Guild Wars 2

I’ve been testing the various sigils, perhaps like other’s I like the sigil of air for the damage proc. However, I’ve been trying sigil of fire and sigil of air at the same time, and it seems that the two sigils share an internal CD. Both have 5secs of CD so in some way it might make sense, but what I’m wondering is, if anyone has done some extensive testing or can tell me of their experience with these sigils?

Additionally in my quest to find this information I also tried to use sigil of air and sigil of blood (not bloodlust, this is the one that steals life), however since combat log doesn’t record the damage from the sigil nor the health taken it is very difficult to discern if these two also share internal CD’s. In this instance, however, the sigil of blood only has a 2sec CD whereas the sigil of air has a 5 sec CD, so here I cannot comprehend why they would share a CD.

So can anyone tell me if weapon sigils do indeed have a maximum of 1 weapon proc a time, and if so, is the internal cooldown then of the sigil that procced? I.e. if sigil of blood procced, will there be a CD of 2 sec, and if air procced a 5 sec CD? Or what?

I can’t give you an exact answer, but I can give some insight. I tested sigils for literally hours one night on training dummies and learned a few things.

Please keep in mind that this is all my own ongoing testing that I started weeks ago. Unfortunately, things may have changed in patches. On top of that, I am an Elementalist, and our attunements are supposedly similar to weapon swapping in terms of sigils, but some differences could exist between Ele and “true” weapon swapping.

Certain weapon combinations allow two sigils to coexist on separate cooldowns whereas other combinations don’t. For example, on my Elementalist I noticed that “complementary” weapon combos (e.g., Scepter/focus) seemed to allow coexisting sigils (i.e., different cooldowns) moreso than noncomplementary weapon combos (i.e. Scepter/Dagger). This was not always consistent but once I figured this out I was able to get more stable results.

If you test this and it doesn’t work, it may be that, in fact, “proc” sigils simply all share a cooldown. I know that in my testing I also had an easier time getting different “types” of sigils to work together. For example, when I paired a “% chance to proc on crit” with another “% chance to proc on crit”, I had inconsistent results. Sometimes they worked together sometimes only one would work. However, pairing a “% chance to proc on crit” with a “gain (or cause) ____ after swapping to this weapon in combat” seemed to work more consistently.

Third, sometimes sigil effects and profession traits can prevent each other from working properly, at least they have for me it seems. For example, if I take “endurance granting” traits as well as endurance granting sigils, I got inconsistent results regarding which one would actually work (i.e., sometimes my traits would proc endurance, sometimes the sigils would. Sometimes neither would).

Lastly, as an oddball example, I tested sigil of energy (restores 50% endurance on weapon swap) with a life-stealing sigil (I think 30% chance to steal life on crit) and found that sometimes the sigil in my offhand would not proc, if I was missing endurance. If I was at full endurance, the health leeching would proc like candy. So it seemed that the main hand weapon was taking precedence in procs/function and then when the coding determined my main hand proc wasn’t “needed”, it switched to my offhand proc. (I’m aware that leeching only works when you’re missing HP, and I took this into consideration during my testing).

I know this wasn’t the sure-fire answer you were looking for but after all the hours of testing I did, I learned that the best thing to do is TEST YOUR SIGIL COMBINATIONS FOR FREE IN THE HEART OF MISTS ON THE TRAINING DUMMIES. This will save you money in the “real” game.

Whether there’s some weapon/weapon formula, a “type” of proc formula, or simply bugs, you cannot really assume anything when it comes to the sigils. At least not by any systematic method I’ve come up with so far. I imagine this will get ironed out eventually but for now I have found it to be a puzzle. If you find a good sigil combination, test it and stick with it IMO.