Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing a mesmer for ages now, and I’ve just realised I have absolutely no idea how shatter damage is calculated. I get that it deals a ton of damage, it’s just that the tooltips and combat log seem to disagree.

For eg:

I’m in full exotic zerkers gear with illusionary persona equiped. Obviously that means I’m going to crit which will confuse my damage figures.

My mid wrack tooltip damage is listed as 630 / 850 / 1110. From that I’m guessing that there’s diminishing returns for each illusion, so the first does the most, and the next 2 only deal maybe a third the amount of damage as the first.

Hit 2 different mobs and did a 4 illusion mid wrack (including myself). My combat log lists 686/680/1649/717 damage on the first attempt, and 679/1592/698/1692 on the second. Presumably those are additive, and I’m doing around about 4k damage, including a few crits.

I’m guessing the numbers over a thousand are the crits, but why does each individual illusions seem to cause an equal amount of damage?

Secondary question – when illusions have had their target die, they seem to hang around a bit until they realise they should die. If I shatter them, does the actually cause damage? Or have I missed my opportunity when their target dies.

First off, yes, the ~1650ish hits are crits, consistent with having a close to 100% bonus crit damage (==2.5x as much as a regular hit). The tooltip damage listed is the TOTAL damage for the wrack, assuming all clones hit, and NOT counting your Persona shatter. It gets divided EQUALLY among the clones you have out. It also (according to the wiki) doesn’t take weapon damage into account properly, which may be why it’s lower than the actual damage. It’s also always an estimate since it doesn’t factor in enemy armor. And I’m not sure if the damage tooltip takes Mental Torment into account.

So as you can see, as the # of clones shattered goes up, the damage per clone goes down (630×1 / 425×2 / 370×3 going by the tooltip, multiply by ~1.85 for your actual combat log numbers). IP adds exactly one more instance of that much damage, so it becomes 630×2 / 425×3 / 370×4, again assuming all hit. Notice that this SIGNIFICANTLY boosts low-end damage (1 clone + IP is about as good as a 3-clone non-IP wrack), tailing off to a 33% bonus for the full 3-clone+IP hit.

Oh and secondary question – I’m pretty sure once the target dies those clones are off your “queue”, so they won’t cause shatter effects. I haven’t tested whether they proc ‘on-death’ effects though.. (cripple, random condition etc. from traits)

Clones dissipating from their targets dying will proc on-deaths, but are no longer available to be shattered. In some odd circumstances with a target stealthing then running out of range, illusions will lose their target and stand around waiting for a new target to latch on to. While they are standing around, you can use all shatters, though only distortion will really have an effect.

Thanks, very helpful responses. That’s very strange regarding the way it calculates and distributes the clone / shatter damage ahead of time when the skill is activated rather then when they hit their target. Odd implication – if you have 3 clones out, activate the skill, and only 2 hit their target, it does less damage than if you have 2 clones out and both of them hit their target, no?

I also wonder how it calculates and allocates clone damage if there are the clones have multiple targets. I suppose that means that having 2/3 clones hit one target and 1/3 hit another target will do less damage than if you just had 2 / 2 clones hit a single target.