Guild Wars 2

Hello again!

I’m trying to figure out the best sigil to use for my build, but I can’t seem to put 2 and 2 together from the wiki pages. I’m debating on whether I should stick with the Sigil of Fire or switch to the Sigil of Blood.

I’m running a nearly complete glass cannon build…

Power: 2,555 (including Assassin’s Signet)

Crit Chance: 52.8% (+7 with Side Strikes)

Crit Damage: 223.4% (240.1% when under Fury)

Health: 11,645

I couldn’t really tell much damage difference for the Fire sigil between the different size golems. The highest Flame Blast damage done that I saw was 916, but it was usually less than that, probably averaging in the 800’s.

Unfortunately, the Blood sigil doesn’t list the damage done in the combat log, so I can’t compare directly. It supposedly does less damage, but ignores the target’s armor, so I didn’t know if it would hold the advantage against heavily armored targets.

And even if the Blood sigil did hit for less than Fire, would the extra healing be worth it for such a low-health build? Adding to that, will it still damage the target if I am at full health already?

Thank you! :-D

Fire.

Doesn’t fire ignore armor as well?
I’m using both sigils – fire on my dagger and blood on my SB which I use mainly to cap camps or in zergfights. Against a lot of enemies it heals nicely (daggerstorm) (did I mention that I love daggerstorm?) (although clusterbomb spam is fine too) – but otherwise I wouldn’t rely too heavy on neither blood or fire – it doesn’t really matter in the end whether or not you get 1k health off an enemy.
I’m trying to get a combat log in which it says for how much it heals.
But: maybe you can get a friend to duel you in pvp to test it yourself – as I can’t guarantee I will be full health at any point.

ETA: Come to think of it; that maybe depends on your playstyle – if you’re spamming a lot, blood might be better, if you’re relying more on BS then fire – but I’ll test it in the next zerg fight.

I believe Jana’s method is common sense. For the more single target and up close weapons you use blood for the extra heal. For aoe and range you use fire for greater decimation potential.

blood has another advantage: it doesn’t proc the second stack of basi venom, because it is not considered damage but it is lifesteal. So you often get an extra stun out of it.

(fire and air, howerver, consume the 2nd basi venom stack if they proc)

PvP build or no?

If WvW I would take Draining. Blood heal is based on healing so no healing in build it caps at 450 or so. Draining damage heals for over 1000 no icd and damges for 1140 and there appears no scaling with either power or healing.

This all premised of course on the number of interrupts in your build. Thieves do not have AOE interrupts but as example I use one for my warrior with that stomp skill and have gotten a nice chunk of heals off multiple interrupts.

For thief WvW it works real nice with scorpion wire, hook strike head shot Bas venom impact strike. If there no interrupt sources in your build it not woth it but a steal with MUG and SOH traited is very nice.

A lot depends on the particular build and game style.

My 2 copper (assuming sPvP):

Blood > Fire

If you’re running a staff build, then fire may be better since you’ll be doing some more meaningful cleave with that weapon, but for D/P, Air + Blood is more ideal. Part of this is because you’re less likely to lose a charge of BV to a fire proc and the other part is that blood will help keep you at higher health and more likely to stay >90% hp for the scholar rune bonus.

I tried but self heal isn’t shown.
But we already have numbers for it:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil_of_Blood

ETA:
And if anyone could unravel the maths for me I’d be really grateful – but be careful; I said the moment I can calculate the damage in this game will be the day when I’m no noob anymore. I’m still 70%+ noob.

TL;DR Based on the math they use, single target damage will almost always be Air > Fire > Blood except in extreme edge cases like two bunkers with low power, high armor, no multipliers hitting each other in the face with wet noodles

Blood doesn’t show up in the combat logs. It ignores armor, but it doesn’t benefit from passive damage multipliers. Blood is one of the few lifesteals that scales with power, but it’s only 7.5%. The heal is independent of the damage and scales to healing power like a normal heal. Not sure if it crits; I assuming no if the passive multipliers don’t influence it.

Flameblast uses the normal damage calculation, but it can’t crit. It also has a smaller coefficient of than the weapon skill version.

So with your power level, both do the following damage…

(Base 451 dmg at 80 + (Power * 0.075))
Blood : 642.625 dmg with the base 453 heal

(Weapon damage roll * Power * 0.565 / Armor)
Fire: 611.449 dmg (Average role on ascended staff against an opponent with 2597 armor)

That’s just simply theory crafting based off an average and doesn’t apply any post damage passive multipliers.

If you have enough multipliers (and thieves have a lot in their traits), Fire will do more damage, both AoE and single target and most likely even out if you are fighting players with high armor pushing 3300ish. Even just a single 15% multiplier pushes the above damage up to 703.166.

Sigil of Air will almost always do higher single target damage than both, because even though it uses the same damage calculations as Sigil of Fire and can’t crit, it’s coefficient is 1.1 (which is pretty insane). That’s why people run double air runes, Major and Superior, because even though Major has a shorter CD, the coefficient is the same and so high that it doesn’t really matter.

There is other things to consider with lifesteal like if you have low power to begin with, the healing element, the armor element, but the fact that it doesn’t benefit from passive damage multipliers is a pretty big deal.

(Note: The algorithm for calculating lifesteal damage isn’t published, so there could be some variable I am missing, but based on all the information I have, it should be correct or close to correct. It can’t just use the standard damage calculation with an armor of 0, because it would hit for 80k)

Where do the 0,565 come from?
Also I’m a bit confused if your blood damage is from you having put a number into power or if you calculated it with healing power and I also don’t know what the 453 really mean. Base heal – isn’t our base heal 1?
Fire only scales with power and the only trait I know off my head that increase this stat is revealed training.
And of course if you gain might with signets of power and thrill of the crime.

Jana.6831:

Where do the 0,565 come from?
Also I’m a bit confused if your blood damage is from you having put a number into power or if you calculated it with healing power and I also don’t know what the 453 really mean. Base heal – isn’t our base heal 1?
Fire only scales with power and the only trait I know off my head that increase this stat is revealed training.
And of course if you gain might with signets of power and thrill of the crime.

Blood has a set damage amount that’s based on your level which is 451. That 451 is increased by 7.5% of your power. The OP had 2555 power so its 451 + (2555 * 0.075).

This is listed in the table under Damage in this wiki page https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Life_stealing

The 453 is the base healing it gives at 80 with 0 zero healing power.

This is listed in the table under Healing in this wiki page https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Life_stealing and in the Notes section of this page https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil_of_Blood

0.565 is the coefficient for the Flameblast skill. Every damage skill has a coefficient and it’s used to determine damage done in this equation. (Note: Doesn’t apply to life stealing; it has it’s own damage calculation that I described above)

Damage Done = Weapon Roll * Power * Skill Coefficient / Target’s Armor

This equation only determines the base damage. Once the system has the base damage, it then checks for a critical strike. If you crit, than the number is multiplied by your crit damage. Then, that number is then increase by any passive damage modifiers that you have (traits, sigil of force, vulnerability, no idea the exact ordering, doesn’t matter mathematically because its multipliers on top of multipliers).

All of that is explained here in the Direct Damage section https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage

The wiki for the Flameblast says it cannot crit, but says nothing about whether or not passive damage modifiers apply. In the absence of the wiki saying otherwise, I assume they still do apply. I’ve never found anything that says they don’t apply to sigil damage procs except in certain cases like lifesteal.

Coefficient and the crit limitation of Fireblast can be found in this article under the notes section
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil_of_Fire

The information about multipliers not applying to life stealing is also the Damage section here https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Life_stealing

This is a bit more in depth explanation of how damage is calculated.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage_calculation

The section on positive modifiers demonstrates why it’s such a potentially big deal when damage calculation specifically say positive modifiers don’t apply in comparison to damage skills that do.

Wow It never crossed my mind to use Major + Superior Sigil of Air.

MadRabbit.3179:

Blood has a set damage amount that’s based on your level which is 451. That 451 is increased by 7.5% of your power. The OP had 2555 power so its 451 + (2555 * 0.075).

Ah, alright, you took the power of the OP – ok.

MadRabbit.3179:

The 453 is the base healing it gives at 80 with 0 zero healing power.

The base healing of sigil of blood is 451 which you listed correctly in the same sentence, so I still have no idea where your 453 comes from.

MadRabbit.3179:

0.565 is the coefficient for the Flameblast skill.

Ok.

MadRabbit.3179:

The wiki for the Flameblast says it cannot crit, but says nothing about whether or not passive damage modifiers apply. In the absence of the wiki saying otherwise, I assume they still do apply. I’ve never found anything that says they don’t apply to sigil damage procs except in certain cases like lifesteal.

Then have a look at all the traits thief has got: more crit chance, more ferocity (which only applies on crit), damage increase. The latter might increase the damage of sigil of fire, but I’m certain the others won’t. And the damage increase is marginal at best.

Jana.6831:

Then have a look at all the traits thief has got: more crit chance, more ferocity (which only applies on crit), damage increase. The latter might increase the damage of sigil of fire, but I’m certain the others won’t. And the damage increase is marginal at best.

I’m afraid it’s not marginal at all, because we have the most trait based multipliers of any class in the game. And if someone proves me wrong on that, then we are still at the top of the list.

If you run Runes of the Scholar and Sigil of Force and have a DD/CS/DA build, then at full health with the target below 50%, our total positive damage multiplier is 1.97 from passive abilities alone.

That doubles the damage of Fireblast and Lightning Strike while doing nothing for the lifestealing off Blood.

This is why, in my opinion, at least, Air is the best sigil for us at thieves, because a) it has a 1.1 coefficient meaning it scales insanely well with high power and b) if you stack all the damage multipliers we have available to our class, you can potentially double it’s damage.

I did the exact math earlier, because I was curious. If you have 2500 power and the 1.97 multiplier, each proc hits for 2000ish against a normal level 80 mob.

Now, if I was playing a bunker build that had low power and almost no positive damage multipliers, then, personally, I would start looking towards lifestealing sigils, because they are low scaling damage that also heals.

My sigil of choice is actually sigil of bloodlust ;)
Maybe you have a point but I haven’t seen big numbers with sigil of fire since they nerfed it ~1 year ago. Will observe it further.

Thanks for the calculations although it isn’t always clear where all these numbers are coming from :P

ETA: And the damage calculation seems to be a big mystery on GW2 – the site now lists the weapon coefficient, it hasn’t in the past, I think – I have been on reddit pages, blogposts etc. to find the numbers for daggers.

Jana.6831:

My sigil of choice is actually sigil of bloodlust
Maybe you have a point but I haven’t seen big numbers with sigil of fire since they nerfed it ~1 year ago. Will observe it further.

Thanks for the calculations although it isn’t always clear where all these numbers are coming from :P

ETA: And the damage calculation seems to be a big mystery on GW2 – the site now lists the weapon coefficient, it hasn’t in the past, I think – I have been on reddit pages, blogposts etc. to find the numbers for daggers.

You are welcome.

Sadly, this issue is one of GW2’s biggest problems. Just the lack of transparent information. You end up having to make some assumptions at some point. Like I made an assumption on the lifestealing calculation, because that’s what just made the most sense based on how the information was written.

It’s also a very dynamic combat system, unlike most RPGs. Like in WoW, you have a few buffs that last an hour and grant static bonuses to character abilities. In GW2, in a single second, the combat can change to include 4 additional might stacks and 7 vulnerability stacks which then alters the damage of all proceeding abilties for X amount of time.

With limited information on the workings of the combat engine, a combat engine that is very variable and dynamic from second to second and no in game tools for gathering metrics like a damage meter, it’s very difficult to prove what is objectively better or worse.

So yeah, please, take all that with a grain of salt and make your own judgement calls. I can only give you like 60% of the big picture in a forum post.

I already have everything I want – I chose sigil of fire because I have incinerator and that weapon will stay like it is. I chose bloodlust because I like stacking sigils, I chose blood because I had it. When 2 handed weapons got a second slot I also got sigil of energy. That was the only real choice I made with my sigils. But if any of the others had turned out to be suboptimal I had replaced them – I know that air deals more damage but I like fire better because of the very visible fire proc when hitting a stealthed enemy.
Before June this was the best setup I could get for my purpose and it will likely stay the same, whatever may come on april 19th.

I just want to know how exactly the damage is calculated and not having the “ideal setup” because of my gut (which works pretty fine apperantly, but still).
ETA: I got my valk armor because of my gut as well – I didn’t really have any idea about the stats back in the day. See that’s why I’m so rich, I always stick to the first gear I got.

Jana.6831:

My sigil of choice is actually sigil of bloodlust
Maybe you have a point but I haven’t seen big numbers with sigil of fire since they nerfed it ~1 year ago. Will observe it further.

Thanks for the calculations although it isn’t always clear where all these numbers are coming from :P

ETA: And the damage calculation seems to be a big mystery on GW2 – the site now lists the weapon coefficient, it hasn’t in the past, I think – I have been on reddit pages, blogposts etc. to find the numbers for daggers.

Bloodlust is a solid choice, but I’ve actually found that it works best on Shortbow with something like Leeching. This way, when you down an enemy, you can swap to short bow for the poison on downed enemy and/or to port away so that you get the stack without having to sit on dagger. You also get more burst on dagger by having your air + blood or fire + bloodlust stacks.

rennlc.7346:

Fire.

Also bloodlust+leeching on sb is by far my favourite, swap to sb when something is down get bloodlust stack+leeching procc and then engage with dp with air/fire+leeching thats some nice extra damage on your next burst

for sPvP I’d definitely take Fire for the extra added burst, MadRabbit made an excellent case for it above.
In WvW though… Consider using the Sigil of Draining, assuming you use a pistol off-hand, that sigil is rather amazing.

Jana.6831:

MadRabbit.3179:

The 453 is the base healing it gives at 80 with 0 zero healing power.

The base healing of sigil of blood is 451 which you listed correctly in the same sentence, so I still have no idea where your 453 comes from.

Oh yeah, sorry. I missed this one.

There is like three different sources that list the base healing as 451, 452, 453. I may have used the numbers interchangeably at some point, because honestly, no idea which one is actually correct.

I think the two sources I listed have it at 451 and 452.

MadRabbit.3179:

Jana.6831:

MadRabbit.3179:

The 453 is the base healing it gives at 80 with 0 zero healing power.

The base healing of sigil of blood is 451 which you listed correctly in the same sentence, so I still have no idea where your 453 comes from.

Oh yeah, sorry. I missed this one.

There is like three different sources that list the base healing as 451, 452, 453. I may have used the numbers interchangeably at some point, because honestly, no idea which one is actually correct.

I think the two sources I listed have it at 451 and 452.

It doesn’t really matter whether or not it’s 451,2 or 3 – I was just trying to understand your calculations and the numbers just stood there without explanation, that’s why I asked.

Jana.6831:

MadRabbit.3179:

Jana.6831:

MadRabbit.3179:

The 453 is the base healing it gives at 80 with 0 zero healing power.

The base healing of sigil of blood is 451 which you listed correctly in the same sentence, so I still have no idea where your 453 comes from.

Oh yeah, sorry. I missed this one.

There is like three different sources that list the base healing as 451, 452, 453. I may have used the numbers interchangeably at some point, because honestly, no idea which one is actually correct.

I think the two sources I listed have it at 451 and 452.

It doesn’t really matter whether or not it’s 451,2 or 3 – I was just trying to understand your calculations and the numbers just stood there without explanation, that’s why I asked.

Okay, if it’s not still clear, healing abilities don’t work off coefficients, because healing power starts at 0, not 1000. They all have some base amount that is skill dependent that then gets amplified by a percentage of your healing power.

The base amount for Blood Sigil is that 451 and it increases by 10% of your healing power.

You really didn’t notice that you used numbers all over the place and didn’t explain where you pulled them from and that I asked over multiple posts where you got them from? (It’s now edited, but that was basically our conversation).
It’s nice that you try to explain it to me once more, but we already did this ;)

Jana.6831:

You really didn’t notice that you used numbers all over the place and didn’t explain where you pulled them from and that I asked over multiple posts where you got them from? (It’s now edited, but that was basically our conversation).
It’s nice that you try to explain it to me once more, but we already did this

Then what was the point of your post other than to criticize me?

Honestly, one, I am doing this out of my own good will to help people out. Two, I’m taking additional time to answer to clarify. Three, the math is detailed and being human, I’m rather prone to writing less than perfect communications.

So maybe, cut me some slack, huh?

MadRabbit.3179:

Jana.6831:

You really didn’t notice that you used numbers all over the place and didn’t explain where you pulled them from and that I asked over multiple posts where you got them from? (It’s now edited, but that was basically our conversation).
It’s nice that you try to explain it to me once more, but we already did this

Then what was the point of your post other than to criticize me?

Honestly, one, I am doing this out of my own good will to help people out. Two, I’m taking additional time to answer to clarify. Three, the math is detailed and being human, I’m rather prone to writing less than perfect communications.

So maybe, cut me some slack, huh?

Oh my.
If you’re in school or at university ask your teachers/profs or even boss if calculations with random numbers make any sense – it took us now 10 posts to unravel it.
Of course I’m cutting you some slack I just explained why I asked what each number meant because it wasn’t clear – I got what you meant with them now but I had to ask and I explained why I asked which you took as me criticising you which wasn’t my intend.
Are we good now? *begs

Ever since the Sigil update way back when, All sigils of the same family (Air Superior, Major, and Minor for example) do not stack.

In that case, Air Sup and Air Maj should not have any benefit over just a plan Air Sup.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Ever since the Sigil update way back when, All sigils of the same family (Air Superior, Major, and Minor for example) do not stack.

In that case, Air Sup and Air Maj should not have any benefit over just a plan Air Sup.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Major_Sigil_of_Air

Under the Notes section:

“Does not share cooldown with Superior Sigil of Air enabling you to have both the major and the superior tier on the same weaponset.”

But… to be honest, man… I don’t know when it comes to Air and Fire anymore. Both of these sigils have a pretty long history of controversy and misinformation due to how OP they are.

Like at one point, the community believed the coefficients got stealth nerfed, reducing Air down to .8, but the Wiki continues to list it at 1.1

I use a Force and Air setup, because I believe it’s better in PvE. I might grant some junk weapons and test both air sigils to see if this is still true.

But if the wikis are accurate, then Sigil of Air is mathematically uncontested as the highest burst damage you can get. There is no sigil combination that allows you to spike as hard as double air. This is even more true for thiefs, because of all the damage multipliers we have and our naturally high precision to trigger it.

Thanks everyone! I tried Blood, but went back to Fire. Hopefully, it will work just fine :-)

intrested in using drain on s/d. tactical strike/impact strike/reflext trike and slight of hand.

Fat Disgrace.4275:

intrested in using drain on s/d. tactical strike/impact strike/reflext trike and slight of hand.

Yep. In my own build I also add Scorpion wire to the mix. (wvw of course)

Basi will of course also interrupt and with me it a toss up which i prefer between that and Impact strike. What I like about basi is using an interrupt at range with dancing dagger.

Now if you also have absorption traited with bountful theft you can get a whole lot of boon steal.

gonna try both actually. gonna give fire/air a miss.