Combat dummies exist so that you can test your damage and mechanics. However, they don’t interact with various skill mechanics in the same way as enemies.
Here’s some example testing I just did on my Mage:
From this video:
- The Zap proc from Enchant Weapon’s Conduit node will target combat dummies, but the Zap proc from Static’s Overload node will not.
- Meteors from Harbinger of Stars will never be triggered on combat dummies, no matter how many times you crit them.
Both of these work normally against actual enemies (see the monolith testing in the second part of the video), it’s just combat dummies that have problems. I’m sure these are far from the only skill mechanics that have weird exceptions for combat dummies, just the ones I noticed on my build.
Unfortunately, this means that combat dummies are useless for their intended purpose. If you want to know how something works, and you go test it on combat dummies and find out that it doesn’t work, have you learned the answer to whatever you were testing? Or have you just found another way that combat dummies are weird? In order to find out, you have to go test it against actual enemies, which defeats the purpose of having combat dummies in the first place.
Please change combat dummies to reliably behave like actual enemies, or else just remove them from the game so they don’t mislead people by screwing up testing.
edit If this is getting treated as a bug report, then it should include my log file; here it is:
Player.log.zip (1.4 MB)
