Illusion Phantom Army Question

[Jaynen]

On large packs I still seem to draw aggro off the phantom army is this just a number of enemies issue? Or is there some other trick to getting the mobs to attack PA vs you? When you get "perma" does it still resummon the guys and thus drop aggro and have to re-establish or does it refresh the current pets?

[Coyote]

Perma-PA means that you can summon the next set before the first expires, which causes the first set to drop out of existence. It does not cause the first set to have their duration extended.

 

You only have 3 decoys, and while each of them Taunts with its attacks, that Taunt lasts for a limited time.. if you have 6 mobs, then the decoys have to spread their attacks around efficiently to maintain aggro. If an enemy mob gets lucky and no decoy attacks it for some time, the Taunt effect from the last hit fades, and at this point it's likely that any AoE debuffs that you have put up will cause it to look at you for its next target. The more mobs there are, the more likely this is to happen. PA is a very useful alpha-strike absorbing power, and it can hold aggro on smaller mobs, but its control abilities do not scale well with spawn size.

[Frosticus]

Basically you are supposed to draw attention with PA and hold everyone else with spec terror meaning that the only time they retaliate is when hit by PA. You are also supposed to lower your threat ranking with superior invis, so they seek others before you.

 

In practice that has pretty mixed results so prepare to pull aggro vs large spawns

[DSorrow]

What the other guys said. PA is wildly inconsistent when dealing with large packs especially if you toss in area of effect attacks/debuffs that might draw the attention of anything that wasn't very recently hit in the face by a decoy.