Guild Wars 2

I don’t know if it’s just the increased damage or the combination with improved iMage and Confusing Images, but it definitely feels like some enemies go down a lot faster. I’m not saying a condi build would be a viable choice for most PvE content, but as an anti-social person I prefer to run things solo, so for me it seems pretty good. Here’s a example from running Twilight Arbor solo last night using a 0/4/6/0/4 build with perplexity runes and scepter + torch / staff.

Toward the end of the forward path where you fight Leurent and the 3 elite enemies, I would normally have a lot of difficulty killing the elite knight. So as per usual I tried pulling the elite archer and sorcerer to kill first. Unfortunately the knight wouldn’t go away, but to my surprise his health was actually dropping much faster than the other elites. He had accumulated a decent number of confusion stacks just from iMage bounce attacks. I ended up killing him first then took out the other elites with much ease.

Then, at the start of the up path I decided to try a condi build to clear out the spiders before Malrona. Unlike previous runs where I struggled with zerker gear, I was able breeze through it this time. Just started out each group of spiders by summoning iMage, shooting Confusing Images through them and then dropping Chaos Storm. However, when I got to Malrona, I found the condi build was a little weak and switched back to zerker. It seems that as usual, an enemy with slow telegraphed attacks will still make confusion ineffective.

Overall though I think the recent changes for confusion and its application are a decent improvement and may offer new options for certain content.

No, confusion is not good now, it’s simply better than it was before.

Condition builds have been optimal for most solo PvE situations for quite a while now. It allows you to output consistent damage without worrying about squishing as much. The thing is that if you did a different condition build with more bleed/burn stacking…you’d have killed things even faster than with confusion.

Confusion simply isn’t worth it until one of two things happens. They can either revamp how it functions in PvE entirely, or buff it to absurd lengths that it becomes optimal.

I’ve used such builds before without investing in confusion. After the patch though it feels like it’s outperforming just solely relying on bleeds and burn, so I don’t know if a revamp is necessary since it feels like its in a good place now.

Fay.2357:

Confusion simply isn’t worth it until one of two things happens. They can either revamp how it functions in PvE entirely, or buff it to absurd lengths that it becomes optimal.

This. They’ve buffed the damage scaling in PvE but that’s not the problem. It’s the fact that mobs attack so slowly that you’re lucky if you get it to proc at all.

The ideal solution IMO would be to drastically increase the attack speed of mobs. Mordrem have a lot of multi-hit skills but I’m not sure if they count as several attacks (for the purposes of proccing confusion) or just one. Still, designing new mobs to have an increased attack speed would just create a schism where confusion is good in HoT and crap everywhere else, and unfortunately I doubt that ANet would go back and rebalance the rest of PvE (although there is precendent i.e. NPE).

But hell, if all they want to do is tweak numbers, then a single large buff to the duration of all player-applied confusion in PvE would be far more effective than damage scaling tweaks.

Making mobs attack faster would actually also make things harder for the Zerk meta (not something I would object to), since dodging and blocks/Blind help ameliorate damage from big spikes, but their poor health pools means that lots of little “bug bite” attacks that they can’t all dodge would quickly wear them down.

Confusion can actually work wonders against foes that attack rapidly. A lot of Risen in Orr will rapidly murder themselves with Confusion due to their incredibly fast attack rates.

They can’t make mobs attack faster just for the sake of making confusion work. Think about it, it would break PvE and require an incredible amount of work.
What Pyro said are the only possible solutions.