So I headed to the mists today naked, steady greatsword in tow, without traits, to see if I could figure out how the Illusionary Berserker works. Well I am more confused than when I started, I think, but I will share what I found.
I tested on a single Heavy Target Golem first. I found the damage dealt is definitely positional. The hits on the “away trip” are almost always more than the hits on the “return” trip of the berserker. The damage of a single hit on the away trip is about 150, and on the return trip about 300. This doesn’t make sense, but I thought, well maybe the various hits are not always the same damage, so with that in mind, it started to make more sense. I was getting mostly ~600 damage on the away trip and mostly ~300 on the return, so I came to the conclusion that the first two hits were 150 each, with the third and fourth hit being 300 each. In my testing I got one trip that appeared to do 4 hits. Here is the data I collected on 16 passes of the berserker:
Away Trip (a.k.a hits when phantasm starts attack in melee range)
Number of hits, approximate damage
1, 150
3, 600
3, 600
3, 600
2, 300
3, 600
3, 600
3, 600
2, 300
2, 300
4, 900
3, 600
3, 600
3, 600
3, 600
3, 600
Return trip (a.k.a hits when phantasm starts attack in at about 600 range)
1, 300
0, 0
1, 300
1, 300
1, 300
1, 300
1, 300
1, 300
1, 300
0, 0
1, 300
1, 300
1, 300
1, 300
1, 300
1, 300
So despite my target being a stationary golem, some of the return trips didn’t even connect! Something definitely wrong here. It is a shame I do not have a pre-patch dataset, but from my analysis of older videos makes me belief that it used to hit 4 times almost all the time on the “away” trip.
Where it all breaks down is in a multiple target situation, unfortunately. I tested this in the “aoe” target golem area of the mists and had widely varying results, with 3 hits causing 450 damage which was unexpected, and also hits occurring on the initial target when the berserker was hitting the targets last in line (some sort of additive damage or compounding of hits). I can’t explain any of that data and it was difficult to collect and I got tired. So if someone wants to do some tests on the multiple heavy golem target situation, I would greatly appreciate it!
Alternatively, I would love if Jon could chime in and tell us how the skill is supposed to work in terms of damage output?
Also, this testing is quite difficult as phantasm damage is not recorded in the combat log
Phew. Hopefully someone finds this helpful and will help me build on it to crack the nut that is the berserker!