Guild Wars 2

I’m probably missing something, but why not use the chill sigil to get 3 stacks when we chill instead of geomancy?

Josh.4016:

I’m probably missing something, but why not use the chill sigil to get 3 stacks when we chill instead of geomancy?

Geo is an AOE and has a lower cd. Ice isn’t as popular due to its 10s icd which really limits it. I would prefer torment over ice since it is lower cd and an AOE proc plus a new cover Condi. In additional Geo is a longer duration bleed than the chill applies.

It’s an AOE though due to talents right? Bleeds are stronger from this too. I understand the damage is less. I was just looking at situations when it’s not safe to be in range for Geo.

Because Geomancy applies 3 stacks of bleed for 10 seconds, while Deathly Chill is 3 stacks for 5 seconds.

If I played a baddy condi staff reaper I would run ice/torment on staff or scepter for small scale. Idk why a condi reaper would even use geomancy/hydromancy unless they chose a melee weapon set for swap but apparently many do staff/secpter for some reason.

if you’re too bad to use geomancy, use earth. other options either have too long ICD or too short duration

Personally I use Sigil of Malice and Sigil of Bursting for most of my condi builds, even outside necro. It tends to cover a bit of everything with a nice slight boost to condi damage.

Crinn summed it up best. Double the bleed duration, so for things like Pve, geomancy will always be better since you don’t need the covering condition there.

Methuselah.4376:

Personally I use Sigil of Malice and Sigil of Bursting for most of my condi builds, even outside necro. It tends to cover a bit of everything with a nice slight boost to condi damage.

Sigil of bursting is bad. It actually is less damage than geomancy and way more expensive.

FrostDraco.8306:

Methuselah.4376:

Personally I use Sigil of Malice and Sigil of Bursting for most of my condi builds, even outside necro. It tends to cover a bit of everything with a nice slight boost to condi damage.

Sigil of bursting is bad. It actually is less damage than geomancy and way more expensive.

Aye it increases your base condition damage stat rather than actual condi damage.

Lahmia.2193:

Crinn summed it up best. Double the bleed duration, so for things like Pve, geomancy will always be better since you don’t need the covering condition there.

Covering conditions is so gw1. If you got your condition covered that someone’s triple cleanse didn’t somehow remove, you got lucky.

Against PvE bosses, condi dps duration and quantity are best.

Real players cleanse conditions and are inconvenienced by soft CC like chill, which bosses ignore.

Anchoku.8142:

Against PvE bosses, condi dps duration and quantity are best.

Real players cleanse conditions and are inconvenienced by soft CC like chill, which bosses ignore.

That’s actually another reason you don’t want Sigil of Ice, sometimes you don’t want to cc a boss, so having an extra, uncontrollable soft-cc is not a good thing. But as everyone else said, yeah it’s mostly because Geo does double the damage.

Josh.4016:

I’m probably missing something, but why not use the chill sigil to get 3 stacks when we chill instead of geomancy?

Depends on the game mode and what you intend to focus on.

In PVE, where you have scripted targets with predictable locations, sometimes mob swarms with very low hitpoints, or boss mobs that don’t move for a long time or not at all, don’t use any defense abilities or don’t time them correctly, etc., the geo sigils are better because you can just stand there or position yourself with reliability and land hits.

In PvP, especially in WVW, where your opponents have very high mobility, will not stand in your circles, range or near you, use their defense abilities and counter boons etc. the ice sigils are better hands down.

It is true that torment sigil by itself is better then ice, but by going torment you are missing a ton of CC, utility, and actually way more damage (trait dependant).

Thing about sigil of ice, is that it has great synergy between Chilling Nova, Deathly Chill, Lingering Curse, Shivers of the Dread, Cold Shivers. Add to that any of the decent rune sets and the fact you can also run it on staff and pop it off of AA @ 1200 range and pop it of off your marks, and the other sigils just can’t come even remotely close.

So it does depend on rest of your build and your focus, but I find it overall much more useful then geo or any single stack of a cover condi.

Tongku.5326:

In PvP, especially in WVW, where your opponents have very high mobility, will not stand in your circles, range or near you, use their defense abilities and counter boons etc. the ice sigils are better hands down.

No Geomancy and Hydromancy are (or where in the case of sPvP) extremely strong sigils when playing against players. Why? Because weapon swaps are instant which means the sigils can be used as part of low-telegraph burst combos.

Also entering shroud counts as a weapon swap so you can combine geo/hydro sigils with on-shroud procs to create a very nasty instant burst. (in fact there used to be a meta build that exclusively focused on doing exactly that)

Crinn.7864:

No Geomancy and Hydromancy are (or were in the case of sPvP) extremely strong sigils when playing against players. Why? Because weapon swaps are instant which means the sigils can be used as part of low-telegraph burst combos.

Also entering shroud counts as a weapon swap so you can combine geo/hydro sigils with on-shroud procs to create a very nasty instant burst. (in fact there used to be a meta build that exclusively focused on doing exactly that)

Crinn is right here imo. In WvW the hydro and Geo are still stronger than ice. And torment is better than ice for exactly the points that are made that ice is good. I’d much rather have that cover Condi so my bleeds and chill don’t get cleansed instead of just more chill.

And honestly for good players having control over the proc when using hydro and geo is very important since as Crinn mentions you can set up instant burst combos without having to count on rng. Considering my WvW roaming build is more or less a viper variant of that spvp build Crinn references I can speak towards hydro and Geo’s effectiveness in WvW.

Ice is not bad on a set you’ve built for non-swapping when you have the Spite Vuln and Reaper Bleed traits. I don’t know if it does quite enough for other builds.