confuse powers and XP

[Andrewvm]

I know that there was a discussion about this before sunset and tbh i thought that they made a change to it in favour of these powers

 

right now if you confuse mob1 and it hists mob 2 you get less xp from that mob2. now I get that you should get none if your don't damage mob 2 with one of your own powers, because you are avoiding agro. But i think that you should get full xp if you are fighting along side a confused mob, and are doing damage yourself.

 

because of the xp penatly associated with confuse powers, I hear a lot of players say that they don't use the power in the higher levels anymore.  

 

I think it's a shame that a power is chosen less because it costs your XP.

[DSorrow]

It's a common and old misconception that Confused enemies cost XP. In a vacuum, yes, you get less XP for each enemy that has been damaged by a confused mob, but due to the way the calculation works the increased defeat speed more than makes up for the loss in XP. For example, if you confuse mob A and it hits mob B for 50% of its HP, you'll still get 80% of the XP even though you only have to deal 50% of the damage. All things being equal, you can defeat mobs twice as fast while being completely safe thanks to Confuse so in the end you end up making 60% more XP per time, which is a much more meaningful metric than XP per defeat.

 

As far as I know, confuse mechanics work the same as they did on live so you can check this article for more information. 

[Oubliette_Red]

I find the hilarity of Confuse to outweigh the cost of any lost XP.

 

Confuse a Rikti Communications Officer and he spawns a confused portal, which then disgorges confused Rikti, the chaos is causes is hilarious.

Having a Longbow Warden Fort yourself or one of your teammates, or impale their own with spines, or irradiate them. Too funny.

Having Scirocco clock Night Widow during an STF was priceless. Granted, that also caused the Tank to lose agro and nearly caused a team wipe, but in the end we still prevailed.

 

[quixoteprog]

I use it all the time in high level missions. In some instances confusing a minion/LT near an elite boss (with the purple triangles) is the only way I can solo them with a mind controller. And, as has been stated before, I already get more XP than I technically "lose". And it could be argued WAY more than I "deserve", since in exchange for almost complete freedom from the danger of taking damage I can get any XP at all.

 

Even if there is only one mob. You can try to confuse it with no chance of aggro (several times) until it hits, and stack up confuses enough to lock down a boss/elite boss.

 

Then wail on them and re-confuse them until they are dead. They will never attack you.

 

We need to delete this thread, least the devs come to realize how OP confuse is.

[Lost Ninja]

The only change I'd like to see to confuse is have it count as a Control Power for Controller Bonus Damage (which even though I play mostly controllers I have totally forgotten...) 😄

[n00baka]

1 hour ago, Lost Ninja said:

The only change I'd like to see to confuse is have it count as a Control Power for Controller Bonus Damage (which even though I play mostly controllers I have totally forgotten...) 😄

This is the only change I’d want to see as well. The formula for how XP is gained using confuse has been generously in the player’s favor for a long time, and I don’t expect it to change. If it did, I wouldn’t object, but I certainly wouldn’t expect it or ask for it. 

 

Adding Confuse to the list of things Containment affects makes sense though. It almost feels like an oversight, but I imagine when Containment was added the Devs of the time absolutely had to have had a discussion and chose to not include it. Wish I knew why.

[Crysta Clear]

I looooove confuse. My main character is a psi-melee / willpower stalker, and Boggle is perhaps one of my favourite powers, because it doesn't break your stealth! It's a very safe way to whittle down large enemy groups before you make the plunge into assassinating the biggest-looking threat. Anyone with a Confuse power can do this too, by selecting Stealth from the Concealment pool.

 

Reduced XP for reduced risk is OK and normal -- after all, you're not really learning as much from an in-world standpoint, if you're not placing yourself in any real danger, and from a game standpoint, it's important to balance risk vs. reward. Every other way of altering the risk of taking on a given piece of content also alters the XP gained accordingly -- setting a mission to -1 means every mob is worth less, while setting it to +4 makes them worth more. The larger your team size setting, the more mobs there are in the mission to gain XP from, but the more you have to fight.

 

Edited September 24, 2019 by Crysta Clear

[Andrewvm]

2 hours ago, Lost Ninja said:

The only change I'd like to see to confuse is have it count as a Control Power for Controller Bonus Damage (which even though I play mostly controllers I have totally forgotten...) 😄

Can we do that for pets too then? 

 

Anyway, I consider the confused as pets, that's why I think the xp penalty is kinda unfair

[Crysta Clear]

Pets don't take an enemy out of the fight prematurely and also turn them into a damage source for your side of the encounter. Confuse is very much a more offensive version of soft control, and comparing it to summoning powers is not very accurate.. ^_^;

 

Edited September 24, 2019 by Crysta Clear

[Andrewvm]

True, but tell that to a pet less mindcontroller. 

 

Comparing them to another set where the confuses are either pets or damaging control powers, I'd say that mind loses in the xp department. 

[Zepp]

The confused "penalty" is most felt by low level Illusion Controllers and all levels of Mind Control Trollers and Doms... And the bigger issue for them is low level Illusion trollers that use Deceive in a group and Mind Control Trollers and Doms are stigmatized by ignant people who do not understand the confuse mechanic and thus make it harder for these players to get groups...

In other words, the confused penalty will help these three situations more through removing social stigma than actually changing the amount of XP. However, that would also mean that a Sup. Inv. Illusion troller could Deceive the boss, clear the spawn and then just have the boss to finish off while it is effectively unable to hit back for full XP for each mob. That would be a little too OP...

I do think allowing it to trigger Containment would be nice.

[Crysta Clear]

15 minutes ago, Andrewvm said:

True, but tell that to a pet less mindcontroller.

I just did.

 

When you have a summon, you are still a valid target for enemies to shoot over your summons if you spend your own activations debuffing or whatever (debuffs draw a lot of agro!), or if the enemy has an AoE power. Confuse, especially AoE confuse, removes the enemies' ability to target you, is not broken by damage (and is thus more of a hard control than a soft, now that I think about it), and also turns them into a damage source for your own benefit.

 

It's like a hold/disorient, except it also causes your enemies to damage each other.

 

Game balance should not shift toward easier difficulty just because of "social stigma" from the rushrushrush, MMO mentality, merits/XP per minute crowd. Kindly tell those people to screw off, and solo the content instead with your build's vastly decreased risk.

 

Edited September 24, 2019 by Crysta Clear

[Andrewvm]

2 hours ago, Crysta Clear said:

solo the content instead with your build's vastly decreased risk

wow.....   so your solution is just to tell people to stuff it and play solo?

2 hours ago, Zepp said:

However, that would also mean that a Sup. Inv. Illusion troller could Deceive the boss, clear the spawn and then just have the boss to finish off while it is effectively unable to hit back for full XP for each mob. That would be a little too OP...

 

Ok compare these two: 

 

a fire controller hits the aoe hold and then pings the boss with an st hold, send in the monkeys and in the mean time keeps the boss occupied by piling the holds.  minions are killed by damage you dont pay end for, boss is helpless and ultimo you have no risk and kill the whole group.

 

a mind controller hits the boss twice for confuse, the boss kills the rest of the spawn, and then you whittle down the boss with ST hold and sleep. Equally no risk, and no reward either.

 

 

Now I do agree that you should be hitting your target yourself to qualify for xp, but shouldnt be in competition with your confused "pets" 

And the agroless characteristic of confus should be tweaked: it should agro when your confused mob hits another for instance. or it should agro on hit...

[DSorrow]

23 minutes ago, Andrewvm said:

a fire controller hits the aoe hold and then pings the boss with an st hold, send in the monkeys and in the mean time keeps the boss occupied by piling the holds.  minions are killed by damage you dont pay end for, boss is helpless and ultimo you have no risk and kill the whole group.

 

a mind controller hits the boss twice for confuse, the boss kills the rest of the spawn, and then you whittle down the boss with ST hold and sleep. Equally no risk, and no reward either.

This isn't really a fair comparison: you're looking at Cinders + Fire Imps + Char vs. Confuse. The former can be repeated maybe once every couple of spawns while the latter can be done all the time. The latter is also completely risk free in that even if you miss, nothing is going to attack you, Cinders + Char strategy can fail pretty badly if either of the two misses or if there are more than one boss in the spawn.

 

I still don't see anything wrong with Confuse and changing it to aggro things would be a nerf, in my opinion.

[Steampunkette]

32 minutes ago, Andrewvm said:

wow.....   so your solution is just to tell people to stuff it and play solo?

Ok compare these two: 

 

a fire controller hits the aoe hold and then pings the boss with an st hold, send in the monkeys and in the mean time keeps the boss occupied by piling the holds.  minions are killed by damage you dont pay end for, boss is helpless and ultimo you have no risk and kill the whole group.

 

a mind controller hits the boss twice for confuse, the boss kills the rest of the spawn, and then you whittle down the boss with ST hold and sleep. Equally no risk, and no reward either.

 

 

Now I do agree that you should be hitting your target yourself to qualify for xp, but shouldnt be in competition with your confused "pets" 

And the agroless characteristic of confus should be tweaked: it should agro when your confused mob hits another for instance. or it should agro on hit...

You do get reward. You get slightly reduced reward, but you get reward.

 

And you clear the spawn a LOT FASTER than the Fire Controller relying on his pets to do damage.

 

Confused Opponents only count for 25% of the damage they do to the enemy. If you have a target with 100hp and your team and someone else's team each does 30 damage and 70 damage, respectively, you get 30% of the XP for that enemy and they get 70% of the XP for that enemy. But if it's a Confused Minion dishing out 70 points of damage the XP is reduced by 70/4=17.5%. You're putting out 30 damage out of 100 and getting 83 XP out of 100.

 

Does it result in an XP Loss per Minion? Yes. Does it result in an XP Loss per Minute? No. Because you move on to the next group 70% faster than a Mind Controller who -isn't- using Confusion (in the hypothetical 30/70 split)

 

You don't really "Lose" anything, unless you -exclusively- confuse the enemies and just stand around while they fight it out. So long as you're also tossing out some damage with Dominate and Mesmerize (Or if you're a Dominator WHOO BOY can you chuck damage!) you'll be fine.

Edited September 24, 2019 by Steampunkette

[Andrewvm]

14 minutes ago, Steampunkette said:

You don't really "Lose" anything, unless you -exclusively- confuse the enemies and just stand around while they fight it out. So long as you're also tossing out some damage with Dominate and Mesmerize (Or if you're a Dominator WHOO BOY can you chuck damage!) you'll be fine.

I get your calculation, fair enough.

 

but to compare with a set with pets the mind-troller shouldn't do anything. (since the fire troller doesn't need to either)

 

I can't comment of speed though, but I do have a specific point to make on that. to get any of the above mentioned XP you need to do a fair amount of damage in a short time to get the 30% done, especially later in the game where bosses are exceptionally hard hitting. and you need to keep targetting stuff that the boss is hitting just to compete for damage.

 

I loved mind, but I would rather have had a pet than the confure powers.  ll and dark dont have this problem as much, with their pets, but for mind....confuse is a bad substitute for a pet.

[Crysta Clear]

That is absolutely my response, yes! You don't need any team that's going to treat you like shit.

[Steampunkette]

14 minutes ago, Andrewvm said:

I get your calculation, fair enough.

 

but to compare with a set with pets the mind-troller shouldn't do anything. (since the fire troller doesn't need to either)

 

I can't comment of speed though, but I do have a specific point to make on that. to get any of the above mentioned XP you need to do a fair amount of damage in a short time to get the 30% done, especially later in the game where bosses are exceptionally hard hitting. and you need to keep targetting stuff that the boss is hitting just to compete for damage.

 

I loved mind, but I would rather have had a pet than the confure powers.  ll and dark dont have this problem as much, with their pets, but for mind....confuse is a bad substitute for a pet.

If you do 10% of the damage the target takes before he dies you get 77.5% of the XP when a Confused Enemy does 90% of the damage to the target.

 

90/4=22.5%

 

If you do 1% of the damage required to kill the target you still get 75.25% of the XP for killing it. 99/4=24.75

 

If you do 0.1% of damage to the target you still get 75.025% of the XP. 99.9/4=24.975

 

Anyone who tells you Confuse is some big XP waste is someone who doesn't understand how confuse works.

 

And yeah. The Fire Controller can stand back throwing out holds indefinitely while his pets kill things where the Mind Controller can't do the same thing with Confuse. But that's an EXTREMELY SPECIFIC situation that intentionally frames two dissimilar situations as being equal. I.E. False Equivalence. But you knew that before you described it, and only described it in order to make a case where no case actually existed.

 

And in -that- case you could toss some Damage Procs into the two confuse powers you have and start stealth-murdering entire groups faster than a Fire Controller while being totally safe and gaining most of the XP from a given enemy.

[Andrewvm]

10 minutes ago, Steampunkette said:

And yeah. The Fire Controller can stand back throwing out holds indefinitely while his pets kill things where the Mind Controller can't do the same thing with Confuse. But that's an EXTREMELY SPECIFIC situation intentionally frames two dissimilar situations as being equal

Nope, that is called ceterus paribus: where you create equal circumstances to make an actual comparison on a single aspect of a whole.

 

6 minutes ago, Steampunkette said:

But you knew that before you described it, and only described it in order to make a case where no case actually existed.

If you want to discredit my argument as a fallacy, fine, that's what discussions are for. We can discuss where you are right or not.

 

 Personal attacks by accusing me of intentionally using false arguments to make a point where there is none, is just poor form, if that's the way you want it, fine. I'll just take my toys and go somewhere else.🤷‍♂️

 

I think Crysta's response qualifies for this situation too.

 

[Steampunkette]

Just now, Andrewvm said:

Nope, that is called ceterus paribus: where you create equal circumstances to make an actual comparison on a single aspect of a whole.

 

If you want to discredit my argument as a fallacy, fine, that's what discussions are for. We can discuss where you are right or not.

 

 Personal attacks by accusing me of intentionally using false arguments to make a point where there is none, is just poor form, if that's the way you want it, fine. I'll just take my toys and go somewhere else.🤷‍♂️

 

I think Crysta's response qualifies for this situation too.

 

But they're not equal circumstances. Confused Enemies are not pets. They don't function like pets. The Confuse on them has a time limit and accuracy plays a role and they can and will break loose and come attack you if you're also using Dominate to dish out some damage of your own.

 

Those Fire Pets? Those are also entirely separate and controlled entities that con as enemies to the NPCs. They become targets of attacks separate from you by enemies that are not Mezzed. Confused targets might fire on targets that aren't Confused, but that enemy that isn't Confused? Coming after you. Not his Confused Allies that have dealt more damage to him, not the Fire Imps that hit him that you don't have. You.

 

Certerus Paribus my ass. It's a False Equivalence. You're trying to equate Confused Enemies with Pets and they just aren't. Apples and Oranges. And no matter how much you'd prefer oranges have a skin than a peel it doesn't quite work.

 

You didn't realize this was a false equivalence so I apologize. I'm just stunned that you didn't notice.

[Chuckers]

I have to agree with Steampunkette. Confused mobs are NOT pets. They don't follow you around, they don't aggro enemies even when they attack them, they can't be dismissed, and once the confuse has worn off, they will attack you. 

[Steampunkette]

They're both Superior and Inferior to pets.

 

Superior 'cause they do more damage, especially if you make a whole group fight itself.

 

Inferior because they won't take a bullet for you, and will happily kill you when you roll a bad ToHit check, and cost you a fraction of the XP from killing enemies.

[Chuckers]

2 minutes ago, Steampunkette said:

They're both Superior and Inferior to pets.

 

Superior 'cause they do more damage, especially if you make a whole group fight itself.

 

Inferior because they won't take a bullet for you, and will happily kill you when you roll a bad ToHit check, and cost you a fraction of the XP from killing enemies.

 

Superior, but you still have to do damage to get XP. Unlike Pets that can take out an enemy without your help and you'll still get full XP, if you don't do some portion of damage the confused mob is working on, you won't get any xp. 

[Steampunkette]

Just now, Chuckers said:

 

Superior, but you still have to do damage to get XP. Unlike Pets that can take out an enemy without your help and you'll still get full XP, if you don't do some portion of damage the confused mob is working on, you won't get any xp. 

Sure. I mentioned that upthread. But even if you do .01% of the enemy's health you get 75% of the XP.

 

For a Mind/Psi Dominator that's throwing down the confuse then following it up with a Psychic Scream, then twiddling your thumbs while they murder each other.

[quixoteprog]

Pets and confused enemies are WAY different. If you confuse an enemy and he attacks and kills several other mobs, when the confuse wears off nothing will aggro to you, not the guy you confused, or anything he wounded. You are free to confuse some more stuff with no danger of harm.

 

If you send in a pet to attack some mobs, and that pet dies? Or, you just call it off, or dismiss it? All mobs engaged with that/those pet(s)? They will come after you. Not matter how far away you were when the pet ceased its hostility.

 

Confused enemies are not considered a member of your party. Pets ARE.

 

Pets =/= Confused enemies.

 

QED