort of like retaliation.

Maybe I was making that up…

Perhaps. I do like this idea more than some torment-like condi. Hopefully this is the right guess.

I also want to know, where did this info come from? I didn’t see it in a post or anything.

Seeing how torment works, I imagine what we’ll see is the same:

• Does less damage than bleeding when your opponent isn’t doing X (Torment = moving, Confusion = using skills)
• Does more damage than bleeding when your opponent is doing X (Torment = moving, Confusion = using skills)

So I assume the per-tick will be less than bleeding.

How the damage due to skill use is done is what I’m unsure of. Will they increase the tick if your opponent used a skill since the last tick? Or will they have it tick extra damage each time your opponent uses a skill?

Maybe they could just up the damage some. They reduced it too much, they could increase it some, but not as much.

Or maybe escalating damage. Have it do X damage per skill use, +Y more each second after the first that its on.

shrug I dont know. Even though it was nerfed, Ive still used confusion – although I admit its a confusion/torment hybrid build, so….

Initial numbers ArenaNet provided on the core specialization stream indicate that confusion will apply 24-25 base damage per stack of confusion per second. This is in addition to the damage inflicted on skill use.

Confusing Combatants
Mistrust
Illusionary Retribution
Blinding Befuddlement

Note that value subject to change ahead of the official release. Math whizzes help me out if I’m incorrect.

So here are my opinions of everyone else’s confusion on how new confusion works. It is very simple if you look at any of the traits concerning confusion.

http://dulfy.net/2015/04/25/gw2-core-specializations/#Mesmer
I am going to go off the new tooltips shown even though I have the actual numbers for torment. I assume the calculation error for torment they showed and the one for new confusion will be the same. So it will be a better comparison using their tooltips for torment damage.

No condi damage torment does 18.5714285714 per second standing still, 37.1428571429 while moving.
No condi damage old confusion does 65 damage per skill.
No condi damage new confusion does 24 per second, or 39.3846153846 per second while using a skill.
No condi damage new confusion does 24 per second + 50 damage per skill.

There is no reason it would switch over to torment style, although I did show the math for that in the strikethroughs and confusion comes out ahead. The fact it says “on skill” use and not “while using” means it cant be a tick based system.

Elementalist doing 3 lightning whips in 2.5 seconds takes from 2.5 seconds of confusion:
195 damage old confusion
204 damage new confusion

88.6153846154 damage new confusion
41.7857142856 damage, 83.5714285712 torment damage while moving.

@skcamow you just need a calculator. I’m not a math whiz either.

You can’t really do the math with the information you provided.

They showed us tooltips without us knowing the amount of condition damage.

Even then, we’d need to have at least one other example of the tooltip with a separate known amount of condition damage.

Without that information, it is difficult to know what the damage will be like.

We don’t know what the constant damage is that it does with 0 condition damage, and we don’t know what the coefficient is for condition damage … for both the tick and on-skill-use.

Sebrent.3625:

You can’t really do the math with the information you provided.

They showed us tooltips without us knowing the amount of condition damage.

Even then, we’d need to have at least one other example of the tooltip with a separate known amount of condition damage.

Without that information, it is difficult to know what the damage will be like.

We don’t know what the constant damage is that it does with 0 condition damage, and we don’t know what the coefficient is for condition damage … for both the tick and on-skill-use.

I think it’s fair to say those are base numbers, but to your point we don’t know with 100% certainty. For example, if you look at the on skill use number in the tool tip, it’s 50 as opposed to the current base of 65. When I say base, I mean no traits, no gear, etc.

They even commented the on-skill number is lower than the current number because people were raging in the stream, but they never came out and said why (at least in the mesmer portion). We know the reason is because of that second damage number.

I’m not into all this number crunching with a lack of information. IN THEORY, I like the way the new confusion will work.

Cons:
-No punishing burst when opponent spams skills[Thus allowing skill spam to continue and possibly weakening its effect on thieves]
-Set amount of damage where current confusion has a pseudo-random damage which can be potentially higher than any other damaging condition in the same amount of time.

It will still be punishing when opponents spam skills. You say this as though dmg on tick is getting removed. Yes, they might nerf the dmg a bit to compensate for the set amount of base dmg, but I see this is an overall buff. Just like torment, stacking it will be severely punishing especially if they are using skills (or moving in the case of Torment).