I think so many people are unhappy with confusion because the condition and the skills/traits associated with it either does too little, or too much. In the case of PvE there are many complaints that confusion does low damage due to the attack speeds of mobs and bosses, even when stacking large amounts of confusion. However, in the case of PvP and WvWvW where players attack much faster, the damage offered by confusion is much higher, to the point where people with 10+ stacks can die within seconds if they’re not paying attention.
A personal complaint about confusion is how it collapses the available skills and traits it allows people to spec in. As a GW1 vet who played a Mesmer, I love how skills synergized so effectively. For instance, I could use psychic distraction to knock down a player, case Wastrel’s Worry, and as they’re getting up and trying to cast a skill I hit them with Power Spike to take a large chunk of their health. In GW2 you can’t synergize confusion or damage with interrupts, the complete opposite of what mesmers offered in GW1: punishment. If you daze/stun someone the confusion stacks are rendered useless and you’ve accomplished very little pressure and damage on an opponent. If you want to use confusion, you have to heavily invest into glamours/reflect/CoF shatter. Conversely, if I’m going straight-up damage (shatter/phantasm), confusion actually hurts my damage output because the methods that mesmers apply confusion clash with the ways they inflict damage rely on the same resources (clones/phantasms).
I think if confusion were to be changed to function differently we might be able to find a middle ground in which WvWvW, PvP, and PvE players are happy with confusion, while maintaining synergy with the rest of the mesmer’s abilities. I think confusion should be changed to something like this:
Confusion: Deals X damage per second. Deals 80% less damage when target is activating skills. Stacks in duration.
So let me give an example of what my change would do. Let’s say for argument’s sake that confusion on a certain build hits for 2k damage per second, and I apply this on a warrior. For each second that he is not casting a skill he would be taking 2k damage. However, if the warrior were to auto-attack or cast hundred blades, as long as he is attacking/channeling he would be taking 400 damage a second.
I think this would help solve the middle ground between both aspects of Guild Wars (PvE and PvP), and I’ll discuss each separately.
PvE: I think this my proposed changes would help make Mesmer condition builds viable. Why? Well, if the issue with the current state of confusion is that mobs do not trigger confusion fast enough, then if you change confusion to damage when mobs aren’t attacking you could make confusion a viable damage-dealing condition, which was the intention of the condition in the first place. If the condition was duration-based instead of intensity-based, then you do not have to worry about teams that could exploit stealth and stack confusion quickly.
PvP/WvWvW: I think that the change to confusion would fit perfectly. We’ve seen this type of hex in the form of Wastrel’s Worry/Demise in GW1, and I think it was a very powerful damage skill when mesmers utilized interrupts. If confusion is applied to a player, they would be pressured to use a skill or take hefty damage. Since every class has access to autoattacks, the only time in which confusion would do full damage that a player would be responsible for would be when a player is hit by daze, stun, kd, or blowout (dodge is currently set so it functions as casting as a skill).
