Guild Wars 2

What sigil do you use in ur SB? i’m currently using superior sigil of frailty (30% vunerability chance on crit). not sure if its a good choice but i like the idea of reducing enemy’s def. wat do u reck?

Superior sigil of agony, always. +10% bleed duration is great on sb.

Air for pve fire for wvw.

I use Earth more bleeds

I use Force (+5% damage), since it was already in the slot when I got the bow.
No reason to change it yet …

Same as Dante here(Earth). Have sigil of corruption on my secondaryt weapon though(GS), it’s great to improve your ConDmg on weak mobs sometimes to apply more damage with the main shortbow.

I used to run agony, but I switched to the precision one (don’t remember the name offhand) when I changed my gear over to Berserker.

Now, however, I’m starting to think that Sigil of Strength may be the way to go.

I run a Berserker/Knight build so I use Sigil of Accuracy.

For Condition builds, I recommend Sigil of Earth or Agony.

I use the “fire bomb” sigil, in full berserker gear, in aoe situations it triggers in every 6 seconds with piercing arrows.

For PvE Air is decent and cheap, Strength is probably the best if you have decent crit chance. Bloodlust is also great but you can have it on any other weapon and switch the weapon once you have 25 stacks, i have it on my Axe and do that.
Earth is good if you have conditions build.

Honestly I’ve tried the same sigil you are using and didn’t find it good enough (30% chance to proc 1 vulnerability) even tho i still use it on my longbow since it’s the weapon that applies vulnerability.

I’m using Fire because I like big explosions that damage everything and everyone

Daemon.4295:

Superior sigil of agony, always. +10% bleed duration is great on sb.

Depends on the build, shortbow has only the crossfire bleed (3 second base, usually 4s on any build normally) in order to make it a 5 second bleed and make any difference you need to run 25 into marksmanship and grab 2 krait, 2 affliction at least. Otherwise it is just a waste, crippling shot does not bleed using your statistics although the tooltip changes with it its based on pet stats and pet condition damage.

But anyway, if the OP could post what build he is running I could make a few suggestions based on that. But some really safe sigils are rage (quickness proc on crit), Battle (3 stacks of might for 20 seconds on weapon swap) or sigil of earth (60% chance to proc bleed for 5s w/ a 5s internal CD) [minigripe: this CD punishes fast attacking classes more than slow condi classes ex-neco vs ranger]. If you play more aggresive condition (meaning close up to enemies and constant weapon swap) geomancy is a good pick as well. Energy is also a good pick if you want to be a little bit safer but like being in the thick of things swapping weapons rather regularily.

Superior sigil of fire, with a superior sigil of luck on swap to buff with.

I have a base crit chance of 43% and this goes up to over 50% with a full stack of precision from my longbow and axe sigils of accuracy.

I consider my crit chance too low to use any sigil that has a 30% chance of triggering off a crit, and if it does trigger, then there is the 5 sec cooldown.

So, I assume all the players using these sigils are running power/precision builds with full berserker amour, weapons and accessories to have a decent chance of the sigil triggering during a fight.

I am curious to know often these sigils trigger for players not running such a build.

bri.2359:

I have a base crit chance of 43% and this goes up to over 50% with a full stack of precision from my longbow and axe sigils of accuracy.

I consider my crit chance too low to use any sigil that has a 30% chance of triggering off a crit, and if it does trigger, then there is the 5 sec cooldown.

So, I assume all the players using these sigils are running power/precision builds with full berserker amour, weapons and accessories to have a decent chance of the sigil triggering during a fight.

I am curious to know often these sigils trigger for players not running such a build.

The proc on crit abilities actually tend to work quite well, I have around a 22% crit normal and on weapon swap (fury traited) it pops to 42% (which is still lower than your crit rating) and they proc fairly often. But yes running air/fire would usually be for a power/prec build. 30% proc change with 43% chance to crit yields a 12.9% chance to proc the ability which is still great.

Higher ROF weapons with high crit chance actually suffers as they could possibly string more hits together, but say using a shortbow with a mid level crit rating gives a really fast attack speed witch increases it chances to proc dramatically. Just looking at it rationally the shortbow attacks at least twice every second just under 10 attacks is where “theoretically” it should proc by. This means that every 5 seconds you can expect another proc with a shortbow. Increase this number when using the longbow, however rapid fire and a few others increase the fire speed. Its really up to you to decide if that is a decent proc rate or not.

@Taym
Thanks for the response!
A 13% chance of triggering is approx 1 in 8, so given the rate of fire, you should get 1 trigger per ‘normal’ mob fight. You should get more triggers in longer fights against vets and champs, but there is the 5sec cooldown to deal with.

I suppose the next step is to compare the 1 in 8 shot ‘burst’ damage with the sigil of air or fire with a constant +5% damage from the sigil of force.

Well, 5% is 50 damage more if you hit for 1k, sigil hits for like 900-1k.

Since in primarily a crit build I’m up to 87% crit chance using sigil of accuracy. I believe it just depends on your build.