Guild Wars 2

Phantasms are often described as “a physical manifestation of a Hex”, so basically a DoT attack that has a physical form instead of a UI form/icon.

Regular DoTs are affected by the player’s Boons and buffs, but Phantasms need the Boons and buffs applied to themselves.

Why is it still not that Phantasms automatically share any and all Boons and buffs that the Mesmer himself/herself receives? Right now it is like “you apply Bleeds and they are affected by e.g. Might, but Torment needs its own Might stacks instead to be more effective”, which makes no sense?

Phantasms sharing Boons and buffs with the Mesmer should be incorporated as a baseline, or am I missing something?

In my opinion, phantasms should share all boons that we get baseline. For effects like alacrity/spotter/banners, there should be a trait we can pick that also grants all phantasms the effects that are placed on us (barring stealth).

This keeps coming up

1. Might when applied to Mesmer does effect Phantasms/Illusions. Fury doesn’t but there is already a trait that gives fury to phantasms. % modifiers like frost spirit or scholar runes don’t, but this really doesn’t matter because…

2. Our damage being tied up with Phantasms is a much bigger problem then the actual dps itself. This is why condi Mesmer isn’t used even though its dps isn’t terrible, though not really amazing either.

Might affects them, quickness and fury do not. Nor do aegis/protection that is applied to us. And considering how vital they are to our DPS and how easy they are to kill, there isn’t a reason to not give them aegis and protection that we get ourselves.

OriOri.8724:

Might affects them, quickness and fury do not. Nor do aegis/protection that is applied to us. And considering how vital they are to our DPS and how easy they are to kill, there isn’t a reason to not give them aegis and protection that we get ourselves.

Quickness is largely pointless for phantasms. The only phantasm that gets a positive effect is the duelist, all others either are unaffected or negatively affected. Since they’re limited by cooldowns, not skill animations, quickness does very little. For wardens, it lowers uptime on the projectile denial.

Fury is traitable.

Aegis and protection would be pointless. In PvE they don’t need it. In wvw or PvP, they take far too much damage and have far too little life for aegis or protection to make a difference. The problem is conceptual, it can’t be fixed with a band-aid like that.

Fay.2357:

Aegis and protection would be pointless. In PvE they don’t need it. In wvw or PvP, they take far too much damage and have far too little life for aegis or protection to make a difference. The problem is conceptual, it can’t be fixed with a band-aid like that.

Well… we got Protected Phantasms. It’s just that nobody can effort picking it. It could easily be made baseline with Protected Phantasms/Illusions instead granting them Distortion on attack. That would be a cool and potentially GM-worthy trait.

It would screw up Persisting Images, though.

@Fay – I still think sharing our boons with phantasms should be baseline.

For one, I know we can trait fury. But with how much of our damage comes from phantasms we shouldn’t have to trait for fury to affect them. What other classes in the game have to trait just for fury to be fully applied to their damage? Rev doesn’t. Guard doesn’t. War doesn’t. Elementalist doesn’t. Thief doesn’t. Engi doesn’t. Ranger doesn’t since they can share fury with their pet via We heal as one. Why is it that mesmer alone has to trait to get fury to be fully applied to our damage? It should be baseline, like it is for other classes. It just doesn’t make sense that when we get fury it only affects a small portion of our damage, and ignores the rest. No other class has to take an entire traitline just to make Fury apply to all of their damage. Most of them don’t have to do anything, and with Rangers its as simple as taking a healing skill, it doesn’t lock them into a specific trait to do so.

Another issue with this is that like you said, a lot of boons won’t affect them at all, so why shouldn’t they be shared baseline? Quickness will make duelist better, will make iWarden worse, and will have no effect on the other phantasms. So why isn’t it just shared baseline? iWarden’s attack can even be slowed up if that becomes and issue, so that it still has decent uptime even while under the effects of quickness. Or, alternatively, Warden’s Feedback could lengthen the duration of the attack so that while underquickness its the same duration as now.

Lastly, I agree that aegis and prot are effectively useless on a phantasm right now. In PvE it won’t matter. And in PvP it won’t make enough of a difference. Well first, phantasms should take reduced damage from indirect attacks in PvP as well, even if it isn’t as reduced as it is in PvE. Secondly, like you said, it won’t make much of a difference, so why not have it be baseline?