Guild Wars 2

The short answer to your question is no; the build you’ve linked is unequivocally awful. The key, though, is why?

Firstly, the concept is a bit flawed. As you actually said in your post, confusion is a condition that only ends up dealing a lot of damage to careless foes. Designing a build to only function properly if your enemies are incompetent is a flawed decision from the start. On top of that though, mesmers actually aren’t great at applying confusion in general, and your build isn’t optimized for what Mesmer can do.

First, the traits.

In domination, you’ve taken confounding suggestions. In a build that relies almost completely on your opponent making actions to proc confusion, taking a trait that adds daze duration and stun conversion is a poor choice. That aside, you also have one source of daze in your build, on a 28 second cooldown. You’re making fairly poor use of the trait. Cleansing conflagration is a fine pick, but then you take crippling dissipation, which I’ll come back to later.

In chaos, you take chaotic dampening, which is fine. You also take debilitating dissipation. The dissipation traits all require large amounts of clone production to provide ample fuel for them. In your build, you have very limited clone production; mainly because you don’t take Dueling X: deceptive evasion. This means that now and then you’ll get the dissipations to do a little something, but the vast majority of the time you’ll be fighting with 0-1 clone out.

Lastly, you’ve taken master of misdirection in illusions, which is fine in theory but ends up not doing much. The big problem here is blinding befuddlement, which is a singularly awful trait that used to be great. Blinding befuddlement was slapped with a hefty internal cooldown. The internal cooldown not only means you can’t use it to apply much confusion to one person, it also means you can’t use it to apply confusion to more than one person ever, even with aoe blinds. The trait is awful now, literally never worth taking in any build.

Overall, confusion as a primary damage source in a build only works against bad players. Additionally, this build has some odd lockdown elements that actually work against your confusion damage, and the build is in general pretty awful at applying confusion at all. The typical confusion burst comes from shatters, but you have no clones, so you’ll have nothing to shatter. Confusing images is easily dodged aaaaand that’s it. That’s all your confusion, gone practically before the fight even starts.

Oh, and the iMage can literally be dodged by a slowly ambling dolyak, so that gives you an idea of how reliable that is.

Thank you :p that was very insightful, I’ll scrap it now