Guild Wars 2

So I am playing on a Ranger and I’ve recently made a build where I use Sword/Dagger and Axe/Torch. On both of the main-hand weapons I have Superior Sigil of Geomancy, and on both of my Off-hand weapons I have Superior Sigil of Battle.

Superior Sigil of Battle:
Gain 3 stacks of Might (20 seconds) when you swap to this weapon while in combat.

So when I use this setup and go in combat I expect to gain 3 stacks of might when I swap weapons… didn’t happen! So I tried to figure out what the problem was so I unequiped both my main-hand weapons so I was going in combat with only using a Dagger and Torch (both with the sigil of battle) and when I swapped weapons I did gain 3 stacks of might! So with the main-hand weapons equipped, it didn’t work. But without the main-hand weapons it did work.

Is this a known problem or am I just doing it wrong?

If you’re using different sigils on your main and off-hand weapons then the individual effects only fire 50% of the time.

So with Battle, you’ll get your three stacks of might 50% of the time, and the other times you’ll get whatever the effect from the other sigil is.

The reason this happens is so that you don’t gain an advantage by using a one-handed weapon and an offhand over using a two-handed weapon. You can only ever have one sigil on a two-handed weapon, so it would be a bit unfair if you only got one effect where dual-weapon wielders got two.

Okay, so what if I use a stacking sigil like Bloodlust or Corruption. Would that work?

There’s still a 50% chance of the effect happening, whatever the trigger is.

So for Bloodlust or Corruption, you’d get one stack for every 2 kills, assuming the other sigil was different.

Basically, the best way to think of it is that if you put the same Sigil on your Main and Offhand weapons, the effect will happen as expected. If you put different sigils on them, then you still get both effects, but they will only happen half as often as they usually would.

The advantage of this is that you can actually get more effects, just less consistently. So for example, if you had Battle and Bloodlust on one set of weapons, and Battle and Corruption on the other, then you could build up 25 stacks of both power and condition damage, as well as having a 50% chance of getting your might stacks on weapon swap. You’d have to kill more creatures to do it, but you’d get there in the end!

I should add that I have no idea what happens with the sigils that give a permanent +X to a particular stat. I guess you only get half the stat boost, but I’ve never used any of them to be sure.

The tooltips for the sigils just suck.

The sigils which are “perform X when you do Y” have an internal cooldown which is shared by all sigils of the same type. So when you have two weapons with a “proc on switch” effect, and you switch, one will proc and the other will then be on cooldown, and will not activate.