Guild Wars 2

Was digging around gw2’s memory and found a lot of useless but quite interesting things. One of them was when I was watching ranger pets I found that they have their own core stats that change accordingly depending on which boons pets have, especially might and fury, just like you’d expect a real player character to behave. Mesmer phantasms ALSO DO have their own stats and similar structure but majority of it is completely ignored.

Duelist/Defender/Disenchanter/Warlock/Berserker:
- 1,580 power

Swordsman/Warden
- 3,160 power

All Phantasms
- 1,374 precision
- 1,374 toughness
- 1,374 vitality
- 0 ferocity
- 640 healing
- 800 condition damage

None of the stats scale neither when mesmer nor phantasms gain any of the boons, that’s including the phantasms specific traits such as fury and health boost. It’s as if ANet devs simply copy/pasted ranger pet coding, commented out most of the real interactions, and then replaced most of it with mesmer core stats. From coding standpoint it would make sense as ranger pets there is only one out at a time and usually aren’t swapped too often and mesmer illusions on the other hand are constantly summoned and shattered/killed increasing the workload on the servers.

Finally, from the mess I was seeing when monitoring phantasms/clones and noting that Mesmer class was the last one to be introduced 2 years ago I can only assume that the dev’s half kittened the whole mesmer class programming just to get the game out in time for launch without properly thinking everything through, which is now proving to be quite difficult to maintain without introducing odd bugs. This could very well explain why we have so many bugs that are simply being ignored.

None of this surprises me even the littlest bit.

I always had that weird feeling that those people who designed mesmer and those who work at the ANet dev team are two totally different groups of people, and since launch mesmer was more of a “black box” for ANet, so they did not actually know how it works, how to fix bugs and were afraid of making it too powerful and thus preferred to nerf more along with attempts to fix the bugs.

But your explanation makes much more sense.

frifox.5283:

None of the stats scale neither when mesmer nor phantasms gain any of the boons, that’s including the phantasms specific traits such as fury and health boost.

So what does that mean exactly? Is it just trash code that’s not used at all?
Any idea how phantasm stats/damage is actually calculated if not from these numbers?

Yes, garbage code.

honestly i think in the beginning there was a complete different balance team. i think balance was not perfect of course but it was better before they started treating wvw and spvp the same way. its not the same game mode and need separate balancing like they did in the beginning. i think devs reached a point where they dont know what to do with the mes. it seems they dont wanna buff us at all cause they are scarred. also they are to proud to revert certain things they screwed up. if i was a dev i would not be afraid of unnerfing something or i would just have reverted the iwarden back to its previous state etc.
i just feel like the devs also only see the 1v1 performance of a mes and roaming performance. they refuse to see issues. they rather nerf us then buff us. cause they play spvp and therefor dislike mes.
anet needs fresh non bias balance people. someone that doesnt know the game and goes ahead and analizes every game mode and how each class performs in it.someone that doesnt main any of the classes. someone neutral.

Correction. Looks like ANet copy/pasted the interaction from Thieves. Tested the Thieves Guild elite and what do you know, the two summoned thieves core stats are EXACTLY same as what our phantasms have, except their stats do change when buffed as expected from a properly coded summon.

I’d just like to point out that all the damage calculations will almost certainly be done server side. Given that why on earth would anet go to the (wasted) effort of synchronising client side stats of AI entities with server side ones? There are very real costs for doing so (network bandwidth, code complexity) for seemingly no benefit.

Who knows, maybe the dev client actually uses that info for debugging or something. I’m long done with justifying ANet’s logic. Sometimes it just doesn’t make any sense.