Guild Wars 2

hi all
what does this gm trait in illusions mean?
can somebody give me a concret example?

thanks

it mean the you are act like a clone regarding your shatter f1-f4 skills

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Illusionary_Persona
E. g. Mind Wrack will do additional damage near you like you being a clone/phantasm.

What the others said. F1 counts you as an illusion and damages around you, F2 confuses around you, F3 dazes a nearby target, F4 gives you an extra second of Distortion.

Illusionary Persona allows you do up to 4 illusion shatters instead of 3 and (more importantly) a 1 illusion shatter even if you don’t have any illusions at all.

The easiest way to demonstrate this is to go to Heart of the Mists and find an unused training golem. Try the following without Illusionary Persona:

Stand near the golem, target it and enter combat. Without any clones or phantasms out, use all of your shatters. They will all go on 4 second cooldowns with no effect.

Now trait Illusionary Persona and repeat the steps above. You will deal damage from Mind Wrack, apply confusion on Cry of Frustration, apply a 1 second daze on Diversion and you will be invulnerable for 1 second thanks to Distortion. All of this without having to pop a single clone. This is because for the purpose of shatter, Illusionary Persona counts you as a persistent illusion.

Without Illusionary Persona you need at least 1 live clone to gain the effect of a shatter. What if you wanted to use 2 shatters back to back? You can’t because you need to pop at least one clone between shatters.

The implications of this are profound in terms of how you can play Mesmer.

If you are doing PvP and one of your teammates is getting stomped, as long as you can get inside 360 range, you can interrupt the stomp with your Diversion, even with no clones/phantasms out.

Lets reverse the roles. You get a Necro into downed state, you have 3 clones out and you are ready to stomp. What happens? The Necro’s teammates throw a tonne of downed cleave on you, instantly killing your clones a micro second before you hit Distortion. It goes on a 4 second cooldown, you dont get any invulnerability, you eat a tonne of damage and you get feared off the Necro.

With Illusionary Persona your Diversion and Distortion are a force to be reckoned with. You can interrupt anything at any time in a 360 radius around your character by using Diversion, provided it does not have immunity to daze. You can see a D/P Thief leaping through black powder and interrupt heartseeker on reaction with your daze, denying them stealth and wasting a tonne of initiative.

If you are getting ganked/focus fired, you can block the damage burst on reaction using your Distortion. You don’t need a clone out. You don’t need to worry about your clones getting cleaved down. Its a guaranteed invuln, any where, any time.

Go back to the training dummy and enter combat. Pop 3 clones and use your Mind Wrack. Check your combat log and you will notice that Mind Wrack hits 4 times instead of 3.

If taking Shattered Concentration this means you can rip a maximum of 4 boons per shatter instead of 3 and you can rip 1 boon having already shattered all your illusions with Mind Wrack.

Any Mesmer build that utilizes shatter mechanics pays a heavy price for dropping Illusionary Persona. More than that, it requires a whole different approach to playing.

It’s our strongest gm in the game and rekts fools!

And pressing F1, F2, F3, F4 gives nice visual effects around your mesmer.

ok thanks all for the explanation
now i do understand and i see its a very powerfull trait!
it gives way more survivability.

good weekend

Honestly, I wish ANet would either make IP a default characteristic of the class and replace it with another GM or move deceptive evasion to a lower portion of the dueling tree (or to the illusions tree perhaps). I imagine that would create a noticeable increase in “build diversity” for mesmers even if our trait lines are still pretty crappy overall. One can only dream….

Keep in mind that the damage per illusion gets reduced for every additional illusion you’re about to shatter with F1. But you always count as a single illusion wich is a huge damage increase for this weak skill.

Xyonon.3987:

Keep in mind that the damage per illusion gets reduced for every additional illusion you’re about to shatter with F1. But you always count as a single illusion wich is a huge damage increase for this weak skill.

Could you clarify what you mean?

I’m curious about mes, and am currently trying to better understand shatter.

If you have one illusion out and use Mind Wrack, it’ll hit for more than having 2 or 3 illusions out.

So if you use MW with 1 illusion, it’ll hit for 1,257 damage but if you have 3 illusions out and use MW, each illusion will hit for 811 damage.

Each illusion has their own critical chance with MW so your damage spike is higher with 3 illusions but if you have an enemy with low health, you can use Mind Wrack and still utilize IP and don’t need to semi-ramp up clones to get a full 3-4 hit MW on them.

What I actually ment is that you yourself won’t affect this mechanic and your illusionary persona will neither reduce the damage of other illusions, nor reduce itself dmg.

So lets say:
1 clone = 1000 dmg
2 clones = 2x 750 dmg
3 clones = 3x 500 dmg

with persona it’s the same but you can add a +1000 dmg from yourself on each of them.