So I went to the Mists to test sigils, in particular combos of superior sigils of air, fire and strength.
The original goal was to determine whether two sigils of Air (on main and off hand weapons) increased trigger probability.
Because the air and fire sigils have 5 second cooldown, every time one of these triggered I paused testing for 6 seconds, so cooldown did not have any effect on these tests.
So here are the results:
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Air/Air: out of 100 critical hits, Air triggered 33 times. This indicates having two Airs has the same effect as using just one!
Theoretically: One Air should trigger 30% of the time… this is quite close to the experimental result. (The guild wars wiki claims that both Airs should have had effect, in which case we should see lightning 51% of the time — not even close!)
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Air/Strength: out of 100 critical hits, Air triggered 27 times and I got might from the Strength sigil 18 times (never both simultaneously). So both sigils have effect and Air takes priority when the probability gods say that both should trigger on the same critical hit (this makes sense because the cooldown of Air supresses the sigil of Strength).
Theoretically: if both Air and Strength were to have effect and Air had priority, then we expect 30% chance of lightening and 21% chance of might. The numbers are quite close to this!
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Air/Fire: I got tired/lazy and simply tested whether both would trigger, or only one.
In this test, I simply let my toon go to town on the golem with auto-attack and I counted the number of times each sigil triggered (much less tedious than the previous two tests, where I had to disable auto-attack).
Both did trigger: out of 30 procs, 18 were Fire and 12 were Air.
Unfortunately, I didn’t record which sigil I had on the main hand and which on the offhand — not sure if there would have been a difference.
Theoretically: we should see a ratio of 30:21 if both sigils have effect and one always has priority over the other. My numbers are 18:12, which is very close! Furthermore, it looks like in this test, Fire always had priority over Air.
By the way, this ratio is consistent with a 51% chance of one or the other sigil triggering (unlike the case with the Air/Air where only one is triggering) — but note that I didn’t count the number of times neither triggered in this test, so further testing is probably in order.
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Conclusion: seems like Air/Air is a waste, Air/Strength works as expected, and Air/Fire has indications of working as expected.
Anyone else done any testing that we might find useful?