Guild Wars 2

Sword clones only strike a single target, unlike the sword mainhand 1 attack, which hits in an arc. Same with spear clones.

Defender has 5.5k at level 80, all the others have 2.1k.

Flame.8096:

Not sure if this was said already, looked through the posts but couldn’t find it.

The trait “Dazzling,” which applies 3 seconds of vulnerability when you daze an enemy does not work with the sword skill “Counter Blade.”

Counter Blade is the chain of Illusionary Riposte

Yeah looks like it doesn’t work with Confounding Suggestions either. Good catch man

I tested this in pvp lobby with 1899 power, 30 dueling, berserker’s amulet/jewel and 6/6 rune of divinity, for a total of +62 critical damage. Using the defender I got 23 non-crits and 41 crits for mid-point damages of 171.5 non-crit and 365 crit. Which works out to crit being 213% of non-crit. That’s extremely close to the expected ratio. The data also fit the expected distribution for the defender (ie range of ±6% from mid-point) and the non-crit damage was pretty much exactly where expected, so it’s consistent with previous testing.

Then I recorded a single attack string from a warden under same conditions, it did 178 non-crit and 377 crit, for 212%.

So I’d probably say phantasms use +critical damage from gear.

Now, there’s always the open question of whether or not the tooltips for the various runes are actually correct. PvP Divinity runes, at least, seem to be accurate.

It looks like it’s doing about the same damage to me. Just eyeballing it, looks within 5%ish of where it was pre-patch.

Prelude.3817:

Not a bug, it’s the way the game calculates % increase and decrease. It’s not added, it’s progressive. 1% per point makes it:
100%-1%=99%
99%-(1% OF 99%)=98.1%
98.1%-(1% of 98.1%)=97.119%
etc…
basically you “lose” a bit each time you substract 1%.
That’s also the reason Mesmers get only 36% cd reduction on illusion summoning skills with both cd reduction traits (Illusioninst celerity and any weapon specific trait)
100%-20%=80%
80%-20%=64%

No, it doesn’t work like that. First of all, 0.99-(0.01*0.99) = 0.99 – 0.0099 = 0.9801. Second, you are basically saying that it’s exponential in that the final recharge rate is 0.99^(shred recharge). But 0.99^30 = 0.7397, and the observed decrease is 0.77. So the numbers don’t match.

Finally, if you time the recharge reduction traits, they’re additive not multiplicative like you are saying. You really do get -40%, not -36%. Phantasmal Swordsman really does have 12s recharge when stacking recharge traits, not 12.8 like you are indicating.

Yes, it does. The only things that illusions do not scale with are boon duration, condition duration, and vitality. They scale with everything else.

It was probably against a warrior using Frenzy. That’s another +50% damage.

It works fine. It’s just the tooltip is bugged and the base duration is 3s, not 4s. Here’s the durations I saw:

No domination, no equip, no master misdirect – 3.02s
No domination, +10% (2/6 Lyssa) equip, no master misdirect – 3.37s
No domination, +10% (2/6 Lyssa) +4% (2/6 Nightmare), no master misdirect – 3.5s
No domination, +10% (2/6 lyssa) +4% (2/6 Nightmare) +6% (4/6 Nightmare), no master misdirect – 3.9s
+30 domination, +10% (2/6 lyssa) +4% (2/6 Nightmare) +6% (4/6 Nightmare), no master misdirect – 4.8s
+30 domination, +10% (2/6 lyssa) +4% (2/6 Nightmare) +6% (4/6 Nightmare), with master misdirect – 5.7s
No domination, no equip, with master misdirect – 3.98s

MLieBennett.9031:

New Bug as of Oct 7: Illusion Trait for Shatter Reduction at 30 no longer gives 30% off CD for Shatter skills. Its around 23% off >.>;

Yeah, weird. Looks like with 30 Illusions Distortion is taking 46.1 seconds to recharge. Very weird.

I did some testing as well. Level 80, power 916, vs heavy golems using scepters:

Steady Weapon
1x 49
2x 38 per hit
3x 33 per hit

PvP Weapon
1x 386.5
2x 299.5 per hit
3x 260 per hit

As reference: Tooltip
1x 280
2x 378 in total
3x 492 in total

So it looks like the tooltip is messed up in two ways:
1. The tooltip damage from mind wrack isn’t taking into account weapon damage, even though mind wrack is a weapon attack. Also, the internal weapon damage mind wrack is using for its tooltip is really weird (average weapon strength 604 at level 80? It should be either 581 or 638.)
2. The scaling with phantasms is wrong. It looks the 1x tooltip should say 244 instead of 280 at level 80.

Basically, mind wrack does twice as much damage with 3 phantasms as with 1, and it scales with weapon strength. The tooltip doesn’t reflect that.

edit: Mental Torment was working fine when I tested it today.

gorma.3725:

Does the same apply to confusion applied via ethereal field + projectile finisher?

Mirror Blade: yes
Phantasmal Duelist, Phantasmal Warden, and Phantasmal Berserker: no

Nightmare runes have bugged tooltip. They provide +6% and +14% for 2/6 and 4/6, meaning you can get +30% duration from runes in total.

Zid.4196:

I suspect the reason we’re seeing ~7 secs instead of 5 is that, judging by the patch notes, ANet was unaware of the 1.6 delay between attacks that existed before.

There’s also the issue of how precisely to measure the duration of an effect. While it’s straightforward to measure the time it takes for the Warden to do all 12 of its hits, it is substantially less straightforward to measure the amount of time it provides a projectile shield. The graphical effect and the projectile shield do not necessarily line up perfectly, and it’s quite possible that the effect is there for a second or two after the graphics have stopped.

re: phantasmal haste
The stickied thread is mostly pretty terrible. The wiki is substantially more accurate.

re: levelling
I levelled with a couple of different builds
*Inspiration heavy reflection build, using warden as a big dps move. This works pretty well; focus with reflection is very strong in general pve. Remember that the Warden can only hit 3 mobs at a time though!
*A clone-on-death build, using scepter/sword for high clone generation. Having a bunch of blocks makes this build really pretty good against single mobs. It can handle champs and +9 normal mobs fine… so long as they are single. Also doesn’t rely on kiting or much movement so it’s good for close quarters.
*High-power shatter build using GS and Sword/focus. Trait dueling for clone on dodge. I feel like the shatter build is probably the most efficient for general PVE, but you need a lot of traits (for 20 dueling and then a bunch in illusions for faster shatters) to make it work.

Playing with a tanky condition Staff build also works pretty well, but does better when you are grinding down groups of 3-6 mobs all by yourself.

I tested Empowered Illusions and Phantasmal Strength on 2012.09.20. They stacked then, so it’s quite likely they stack now. I have not tested functionality of Compounding Power at all, so no idea there.

The little icon is a buff called “Illusion of Defense”. Every time the defender attacks, it gives that little defensive buff to all allies within 600 range of it. And it will make an attack every time it comes off cooldown even if it’s not near an enemy—it doesn’t need to hit anything to grant the defense buff. Maybe you were not quite close enough to the defender when it attacked and you didn’t get the buff?

While in general the defender works best if you are up close, it also defends your other illusions. So if you have, say, a swordsman and a warden up close attacking, it can be worthwhile to throw out a defender so as to keep your dps phantasms alive a bit longer. Inspiration 15 is also helpful in that scenario, especially with high-life mobs.

You should test it and let us know

Illusions have the mesmer’s armor (toughness + defense), power, precision, condition damage, critical damage bonus and healing. They get no benefit from the mesmer’s vitality, condition duration, boon duration or weapon damage.

SuburbanLion.8095:

That’s the part that’s bothering me. If phantasm damage is not based on weapon damage, like every other one of our weapon skills, then how exactly is it calculated? It doesn’t seem to stabilize when using steady weapons either. It’s almost like the phantasm comes equipped its own weapon. I can’t be the only one that’s curious about how this works. Am I?

It’s actually pretty cute! They really do come equipped with their own weapons. You know how each weapon has its own characteristic damage range? Like how 1h axes and rifles go +-10% around their average, but daggers go +-3%? Well if you look at the damage range on phantasms it turns out they they have the same damage range of whatever weapon it looks like they are using. So like warden is +-10% (1h axe) but duelist is +-8% (pistol) etc.

SuburbanLion.8095:

That’s helpful information to know. It also seems like utility skills in general follow a different formula that’s independent of weapon damage. i.e. Mantra of Pain hits about the same with both normal and steady weapons.

Yeah some skills in general are just not affected by weapon damage. My personal hypothesis (mostly based around phantasms) is that they come with their own internal weapon that is essentially an at-level white weapon of a given type. I haven’t been able to verifiy this one way or the other, because precisely how skills’ damage scale with level is a lot less obvious than how they scale with anything else.

SuburbanLion.8095:

I checked last night and the wiki numbers do reflect the tooltips with 916 power for the staff and greatsword. The only inconsistencies were with the offhand and utility phantasms. The tooltips change based on your weapon damage and power, so the numbers change depending on what weapon you have equipped because each weapon has a slightly different damage range.

Let me preface this by saying that the tooltip damages for all the phantasms are useless and not reflective at all of what the phantasms do. Having said that, what specifically were you seeing that didn’t match? Because while the tooltip damages for all weapon phantasms are (erroneously) adjusted per weapon strength, the utility phantasms are not. None should be, since phantasms’ damage is completely unaffected by weapon strength.

I am not seeing any phantasm tooltip damages that differ from what the wiki lists.

SuburbanLion.8095:

What I’m actually looking for is the skill coefficients for the phantasms. The formula that’s been floating around since beta is: Base Damage = (Power)(Weapon Damage)(Skill Coefficient)/(Target’s Armor). If we could determine the skill coefficients for the phantasms, this would help answer questions about what stats to gear. Higher skill coefficients and low attack rates lend themselves to straight Power, while low skill coefficients and high attack rates lend themselves to Precision/Condition Damage with Sharper Images.

How would knowing the damage coefficient be any different from just knowing the tooltip damage? I see no information that the skill coefficient gives you that the tooltip damage—assuming it is correct!—does not. Just replace everything you said about coefficients with “damage” and it holds true. And is presented to you conveniently in the UI.

Well, regardless. If you want to calculate skill coefficients, the level 80 tooltip damage formula is this:
tooltip damage = (power)(average weapon strength)(coefficient)/2595

2595 also happens to be the armor of the heavy golems in the pvp lobby, so tooltip damages—again, when they are accurate—reflect how much damage you will do on average to the heavy golems.

I’m not confirming either of these two bugs:

MLieBennett.9031:

After my hiccup last time, I am making sure the bug I’m mentioning is actually there.

1) Master of Misdirection (Illusion Adept) does not affect the duration of Confusion from either Cry of Frustration or Illusionary Retribution. Tested, and retested. Domination’s Condition Duration affects both, but not Master of Misdirection.

My data shows the following durations (I only did low numbers of reps so precision is not very good):
No domination, no equip, no master misdirect – 3.02s
No domination, +10% (2/6 Lyssa) equip, no master misdirect – 3.37s
No domination, +10% (2/6 Lyssa) +4% (2/6 Nightmare), no master misdirect – 3.5s
No domination, +10% (2/6 lyssa) +4% (2/6 Nightmare) +6% (4/6 Nightmare), no master misdirect – 3.9s
+30 domination, +10% (2/6 lyssa) +4% (2/6 Nightmare) +6% (4/6 Nightmare), no master misdirect – 4.8s
+30 domination, +10% (2/6 lyssa) +4% (2/6 Nightmare) +6% (4/6 Nightmare), with master misdirect – 5.7s
No domination, no equip, with master misdirect – 3.98s

So it would appear that:
1) Master of Misdirection works like it’s supposed to with Cry of Frustration and Illusionary Retribution.
2) 4/6 Nightmare rune bonus is more like 15% rather than 6%.
3) Base confusion duration on Cry of Frustration and Illusionary Retribution is 3s, not 4s as the tooltip indicates.

MLieBennett.9031:

2) The Trait Confounding Suggestions (Domination Grandmaster XII) would not work for me. Whether I used the shatter Distraction, Mantra of Distraction, or Off-hand sword’s Counter Blade.

It looks like what Confounding Suggestions is doing is giving all dazes a 50% chance to turn into stuns. When you use the stun/daze on the pistol, you can see on the normal daze target that it will sometimes become a 2s stun instead of a 2s daze. So there’s still only one icon there, but it will be a stun instead of a daze; daze and stun have the same icon so perhaps that was the issue?

I collected some data on phantasm damage and am going to update the wiki. If you get numbers that don’t agree with mine, let me know.

I’ll try to get solid skill use times on clones probably tomorrow.

A couple of things:

The primary source of data that the wiki uses to document skills are the in-game tooltips. The wiki is inconsistent about multi-hit skills because the in-game tooltips are inconsistent. As those tooltips get updated and fixed, the wiki will become more consistent.

Second, the tooltip damage values for all the phantasms has been more or less nonsense since the first beta weekend. Those things have never been close to accurate. And it’s important to remember that while tooltip damages take into account current power as well as your current weapon strength, phantasms only take into account current power. Not a huge deal, assuming you have a relatively standardized test process, but it’s something to keep in mind.

Finally, if you update the wiki with clarifications or damage information (and all that should go under “notes” until the in-game tooltips change), remember that the standard setup is level 80 with no traits, 916 power and a standard PvP weapon equipped.

Malakree.5912:

capric.1896:

It was still giving 300% health as of last night. It never got fixed. If your illusions can stay up long enough to get the signet buff, they are quite tough.

I’m sure they said they fixed that. I definitely don’t feel like it’s still active.

They did indeed say that. You should test it yourself.

Malakree.5912:

I have to admit, I kinda wish they’d reimpliment the 300% hp buff from signet of illusions in dungeons as it made your clones resistant to random aoe kitten, also made them really good for soloing. Was OP as sin in PvP though.

It was still giving 300% health as of last night. It never got fixed. If your illusions can stay up long enough to get the signet buff, they are quite tough.

That’s incorrect. Only the tooltips are bugged. All the weapon-based phantasms can reach -40% cooldown by stacking Illusionists Celerity and the weapon-specific cooldown reduction trait.

I did my testing in the training part of the PvP lobby. The mobs that are in the control points hit very weakly and are good for estimating phantasm and clone health.

Signet of Illusions is still granting +200% health to all phantasms and clones.