Sigil of Strength and Bloodlust
Sigil of Strength is great if you’re actually synergizing with it, that means:
A) Using +boon duration of some sort. Acrobatics is a no-brainer here, but if you’re invested in multiple sources of Might (acrobatics dodges, sigil proc, steal proc from trickery) then it can be worthwhile to get some +20 % might duration rune sets. The more you push this particular kind of synergy, the more incentive there is to push it farther.
B) Using both condition damage and power-based damage. If you only use power then you’re only pulling 35 effective stat points per Might stack. Find a way to leverage condition damage (caltrops, venom, etc.)and the effective benefit per Might stack doubles to 70 stat points.
Sigil of Strength has more potential than traditional choices like Air/Fire, but if you aren’t actually using that potential it’ll likely disappoint you.
I get that. I decided to use fire for d/d and strength for sword/p
Sigil of strenght got a 10secs internal cd, u sed it before in my SB and honestly it was not that great, bloodlust or fire are way better
Sigil of strenght got a 10secs internal cd, u sed it before in my SB and honestly it was not that great, bloodlust or fire are way better
You’re thinking sigil of battle (gain might on weapon swap)
Sigil of Strength has no internal cooldown
Engineer, Thief, Mesmer, Elementalist, Guardian,Warrior, Necro
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Do on-crit sigils stack with crit haste? Someone said they all share a cd of some sort so those might reset the CD on crit haste?
I actually seem to remember that every sigil that has a X seconds CD on it seemed to make it impossible to make any other sigil proc while on a CD from another. So lets say you have Sigil of Rage and Sigil of Fire, Rage procs giving you haste then Fire wants to proc but can’t because Rage is on CD.
So basically 1 CD means they all are on CD. So stacking sigils that have CDs seems utterly pointless.
I just put one on my rangers shortbow and I will say it has made her MUCH better. Bloodlust stacks from longbow and than the might boon from shortbow has made my damage crazy. as long as I line up enemies good im hitting 4-10 stacks in a fight easy
Sigil of rage is under underestimated :P. Sigil of fire is best one.
Sigil of Strength has no internal cooldown
The wiki states that it has a 2s cooldown, the item itself has none listed. 2s sounds more accurate than no cooldown. Even with insane hit volume like dual hasted pistol whips against 3 targets (54 individual hits in a couple seconds) and 80 %~ crit rate I’ve never seen the sigil build might stacks fast enough to suggest that it doesn’t have a CD. It’d be quite insane if it didn’t just because of such situation, to be honest.
Sigil of rage is under underestimated :P.
It really isn’t, you trade all of your sigil proc potential for a random 3 seconds of awesome once a minute. The CD is huge and it doesn’t play nice with other sigils.
(edited by Tulisin.6945)
So basically 1 CD means they all are on CD. So stacking sigils that have CDs seems utterly pointless.
Not entirely true. It all depends on your crit rate and amount of synergy.
Sigil of Blood is a good example. It has a really short CD (2 seconds), so even with a high crit rate and crit volume you’re not very likely to keep it on CD. It also scales with healing power. If you’re running heavy synergy (lots of healing power, lots of reliance on on-hit heals), slotting dual Sigils of Blood brings your proc trigger chance to 51 % per crit instead of 30 %. While you still won’t get more than one proc per 2 seconds, the odds of actually having your sigil on cooldown when it would’ve otherwise triggered aren’t that great with such a short CD. You could therefore make the decision that the upside (21 % higher chance to proc) beats the opportunity cost of using something else (like 5 % damage) in your other hand.
Sigil of Strength has a 1 second internal cooldown. You won’t get multiple stacks off of AoE crits, but it can stack up pretty quickly with a fast weapon. As Tulisin said, it’s good if you’re taking advantage of both the Power and Condition Damage parts of it, and if you have the boon duration synergies. Without that, consider that your plain +5% damage sigil will give you the same equivalent power as 3 stacks of might.
Sigil of Blood actually has a 5 second cooldown, so it’s not as good an example as you’d think for dual sigil usage. Let’s use the strength sigil, which has a 1s cooldown and hence has the strongest dual proc use case. The long run proc rate is 1 / ( [cooldown] + 1 / ( [attack rate] * [crit rate] * [proc rate] ) ).
If we’re using daggers and attacking 1.9 times per second (auto chain) with a 60% crit rate, that gives us a proc every 3.92 seconds with one sigil, or a proc every 2.72 seconds with two sigils – so the second sigil, in this case, is only 44% as valuable as the first sigil. If you treat the two procs independently, the first one is worth a proc every 3.92 seconds, while the second is only worth an additional proc every 8.89 seconds – again, 44% as valuable as the first.
In a situation where you think this would be really awesome – say, an 80% crit rate from Fury, and 3.5 attacks per second from AoEing a bunch of targets – the second sigil barely improves. With one sigil, you’ll get a proc every 2.19 seconds, which only improves to every 1.7 seconds with two sigils – a 29% increase, which is lower, relatively, than the 44% increase of the previous example. When you look at the effective rate of those, however, you can see it’s an improvement – the first sigil here is giving a proc every 2.19 seconds, but the second sigil is giving an additional proc every 7.6 seconds, which is an improvement over the proc over 8.89 seconds between bonus procs of the previous example.
Of course, a might proc every 7.6 seconds even under the best of conditions is terrible, and you’re much better off using a static +5% damage or crit chance in its place.
Of course, a might proc every 7.6 seconds even under the best of conditions is terrible, and you’re much better off using a static +5% damage or crit chance in its place.
As you said before, on a pure power basis, you need 3 might stacks to compete with a raw 5 % sigil, so if you’re pulling one proc every 7.6 seconds out of your second sigil, you’d need at least 30.4 second Might duration to hit sustain three stacks on average. Assuming there is no cap to boon duration, max Might duration boost is around 130 % (including full food/gear) for 23 second Might procs out of Sigil of Strength. Not enough to make it break even in terms of pure power unless you factor in condition damage. There’s probably a reasonable middle ground with around 100 % Might duration (the cheaper stuff) and using both condition damage and power-based damage.
Mostly just thinking out loud, but it is making me curious how a dual-strength and Might duration setup would do.
It really isn’t, you trade all of your sigil proc potential for a random 3 seconds of awesome once a minute. The CD is huge and it doesn’t play nice with other sigils.
Sigil of Rage really is underestimated.
It doesn’t play nice with other sigils that share a cooldown, it’s true – but no sigils that have a cooldown play nice with other sigils. So that isn’t really a downside.
As an example take a pretty heavy duty melee crit build with no complications from conditions, proc traits, food, or the like. Let’s say a 60% crit rate with 80% critical bonus damage, attacking 1.9 times a second (dagger attack rate, or roughly a sword hitting two targets).
Sigil of Rage’s average time to proc is 8.77 seconds in that case, for a long run proc rate of a proc every 53.77 seconds. It gives a virtual 3 seconds of time, for a boost in damage of 5.56%.
Sigil of Air’s average time to proc is 2.93 seconds, for a proc every 7.93 seconds. It has a power ratio of 1.3 and cannot crit. At a base weapon damage power ratio of 1.1 per second and the above crit numbers, you get a single target damage bonus of 8.34%.
So in the long run, with no other modifiers, Sigil of Air is a 50% stronger damage bonus than Sigil of Rage. End of story?
Not quite. Sigil of Rage is extremely front loaded due to that long cooldown. While Sigil of Air will do more damage over an infinitely long fight, in a short fight the fact that the Sigils get to proc once before they go on cooldown is a huge edge for the Sigil of Rage. With no other modifiers, when you take that front loading into account, you’ll find that the Sigil of Rage will out-perform Sigil of Air in any fight lasting less than ~35 seconds – it takes that long for Sigil of Air to proc enough to catch up to the value of that initial, powerful Rage proc.
Sigil of Rage passes Sigil of Air again when it procs a second time, in fact. The break-even time for Sigil of Rage and Sigil of Air, then, is actually around 72 seconds of continuous combat.
There are additional asymmetries that favor Sigil of Rage as well. The compressed effect of Sigil of Rage means you lose a lot less from breaking combat for other reasons, such as dodging, ressing, or the like. Doing any of those things while your sigil is on cooldown means you get a higher effective damage bonus during the time you are fighting – and while you’ll spend a good amount of time with your Sigil of Air ready while doing other tasks, Sigil of Rage is usually on cooldown. So the more time you spend dodging, kiting, or staring at a boss in an invulnerability frame, the better Rage looks. It ceases to even be a contest when you start taking time running between mobs into account.
Sigil of Rage also plays a whole lot better with other proc effects. You’ll have a pretty big condition stack from sword or dagger autos after a Sigil of Rage proc ends. It gets a huge boost if you have a pie active, boosting the damage and healing from that during the burst as well (with Omnom Pie active, the break-even time between Rage and Air increases from 72 seconds to nearly 90 seconds at the numbers listed). You’ll gain extra initiative during the burst from Opportunist.
When you put it all together, you get a picture that shows pretty clearly that Sigil of Rage is very strong, and even the best sigil in quite a few very realistic situations. It definitely belongs in the conversation with Air, Fire, Blood, and Earth.
That is good analysis of Rage, but you didn’t account for those “virtual 3 seconds” only being free in regards to auto attack. If you’re actually expending initiative, you get those free 3 seconds at the cost of double resource expenditure.
The same frontloading that makes Rage surpass Air during the first and second procs and during situations like running between mobs also makes it more vulnerable to waste. Spend 1 second of your Rage proc duration not actively using a skill/activation (say, by dodging) and you’ve majorly impacted the efficiency of Rage, whereas an instant proc like Air doesn’t require any sort of additional effort post-proc to actually benefit. Even worse, get a Rage proc on your final blow against a target and you’re pulling almost no use out of your sigil for an entire 45 seconds. The random nature of Rage also means that, for thieves, it could come up when there are no resources to expend on it, or (for other professions) when cooldowns are active. At best, this particular feature is a wash between Rage and other sigils.
You’re right that Rage’s effect on hit volume makes it play very nicely with pies, but I’m of the mind that pies are pretty much broken in any case.
(edited by Tulisin.6945)
The ‘virtual 3 seconds’ you gain from Rage are worth an extra 3 seconds of auto-attacks in any scenario. Yes, you can burn initiative faster during the proc, which means you’ll have to wait longer and just auto-attack. The math is just easier looking at auto-attack chains. Yo can inject any skill usage into the Rage pattern, or the Air pattern, and you get roughly the same damage bonus (in terms of raw +damage); just the percentages change.
The potential to waste the Rage proc is well taken though, and should have been mentioned. If you’re sloppy about using it mid combat you can waste it entirely, and if you just play randomly without regard to it you’ll end up performing much worse than air in a joined fight. The net benefit from running between mobs comes from it resetting, which gives the front-loading benefits talked about earlier. Trying to get mid-combat benefits from maximal usage is, as you said, probably a wash.
Pies are indeed broken as hell, but hey, as long as they’re going to leave them broken as hell you might as well take them into account. In any situation where min/max matters you’re using pies anyway, right?
In any case, the take-away should be that in the short run, the front-loaded nature of Rage makes it very, very strong for short fights, but that it falls behind in sustained legendary battles. That combination gives it a unique use case and a comparable power level to the Air, Fire, Blood, and Earth sigils, and should definitely be considered when making your choices.
(edited by Ensign.2189)