The mechanics of Effigy

Can someone explain clearly how this work, because I am hearing conflicting information from people in the chat.

My understanding is that the enemy creates a totem somewhere that is linked to you and performs a taunt, attracting enemies to attack it.

Some people said their minions would attack it for some reason and get the character killed. Is this true?

Some people said the player can attack the effigy as well and get their damage reflected. Is this true?

How do you die from this exactly? Does your own life have to reach zero, or can the effigy die as well, resulting in your death? Do your own defenses matter at all when confronted with Effigy? Is the damage done to you based on the percentage of damage done to the effigy? For example, if the effigy has taken 50% damage, do you take 50% damage? What if you heal the damage done to you, what happens to the effigy?

I've encountered a few effigies as well but I was able to run away in time and took no damage. Is it risky to jump wipe out everything on screen if there is an effigy? How do you deal with effigy in delve, blight, incursion, etc? There's just way too many things going on.

From what I've been hearing, this mod is extremely broken but a lot of people are saying conflicting things about how it behaves.

I'd really like to know, so I don't rip to this mechanic. I'm sure someone does?

From my experience with it in league, is it creates a totem of you linked to you.

--If you are within a certain distance of the totem, all damage dealt to it is shunted to you.

--You cannot damage the totem yourself, but minions might be able to, didn't check this since I wasn't running a minion build.

--It's not "reflected" damage despite the wording, so 100% reduced reflected damage won't protect you.

--The link between you and the effigy is invisible, so you get to discover by trial and error how far away you need to run when you first identify this rare. Anything that increases monster area of effect may make it virtually impossible to stay out of linkage range and still deal damage (or it could be that you're taking both effigy-redirected damage AND collateral damage from the pack/mob.)

Your safest option is to leave the map as soon as you begin taking damage from an unknown source: if you see no ground effects, no projectiles, no mobs nearby, and no other cues, it may well be you've inadvertently stumbled into aggro range of a rare monster with this ability. And because monsters this league tend to have a LOT of hasted as well, outrunning it is not really an option.

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crunkatog wrote:

--The link between you and the effigy is invisible, so you get to discover by trial and error how far away you need to run when you first identify this rare.

I'm fairly sure that the link is identified by a red tether. I've seen it a few times and from my experience when I ran away that tether disappeared.

I'll update since an Effigy has changed a bit and the mechanics behind this have been officially clarified.

– An Effigy summons at the player's location and links to the player.
– The Effigy is immune to damage for 2 seconds after linking.
– After 2 seconds the Effigy can taunt Enemies to attack it.
– While linked 50% of damage from Hits taken by the Effigy is also taken by the player as reflected damage.
– Running away from the Effigy will sever the link between it and the player. The link is visible, it's red.
– The Effigy is allied to you. You and your allies (including minions) can't damage it. This excludes cases where your totems/etc and minions are able to kill you.

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Emil_kof wrote:

How do you die from this exactly? Does your own life have to reach zero, or can the effigy die as well, resulting in your death? Do your own defenses matter at all when confronted with Effigy? Is the damage done to you based on the percentage of damage done to the effigy? For example, if the effigy has taken 50% damage, do you take 50% damage? What if you heal the damage done to you, what happens to the effigy?

It's nothing more than just an object that redirects (reflects) the damage it takes to you. Effigy's life pool is independed of yours. All defence layers work as usual, if monsters deal phys damage with attacks to the Effigy, you can block/evade/reduce by armour/etc it. Reflected damage mitigations also work for matched damage types. Having "Cannot take Reflected Elemental Damage" won't save you if monsters attacking the Effigy use physical or chaos hits.