Guild Wars 2

Question about this. Does it have an internal cooldown that’s not referenced to in the description? I’m getting the feeling it doesn’t always apply the stacks of might on swapping if I swap weapons a lot… I use the warrior trait that reduces weapon swapping cooldown.

And I am talking about swapping in combat, just to be sure.

there are hidden cooldowns on sigils and traits that are not mentioned in description.

i believe for most of the “on swap” sigils it is 9 seconds. Be also aware that they share internal cooldowns so if you have 2 “on swap” sigils in your weapon set – then only one will proc

All sigil cooldowns prevent any sigil with a cooldown from functioning. This is incredibly important.

So your on swap sigils (which all have a cooldown of 9 seconds) prevent the on crit, on hit, and on swap sigils from functioning for those 9 seconds. Your on crit and on hit sigils prevent on crit, on swap, and on hit sigils from functioning for their respective cooldowns as well.

Effectively, this means you should be only using a single on swap, on hit, or on crit sigil per set, and you shouldn’t mix them up at all between the sets. If you are using Sigil of Battle, your other weapon set should be using an on swap sigil as well (probably Sigil of Battle, but you can pick here). If it’s a duel wielding set, then you should probably bring in something like Corruption, Bloodlust, or Force to supplement. Other options tend to conflict via cooldowns.

Mmm although some of what said in here is true, the above is not the true story when it comes to sigils.

The anet devs realised they had to equal out the sigils on both double hander weapons and duel wield. In bw1 + 2 you could use multi sigil and it work just fine. BW3 + they changed it.

The chnage basically is an un-written rule “Only one sigil can activate any any one time” bear that in mind. Also sigils share cd’s.

Some examples:
Sigil of Earth 60% chance to do a 5 seconds bleed on critical.
Sigil of Strength 30% chance to apply might for 10 seconds on critical.

Now, if you duel wield, only one will ever activate at the same time. Try it out on a dummy, you’ll get a maximum of 3 stacks of might with 3 stacks of bleed (depending on build, make sure you use a crit build with non-bleed applying autoattack). With the same build, using 2x earths you can stack up to 6 – 7 bleeds or with 2x strength sigils 6 – 7 stacks of might.

Another example:

Sigil of Hydromancy you freeze nearby foes for 3 seconds when you swap to this weapon while in combat. (This effect cannot trigger more than once every 9s)

Sigil of Ice 30% chance to cause a 2 seconds freeze on a critical hit. (Cooldown: 10 seconds)

If sigil of ice procs, you have to wait the full 10 seconds until your other weapon sigil will proc.

Anet was looking for a way to balance sigils, and this is what they did pre-release.

The long story short, it’s often not worth having 2 different types of sigils on duel wield weapons as it will kitten the build you actually want.

Feel free to test any of the above on mist dummies. One thing I haven’t checked out is how the charge on kill sigils work in comparison to other sigils. But I’m 100% sure they would share the 9 second cd if if you used a different type of weapon sigil that procd.

On Kill sigils don’t have any cooldown related issues to other sigils that aren’t of the the on kill variety. Just don’t ever mix two different on kill sigils.

Oooh nice that’s some great info. I was wandering why teams of 5 were running with on kill sigils. They knew the secret all along