Guild Wars 2

So I’m really enjoying mesmer, but I’m a little confused about the illusion mechanics. It seems like, even if you’re in combat, as soon as your current target dies, your illusions go away. So if you pull 3 enemies and you’ve only finished fighting the first, all the illusions go away. However, if you target the next enemy before the first one dies, you can kill off the first one with some AoE and the illusions stay. Is this working as designed? It just seems really odd.

It’s my understanding that this is working as intended.

Each illusion is an NPC pet that persists only as long as the target on which it was cast remains alive.

As an example, let’s say you summon two illusions while targetting an enemy and then summon another illusion while targetting a second enemy. The death of the first enemy will cause the first two illusions to disappear, but your third will remain alive, still kicking the second enemy closer to death.

One way I think is helpful to look at them is almost as a pet class functioning in reverse. The Mesmer summons pets attached to the target, rather than as their own companions or constructions.

While this can make things a bit awkward when we have traits or mechanics that reward maintaining or building up illusions as if they were our own resources, it can also make for some interesting tactical choices as you mentioned. For example, sometimes it is better to cast illusions on multiple targets to ensure that at least some of them remain alive for a longer time. Another consequence is that sometimes it can often be worthwhile shredding all of your pets (even on multiple targets) when one of their hosts is close to death – you might actually cause more overall damage than letting half of them just disappear.

Anyway, I hope I understood your question and this is helpful!

illusions die if they are directly killed or if their target dies.
illusions don’t change targets, they only attack the enemy that was targeted when the skill that summoned the illusion was used.