Guild Wars 2

With this patch they disabled the use of stacking sigils by having one on your underwater weapon. RIP in peace, max efficiency.

I hope my bloodlust sigil was at least in an exotic aquatic weapon.

Yeah, it’s very annoying for Ele. You can still stack with Thief, War, Guard, Mes, Ranger though – you just stack with one wep set, then camp the other set for combat.

eg. Thief: dagger force/dagger night for combat, sword bloodlust/pistol force for stacking. Unless you need interrupts, you camp d/d for bosses, so you can keep your stacks that way without losing dmg.

Or you just kittening suck it up for once and use other kittening sigils. Gosh. The hassle some people inflict on themselves, I swear it…

So you need a copy of the stacking sigil on an equipped land weapon, and a copy of the stacking sigil on an equipped underwater weapon, in order for stacks to persist from one medium to the other?

Zaxares.5419:

So you need a copy of the stacking sigil on an equipped land weapon, and a copy of the stacking sigil on an equipped underwater weapon, in order for stacks to persist from one medium to the other?

No. After April 15th you used to be able to keep sigil stacks after unequipping your stacking weapons if you had a stacking sigil on your water weapon. They changed/fixed (however you wanna look at it) that. Only way to keep stacks now is to keep a stacking sigil equipped on your land weapons at all times. Personally I’m moving on. Its too much of a hassle now.

Ah. Thanks for the explanation. Luckily it makes no difference for me then. I do have multiple weapon sets, but I’ve structured them in a way so my landbound stacking sigil was always equipped.

What happens if you go underwater and back?
Do you lose stacks?
I hope we didn t have the usual ANET “fix” breaking more than it fix.

LordByron.8369:

What happens if you go underwater and back?
Do you lose stacks?
I hope we didn t have the usual ANET “fix” breaking more than it fix.

Anet does not dissapoint:

You lose stacks. Unless you got your stacks underwater, I believe. Why? No idea.

So they replaced a bug by another bug. GG.

They separated the underwater and land weapons for this. It was the only possible solution. And i guess i can see why they didnt mind doing it this way. Its not like underwater combat is popular or common anyway. What annoys me is why did they feel it needed nerfing? Its not like the sigils were overpowered and pretty much noone used them in dungeons unless doing a solo lupi. With this change they have made stacking sigils completely useless. If their reason for changing it was wvw then thats a huge joke. Balancing zerg content, pls anet.

I agree with spoj.

I was pretty kittening mad when I found out they changed this too. Every single change yesterday was for the better EXCEPT this. Making me hit kitten damage is not going to make me happy.

Purple Miku.7032:

I agree with spoj.

I was pretty kittening mad when I found out they changed this too. Every single change yesterday was for the better EXCEPT this. Making me hit kitten damage is not going to make me happy.

Warrior meta build is probably least hurt by this. Camp Greatsword with Slaying + Force, offhand is sword+warhorn with a stacking sigil. The build never swaps to offhand anyway, so the loss of the sigil on it doesn’t matter at all.

The 30/25 fast hands builds, or the axe meta builds, obviously do get nerfed by this.

Yeah and for solo warrior can just use an axe with bloodlust seeing as you camp gs for lupi solo. But it completely destroys classes that have to swap weapons. I wanted to get a smoother berserker necro solo done and from testing the other week it looked like i could get about the same or faster than before patch, despite the crit damage nerf. Now thats not going to be possible.

Why should you benefit from 1 sigil and then being able to swap it out and gain the benefits of another sigil.

Unfortunately the problem is that stacking sigils are not worth taking on main weapon sets so maybe they need more bonuses or benefits to a full stack to make them worth using over anything else.

Or just allow you to keep the stacks even if you swap the weapon? Oh wait thats too op!

maxinion.8396:

Purple Miku.7032:

I agree with spoj.

I was pretty kittening mad when I found out they changed this too. Every single change yesterday was for the better EXCEPT this. Making me hit kitten damage is not going to make me happy.

Warrior meta build is probably least hurt by this. Camp Greatsword with Slaying + Force, offhand is sword+warhorn with a stacking sigil. The build never swaps to offhand anyway, so the loss of the sigil on it doesn’t matter at all.

The 30/25 fast hands builds, or the axe meta builds, obviously do get nerfed by this.

I almost always am on 65003 and I don’t do group dungeons on warrior. Any group dungeons I do are pugs on ele 99% of the time. I am severely hindered by this change because now I have to either put bloodlust sigil on GS, never unequip a warhorn with sigil, or never swap to sword for savage leaping again if I put it on axe.

What happens if you are, say, wearing a warhorn with bloodlust and an axe with force, then swap to an axe with bloodlust and after that swap your warhorn to sword with energy, will you keep your stacks?

This is one of those head-scratching changes where dev silence is like poison to the community. 99% of dungeon runners, if polled, would likely not be a fan of this nerf which begs the question: why do it then?

I understand, from a game design standpoint, that you can’t just do the popular thing. If put to a vote 99% of the population would want a free precursor too, but we understand that is a bad idea rationally.

This is a bit less obviously bad than free precursors. This is simply a min/max thing that encourages good gameplay and good gearing of toons. Those are traits that should be encouraged. The only plausible argument in favor of the nerf is to reduce the game’s complexity.

So we have a situation with the following…

1. Most of the community disagrees with the situation.
2. No rational reason for the nerf exists that demonstrates a clear justification.

Like other topics that have gone unaddressed by devs, I have long contended that when issues aren’t addressed head on it leaves the door open for speculation and speculation on the internet inevitably leads to conspiracy theories which leads to people becoming angry.

While no doubt every player group in the game would like dev responses to their questions, I think this change especially warrants a response. A simple one paragraph answer from the devs explaining their rationale for the change would be more than sufficient to put the issue to bed. We may not be happy to the nerf even after it is explained, but at very least we will understand the reasons why, and idle speculation will come to an end.

I personally like the change and I will explain why.
1: It was not very interesting, in most dungeons you have this 1 event that just allows you to almost full stack to 25 and then you just forget about it.
2: It was a dominant strategy, there was no downside to using stacking sigils.
3: I don’t enjoy carrying multiples of the SAME weapon sets.
4: It is now less of a pain to reach “MAX” dps.

The stacking sigil mechanic was interesting as a reward for not getting downed in fights. However, I will not miss having to swap in/out stacking weapons, which was tedious and annoying.

Eh, I sold my stacking Sigils shortly before the April 15th patch. Then I learned about the underwater weapon stack. Figured it would be a matter of time.

I don’t agree with their decision to nerf stacking weapons but I also didn’t care much for using them post patch. I never did really enjoy swapping weapon sets….still, I can see why some folks would be bothered by it.

That said, who didn’t see this coming? The underwater weapon stacking system was bound to be nerfed as well. It was a clever workaround to something they lazily patched.

I dont even care about it for speedruns and casual runs as we never used them there. What bothers me is they destroyed soloing in competative times.

Yeah, I can see that. A shame. I don’t think their choice to nerf stacking weapons was the right one. It was more unfair for certain classes as well.

Supposedly they did it because they never intended the weapons to be used that way? Which is understandable but I think their policy of silence and lack of interaction makes things like this come out of the blue and really shock people.

Not sure who this did benefit. If it’s any consolation, everyone’s solo times will suffer so we really just shift the bell curve instead of skewing one way or the other.

Some will suffer a lot more than others.

Warrior can still use them for example. And classes that rely on perception are kitten.

It really was the best motivation not to down. Literally nothing in this entire game could make me as angry as dying to something stupid and losing 25 stacks.. But it’s been clear for a while that anet loves to discourage efficient gameplay.