Arelith

Hey there!
I've been wondering about the henchman you can summon with the epic focus illusion feat for some time now. It is supposed to make a copy of your character in terms of stats. Does this include buffs? And if so, does it retain the duration of those buffs?

If it works like the shadow dancer summon, it copies whatever your stats, feats, and weapons are when you summon it. Even if you're buffed, whatever the stat happens to be is treated like it's permanent. So what you can do is cast Bull's Strength on yourself, summon, and then cast Bull's Strength on the illusion.

Of course, that's IF it works like the shadowdancer. I could be wrong, as I haven't tested it.

It keeps a fair few buffs, but there's also a lot of scripting in place to prevent it from being that strong in combat (e.g. lots of feats, abilities, spells are all stripped, and properties on items).

It's mostly an RP tool with some situational use as a brief distraction in combat. I wouldn't build around it.

I'd really like to see a build with this clone ability as a core.

Cleric (to clone armor, weapon, hp?) with ESF Illusion, ESF transmutation for the zoo spells, ...

Can someone try something ? I am too new to the game to optimize a build like this.
I'd like to this a good version of this average build.

Tx

See above. It's really not worth building around. It's an RP tool and not even a great one (if you could leave it somewhere with a message to give anyone who clicked on it, or if you could inhabit it like a familiar and go to different areas as an illusion-- THAT would be great.) In combat it's basically a decoy, cool for RP but not really useful.

If you want a character with a clone who can fight go Shadowdancer. It's extremely strong. Can't really be a caster that way unfortunately, not even Shadowmage.