As known, Spirit Barrage - Phantasms are pets.
Zunimassa’s 6 piece bonus gives 15000% damage bonus for all pets.
But it doesn’t. I tested it by hitting mobs with different spenders, like Spirit Barrage itself, or Haunt, etc. It still doesn’t work.
Why?
My guess is that the Zuni bonus is separate multiplier category from your regular pet damage bonus. The phantasms are only calculating based on that regular pet bonus damage and ignoring Zuni, unlike all your other pets.
It’s important to note that Phantasms were never intended to be pets, they only benefit from regular pet damage because of a bug. The devs chose not to patch it because it wasn’t game-breaking and it was useful component of SB builds.
Because WD pets have health bars and are targetable (by enemies) unlike phantasms. Phantasms are like wizard Hydras to put it in context, they exist and deal damage in their own way, but enemies can’t interact with them.
Necro has both type of pets as well, skeletons are targetable and golem, while mages are untargetable.
Fetishes are also targetable (at least those summoned by Fetish Army skill or w/e is called, those summoned by Belt of Transcendence or passive skills might not be).
hmm then how come my mage can be frozen by enemy affix ?
am i mistaken ?
Both Enforcer and Mask of Jeram affect phantasms, and both use the same wording as Zuni’s: “your pets”.
Blizz needs to either change the wording of the Zuni 6-pce bonus, actually make it affect phantasms, or decouple phantasms from pet bonuses entirely; as it stands, the inconsistency is really tacky and disappointing.
They both may say that boost pet damage, but that does not mean that the Zuni bonus uses the same multiplier category that they do. It’s similar to Ring of Emptiness not effecting pet damage – it’s a separate category of multiplier from other sources of bonus damage, one that’s not being factored into the equation when pets hit enemies.
As I said above, Phantasms are only benefiting from normal pet damage because of a bug, not by design like true pets are. That leads to some confusion sure, but fixing it would seriously nerf SB builds, and Zuni darts doesn’t need pet damage to be strong, so they left it in.
Both SB and Darts are powerful builds, with or without their sets, so it’s not really a problem.
So, instead of fixing the inconsistency they just removed the pet damage bonus from phantasms…
Because Phantasms were never meant to be treated as pets. Blizzard has confirmed that Phantasms benefitting from pet bonuses was unintentional, in other words it was a bug. They did fix it just unusually late, this bug was known to and confirmed by Blizzard ages ago.
Okay, they fixed a “bug”, but this heavily nerfed the build (obviously) and they have not buffed a single item to compensate that.
Despite the “heavy” nerf the build is still more powerful than Blizzard’s design target power level. It’s still very powerful.
I don’t understand why people are moaning about the change. The build was ridiculously OP, the nerf was necessary. It’s still somewhat OP.
Maybe its “op” if you are a bazillion paragon level. But with paragon 1300 I can barely do GR105, or 110 with super luck.
And my LoD Meteor Wizard can do GR105 much, much, much easier and quicker.