Endaris.1452

I don't think confusion should be changed to tick for more passive damage. For most enemies, different conditions are already really redundant, many mobs in PvE don't heal themselves so applying Bleed or Poison or Burning is all the same. We don't need more of the same, it doesn't add to the gameplay value at all. The torment amplification is already weak enough to be ignorable for most purposes and the amount of builds that mainly rely on confusion can be counted on one or two fingers. Confusion is a rather rare condition and if you include it in your build you should play around it. If you confuse a melee mob and then run away from it, it will be useless. If you stand in melee range and blind, block or dodge its attacks you might find that confusion hits for quite substantial amounts of damage in a short time. True, it stands in a line of skills and effects that suffer from low enemy attack rates like retaliation in core Tyria but in expansion content it ticks quite frequently on many mobs and isn't weak by any means. If you don't like the playstyle that comes with utilising it, simply play a build that focuses on other conditions, there are plenty alternatives.

It really depends on what you are playing and who you are playing with. For low level fractals, story content etc. Scrapper is really nice - until you fail to hit things to generate barrier. If you play in a rather high-end performance environment where people play meta builds and play them well, you will see the difference in numbers between these meta classes and scrapper very clearly, it's not just on paper if you have some skill and practice on the meta classes. I am usually playing Holosmith when it comes to DPS in organised gameplay but I was recently trying to play DPS Scrapper in raids for a bit as personal preparation for the Random Comp Raiding League challenge where I filled the scrapper slot for my squad and it was not great but definitely good enough on some encounters (like Keep Construct or Samarog) but greatly lost out on other encounters to the point of really feeling like a burden (for example on Xera). I would also imagine that Scrapper has a rather extreme deficit when looking at competent meta groups doing fractal CMs. Comparing to what good players can dish out on meta classes, Scrapper simply looks bad. From how it sounds, this is not the content you will be playing with your Scrapper though and if you ignore that content then you can indeed call your suspicion correct. Scrapper is quite good in open world and casual content, better than many classes thanks to its constant barrier generation and versatile hammer weapon skills.

Use modified ammunition in firearms, incendiary ammo does nothing for you if you don't run condition damage. Replace the Accuracy sigils with something more useful. Your modifiers in firearms + fury put you on 105% critrate which is wasted. There's a ton of really cheap budget power+precision food like griffon egg omelets you can use to get your crit rate to 100%. If you're alone running Short Fuse is ok but if you're in a group with a firebrand or something you should take Glass Cannon because you'll get some extra fury from your group. What makes scrapper powerful is that the barrier allows it to very easily maintain damage buffs that depend on your health like Glass Cannon or a Scholar Rune bonus. Aside from that you should really invest in an ascended hammer because for weapons the difference between exotic and ascended is quite noticeable as you not only gain more stats but also higher weapon strength. So far for optimizing damage. Hammer scrapper is not bad by any means. Hammer is in fact an absolutely amazing weapon that makes me wish we had it on core. What Scrapper mostly suffers from is that it has nothing really great in its trait line in terms of damage that can compare to other elite specs and the utilities are also rather meh with Shredder Gyro being the only strong damage option. It also doesn't have any reasonably good elite skill for boss fights. As a result the numbers you can achieve on paper are ~20% lower than meta classes. However unlike other classes it is more realistic for scrapper to reach its numbers even in real fights with real opponents thanks to the barrier protecting modifiers like Glass Cannon and Scholar rune. This still assumes that you play well though. If you go on and try to optimise your damage output, scrapper can be played pretty much everywhere but people *will* give you weird looks in more difficult content and may kick you more quickly if you don't show them that you can perform.