Guild Wars 2

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.

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.

Stun breaks. Use one in time, get de-stunned, and then do something to avoid the rest of the attack. For eg, stun break mirror images, then blurred frenzy + shatter. The other option, which you don’t have, is to use illusionary persona for the 1 second stun / invulnerability.

I notice other people (in wvw videos) seem to be doing much more damage than I am. For eg, other people seem to do 2-3k for each greatsword 1, whereas I’m only doing 1k damage at most (bit more for a critical), although confusingly the number on the tooltip only says about 750 or so.

I’m currently using berserker rares only, with green accessories, and in a 20-20-0-0-30 build.

Is exotic gear really that much better? I notice from a stats perspective it only seems ~20% better than what I’ve currently good (more for accessories of course), but surely not to the extent of double the damage? Can somebody explain?