Hey all, this is going to be a lengthy case on where I think confusion should move towards, and I'd love to hear what the general population thinks! Being here since launch, I've seen confusion wave in the wind and lose its identity to an extent. The target for change here is directed at PvE, but I feel like the change can carry to all game modes.
Current State of Confusion
So currently as is public knowledge in the wiki, confusion hits on two fronts.
The first is a damage over time (DoT), which was implemented to round out this condition as being more useful in areas like PvE where enemies typically attack slower.
The second is a damage on skill activation, which is quite self explanatory 🙂
In the current state of the game, PvE modes will favor the DoT damage and reduce the skill activation damage, where PvP modes will do the reverse. And although this is a decent way of moving confusion from the "useless" category in PvE to "present", the condition itself is generally lackluster. It is a difficult condition to maintain on targets due to its duration, and when compared to something like bleed, its quick lackluster. Bleeds will tick higher per stack as well as last significantly longer then any confusion applications you can apply. And of course confusion has the skill activation damage to compensate, due to the attack speeds in PvE it will perform poorly aside from specific instances.
Suggested Changes
My suggestion is a tweak to how confusion deals its damage. The changes I would apply are as follows:
Drop the DoT component of confusion.
Put the lost damage from the dots into the skill activation damage.
Make confusion stack(s) get consumed on skill activation.
The third point in this list is the crux of my idea. In order to make the damage "fair" in multiple game modes, we would introduce the idea that taking activation damage from confusion will eat up stacks and deliver damage correspondingly. The amount of stacks consumed will need to be adjusted based on things like game mode and type of targets. To give a better example with arbitrary numbers:
I apply 9 stacks of confusion on a target for 10 seconds
The target performs an action
In PvP/WvW every action will consume at most 5 stacks of confusion off the top of the pile and deal its damage. So the first action will lower the total to 4 stacks (dealing 5 stacks of damage), and the attack after down to 0 (dealing 4 stacks of damage)
In PvE where mobs attack slowly, this number of stacks consumed will be at most 30 stacks in a single attack (so first attack drops the total to 0 (dealing 9 stacks of damage)).
With this, I feel like the balancing act of PvE attack speeds will be easier to manage. Bosses like Twin Largos will not be extremely susceptible to confusion compared to KC for example. Of course this requires a proper look at the numbers or we risk dps craziness, but I think it is a worthwhile effort! The one area that is a bit difficult to solve with this change would be inanimate objects like barrels or WvW doors. In these areas, I would think we should either
Consume all stacks immediately on application,
Or Have the object "activate a skill" every X seconds (this second one I feel could cause many in game issues with things like combat, responsiveness etc, so I'm not keen on it).
Curious to hear what you all think!