Diversion

Prophecies Campaign:
Skill Quests: Skill Trainers:
 * Unnatural Creatures (Serenity Temple)
 * Captain Osric (Yak's Bend)
 * Dakk (Ember Light Camp)

Factions Campaign:
Skill Trainers:
 * Zytka (House zu Heltzer)

Usage Notes
Diversion dumps additional recharge time on top of the skill's innate recharge time. Diversion is best used to slow down a fast activating skill for an enemy. This has many powerful applications:
 * Shutdown a monk's Orison of Healing. Orison does not heal a lot, but its power is that it casts quickly and recharges quickly (2 seconds). An Orison that takes 50 seconds to recharge is useless to a monk.
 * Take out an elementalist's quickly recharging attack. Most elementalists will have a single spell for doing damage repeatedly while their big nuking spells recharge. For example, Aftershock for Earth Magic users, or Fireball for Fire Magic users. Diversion can make these take nearly a minute to recharge.
 * Taking out a potential threat from warriors and rangers. Warriors have skills like Savage Slash and Disrupting Chop and rangers have skills like Savage Shot and Concussion Shot that can greatly bother a Mesmer by interrupting him/her. A mesmer can use diversion on them to make those attacks (which are dangerous because they recharge quickly) take a minute to recharge and thus become far less effective.

When combined with Wastrel's Worry, the opponent is confronted with the choice between taking a non-negligible amount of damage and shutting down one of his or her skills for a frustratingly long period of time, and that decision must be made nearly instantly, triggering a panicked response which might interfere with your target's judgement. Your opponent may normally choose to wait out the six-second duration of Diversion rather than shut down one of their skills, but if they choose to shut down a skill instead of taking the damage from Wastrel's Worry, they must not only choose to do so but must choose which skill to sacrifice in a very short period of time. Such snap decisions are unlikely to be well-reasoned and carefully considered, putting you at an advantage. Alternately, Diversion can put sufficient pressure on an opponent (as it carries a much higher cost than, for example, Guilt or Shame) to do nothing that Wastrel's Worry will become a much more efficient damage dealer.