Guild Wars 2

I’m using a Static Discharge build that is going primarily Power/Crit (Yes I know that Rifle may be better for that kind of build, but from my testing while leveling and in the Mists P/P does superior damage even with a lack of Condition Damage)

10 V
30 IV, VI, XII
0
0
30 II, VIII, XII (Yes I’m aware that I’ll be really slow without Speedy Kits, but I don’t like Kits or Kit Swapping)

Healing Turret | Rifle Turret/Tool Kit/Personal Battering Ram

Planning to use Runes of the Adventure (Condition Damage primary and Power secondary, Regain 100% of endurance on using heal skill on a 10 second cooldown) will likely use either full Zerker or Zerker/Rabid combination for gear.

Okay, that’s the build part done now for what I think are reasonable Sigil setups for such a build:

Fire + Corruption (Lots of fire procs, some Condition Damage would be very beneficial)

Fire + Bloodlust (More damage is good damage)

Strength + Corruption (Might = Both Direct and Condition damage)

Strength + Bloodlust (Favouring Direct damage with Might allowing for slight increase in condition damage)

Earth + Corruption (More condition damage and conditions have synergy)

Earth + Bloodlust (More conditions and more damage, I doubt it’d be much good though)

Personally, I like to go with Perception + Air ( the Fire + Bloodlust combo for people who are poor like me) Then switch to an Earth pistol once you have 250 precision. You get an extra lightning strike (or flame burst if you have the fire sigil) and bleeding double stacked at least every other hit. I know this isn’t optimal, but it costs a good 10g less than some of the other combos like Fire and Bloodlust.

Rilke Cadmus.6829:

Personally, I like to go with Perception + Air ( the Fire + Bloodlust combo for people who are poor like me) Then switch to an Earth pistol once you have 250 precision. You get an extra lightning strike (or flame burst if you have the fire sigil) and bleeding double stacked at least every other hit. I know this isn’t optimal, but it costs a good 10g less than some of the other combos like Fire and Bloodlust.

The issue with that is that you end up with 2 proc sigils, which conflict (When one is triggered the other one won’t be able to proc in its cooldown which is 5 seconds for Fire/Air and 2 seconds for Earth)

Similar to the conflict between Corruption + Bloodlust (My ideal setup for a lot of the time) in which only one will work and it being based off which one is alphabetically first (Bloodlust)

I could theoretically also go for Dual Corruption or Dual Bloodlust to get the stacks twice as fast…

No idea if there is room in your build but if you can get 5 points into Alchemy for Hidden Flask it’s a nice boost to damage and will throw swiftness on you at a very useful time to have swiftness.

So so numbers
250 perception is rougly 11% crit.
250 condition damage is 12 more per tick-stack of bleed, 60 more tick-stack per burn.
A might buf is +32 power. Your attack is probably somewhere around 3000 (give or take). 1 stack of might is going to be about 1% more damage.
250 power (at around 3000 attack) is roughly 8%.
Earth is popular for firing at 60% of crit chance so more likely to fire with low crit.

Of the sigils you’ve listed to my eye the one that seems sub-par is Strength. Wiki lists a 2 sec internal cooldown and it’s 30% on crit. Napkin math has me believing it might fire about 1 in 7 so you are likely only to see 3 procs in 10s. Using just a sigil of Force would give you 5% more damage so its hard to see Strength as a win.

Of the remaining I’d guess it will come down to what you enjoy. In the long run it’s probably cheaper to run dungeons to get the pistol with the stats you want and buy the sigils once for swapping weapons around rather than re-slotting sigils.

If you do try them all out please post your thoughts on which works best.

Lanny.6987:

Of the sigils you’ve listed to my eye the one that seems sub-par is Strength. Wiki lists a 2 sec internal cooldown and it’s 30% on crit. Napkin math has me believing it might fire about 1 in 7 so you are likely only to see 3 procs in 10s. Using just a sigil of Force would give you 5% more damage so its hard to see Strength as a win.

Strength has the possibility of being good due to 1 stack of Might at level 80 giving both 35 Power and 35 Condition Damage. When my weapon set and build provides both Direct Damage (Tool Belt skills, Static Discharge, weapon hits) and conditions (Weapon abilities, on crit traits) whilst other Sigils provide an either or decision since they affect only one damage type. Depending on Crit chance it could get up some nice numbers (3-5 stacks should be possible due to the amount of hits done which would be 105-175 Power and Condition damage, about half of a stacking sigil which can combine further with a stacking sigil)

Just did some testing in Mists:
3000 Power
49% Crit Chance
50% Crit Damage
483 Condition Damage

Could only test the Proc Sigils (Dummies don’t give stacks and screw killing the tougher mobs 25 times per test…)

Sigil of Fire – Is good on single targets and grouped up clumps of enemies (Which is the ideal type of fighting for this build with the multiple bounce attacks and cone poison)

Sigil of Earth – About average on single targets, better than Fire on targets that are spread about and more consistent with the low crit chance.

Sigil of Strength – With these stats seems to be the best for single targets and multiples IF, and only IF, you can continuously fight without interruption (Stacks will drop off pretty quickly if you get knocked down or have to get to another group of enemies)

It’s likely these results will change depending on what stacking sigil is used but this insight has narrowed choices down to:

Fire + Bloodlust – Best burst
Earth + Corruption – More consistent damage also allows lower crit chance without too much of a loss
Strength + Bloodlust – Possible best direct damage to be achieved
Strength + Corruption – Possible for best condition damage to be achieved

Bearing in mind that RNG does have a large factor over these results (Of course the Stacking Sigils and actual NPC’s whom have decent health pools will have big effects as well)

Good call on the condition damage reminder. I went with 3 procs in 10 seconds from the napkin math. So 105 power, 105 condition. That’s 3.5% more direct damage and roughly 7.5% more bleed damage (less on burn because of the higher base).

I withdraw my concern about Strength being sub-par. Looks like you’d see a pretty good boost. And while stacks do drop quickly for pistol/pistol Engi’s they are also easy to get rolling again.

Still going to put my weight behind the Rifle. It offers very comparable damage damage and it is really the “Alpha” damage that hurts people. It’s one of the reason two-handers in WoW were far superior than two 1-handers because the enemy had a hard time adjusting to large chunks of life being taken away verses a steady stream by two 1-handers.

Also the Rifle just provides a ton of CC that is so darn strong.

Goloith.6349:

Still going to put my weight behind the Rifle. It offers very comparable damage damage and it is really the “Alpha” damage that hurts people.

I’m aware of that, but I decided I didn’t want to use a rifle for a few reasons:

1) I’ve been playing a GS/Rifle Warrior and didn’t want to play another rifle user too much. (One of my first Engineers was also a Rifle engie)

2) I didn’t like how the skills work against each other (#3 and #5 preferring melee range to maximise damage whilst #2 and #4 actively work against things being close)

3) P/P is more active with multiple skills to use that have short cooldowns (Aside from Glue shot…) thus making it funner for me.

4) Dual pistols look amazing (Even when taking into account the scarcity of good pistol skins and the silliness that comes from an off-hand pistol not doing much a lot of the time (I don’t know why Engie off hand weapon skills couldn’t be dual skills, considering they can only have 1 main hand weapon…))

Goloith.6349:

It’s one of the reason two-handers in WoW were far superior than two 1-handers because the enemy had a hard time adjusting to large chunks of life being taken away verses a steady stream by two 1-handers.

That was mostly due to the damage modifiers that allowed skills (Since for a lot of the time the same skills where used for both 2H and 1H weapons, only recently have more skills become unique to each style and those that aren’t have different modifiers depending on what is being wielded) to become so much more powerful when using a 2H weapon. A good example of this is Warriors and their Heroic Strike that does X% of main hand weapon damage (Which is often 1.5-2 times higher for 2H weapons than for 1H)

On Topic:
I’ve been looking at damage formulas for things (I can’t seem to find the formula for Sigil of Fire, only that it uses a coefficient of 1)

With full Zerker gear, Adventure runes and 30 points into Firearms (483 CD) as my base

Burning – 328 + (0.25 * Condition damage) – 449 Damage per tick
Bleeding – 43 + (0.05 * Condition damage) – 67 Damage per tick per stack
Poison – 84 + (0.1 * Condition damage) – 132 Damage per tick
Confusion – 130 + (0.15 * Condition damage) – 202 Damage per tick per stack

3/4/5 Might stacks would increase damage by:
Burning – 26 (5.7%)/35 (7.7%)/44 (9.7%) per tick
Bleeding – 5 (7.8%)/7 (10.4%)/9 (13%) per tick per stack
Poison – 11 (8.3%)/14 (10.6%)/18 (13.6%) per tick
Confusion – 16 (7.9%)/21 (10.3%)/26 (12.8%) per tick per stack

Full stacks of corruption (250 CD) would increase damage by:
Burning – 63 (14%) per tick
Bleeding – 13 (19.4%) per tick per stack
Poison – 25 (18.9%) per tick
Confusion – 38 (18.8%) per tick per stack

Which does show that Condition damage is extremely effective percentage wise. Though with lack of DPS meters and such it’s very hard to determine what percentage of my overall damage comes from conditions (Since 250 CD wouldn’t be a 17% increase to DPS, only a percentage of damage would be effected by it and even then there’s stacks of Bleeding/Confusion as well as Burning + Poison uptime to consider)

But these numbers do support a decision of Earth and Corruption Sigils (Due to each proc of Earth will do a bleed of 335 (Base)/400 (25 stacks of corruption) and will happen up to 2 times per Sigil of Fire proc (5 second cooldown vs 2 second cooldown)) or even a Strength and Corruption combination.

That is until I can find the information to calculate an average damage increase from Bloodlust and Fire sigils…

Makes sense man.

What would be interesting is if Ruby Orbs would actually be much better than Adventure Runes with since your going Berserker style. Remember those Ruby Orbs increase precision so it might make up a little condition damage with the increased proc rate. I’m not going to do the math because I dont have the time, but if you want to check the damage difference go for it.

You should be carrying a third weapon, and once you get your 25 stacks switching out to a different sigil anyway.

Taril.8619:

I could theoretically also go for Dual Corruption or Dual Bloodlust to get the stacks twice as fast…

Are you saying if you kill a single mob you are getting 2 stacks?

Well the Condition Damage from Adventure runes totals 183:

Burning – 46 damage per tick
Bleeding – 9 damage per tick per stack
Poison – 18 damage per tick
Confusion – 27 damage per tick per stack

I’ve recently swapped my food around to the 40% condition duration (Combined with Explosives trait lines 10% gets to 50% total duration bonus) which allows me to have Poison and Burning up 100% of the time as well as 4-5 stacks of bleeding which adds up to a lot of DPS (The runes condition damage providing ~109 DPS alone).

The runes also provide 50 Power (Not quite up to the 120 Power from Ruby Orbs but it is something)

Then I have to weigh the 12% critical damage and 84 precision against the Endurance refill when I use a heal skill (Which considering I’m glass cannon with 15k HP and no additional toughness with this setup would literally be a life saver)

Though it is possible to go full Zerker and try to blow things up in the initial burst with huge direct damage….

If it’s possible, I’d like to keep to a plan of mostly DD with some half decent CD on the side (For things with high toughness, Protection boons, Weakness conditions the CD will be very effective)

Been thinking about Sigils some more whilst exploding stuff:
Earth vs Strength – Stats = 300 CD from traits, 183 CD from Runes, 70 CD from Food (553 total) + 10% condition duration from traits, 40% condition duration from Food (50% total)

Earth = 60% proc chance, 2 second cooldown – 1 bleed for 5 seconds base (7.5 seconds with buffs) so the bleed will do 71 damage per tick (7 ticks = 497 damage per proc)

Strength = 30% proc chance, 2 second cooldown – 1 stack of might for 10 seconds (35 Power and Condition damage)
Burning increase – 9 per tick (Over 10 seconds will be 90 damage per proc)
Bleeding increase – 2 per tick (Over 10 seconds will be 20 damage per proc per stack – 5 stacks rolling would be 100 damage per proc)
Poison increase – 4 per tick (Over 10 seconds will be 40 damage per proc)
Confusion increase – 5 per tick per stack

Due to Might buffing conditions retroactively it means that the Might proc will do on average (Assuming I maintain conditions) 230 condition damage (Discounting Confusion as that will have 37% uptime if used on cooldown rather than saved for opportunistic times) but will also increase DD by a small amount (I’ll take Lanny’s 1% figure for it)

If I can get a feel for 1% of my direct damage I should be able to gauge the benefit of the Might over the additional bleed.

As it looks for the moment adding in additional Condition Duration makes Earth the superior sigil (At least for single targets, the Strength will have an equal effect on all targets and will pretty much guarantee 5 stacks when it can proc off any target hit and will stack on me rather than on the specific mob)

What I’d give for a tool that gave a damage breakdown as well as a sufficient dummy(s) to attack to test these things…

Tyaen.5148:

You should be carrying a third weapon, and once you get your 25 stacks switching out to a different sigil anyway.

As far as I’m aware 2 stacking Sigils will not work together (Even when swapping out, or at least Corruption + Bloodlust don’t) and using other Sigils will interfere with cooldowns of procs unless I go for one of the condition duration runes (Which are pretty useless unless they take you to a point where you gain an additional tick, which since most Engie conditions are 2 second base duration would mean 50% and 100% for extra ticks)

Tyaen.5148:

Taril.8619:

I could theoretically also go for Dual Corruption or Dual Bloodlust to get the stacks twice as fast…

Are you saying if you kill a single mob you are getting 2 stacks?

Yes, you get 2 stacks if you have the same stacking sigil on 2 weapons. One of the reasons why a few people carry around 2 weapons with their intended stacking sigil on to get the stacks really quick and then swap back.

Taril.8619:

Yes, you get 2 stacks if you have the same stacking sigil on 2 weapons. One of the reasons why a few people carry around 2 weapons with their intended stacking sigil on to get the stacks really quick and then swap back.

Didn’t know that, looks like I need a fourth pistol.