Guild Wars 2

5 second cooldown in game doesn’t match the design of Superior Sigil of Air

In the April feature patch, Anet said the following:
Sigil of Air: This sigil now has a 50% activation chance on critical hit. Rescaled the cooldown from 5, 5, and 5 seconds to 5, 4, and 3 seconds for the minor, major, and superior versions, respectively. This sigil remains unable to critically hit.

I am afraid however, that there has been a miscommunication between the designers and programmers. Namely, the Superior Sigil of Air still has its old 5 seconds cooldown: only the tooltip has changed to 3 seconds.

Build the bug has been found in:
Every build since April 15th 2014

Reproduction rate:
100%

Video of bug
Data collected from the video below. Used an Engineer with a flamethrower, coming in at around 80% crit chance. As you can see, the Superior Fire and Superior Air have the same 5 second cooldown. Superior Sigil of Air however, was intended to have a 3 second cooldown.

Superior Sigil of Air: activated 16 times over 84 seconds (proc every 5.25 seconds)
Superior Sigil of Fire: activated 16 times over 85 seconds (proc every 5.3 seconds)

http://youtu.be/4Gr8_NKf7QQ

Severity
This bug makes Superior Sigil of Air very weak compared to its direct counterpart, the Superior Sigil of Fire. Air does around 30% extra damage on a single target, but Fire can hit 5 enemies which means it could do almost 4 times as much damage in total.

I don’t think your methods of testing are giving you the information you think you are getting.

The sigil has a 50% chance to proc on any crit if it is off of cooldown.

That means it does not automatically proc every 3 seconds.

It almost never procs at 3 seconds….. but it is possible.

I went and tested this myself and I was able to get the sigil to proc at exactly three seconds after about 10 minutes of testing.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

The sigil has a 50% chance to proc on any crit if it is off of cooldown.

That means it does not automatically proc every 3 seconds.

In normal situations, that would be true. However, with the flamethrower and near 100% crit chance, it should proc pretty quick after it comes off cooldown.

This is very clearly demonstrated with the Superior Sigil of Fire: it procs just a little over every 5 seconds. There is no reason why Superior Sigil of Air would proc at the exact same times for minutes on end.

If you have experienced it proccing twice in a 3 second window, I would like to see evidence of that. As far as I’ve been able to see, ANET just didn’t change the cooldown even though they said they did. Maybe the programmers simply forgot to implement the change.

At this point, there is barely any reason to pick Air over Fire. That would be different with a lower (the right) cooldown on Air.

Luijtjuh.5964:

TheBlackLeech.9360:

The sigil has a 50% chance to proc on any crit if it is off of cooldown.

That means it does not automatically proc every 3 seconds.

In normal situations, that would be true. However, with the flamethrower and near 100% crit chance, it should proc pretty quick after it comes off cooldown.

This is very clearly demonstrated with the Superior Sigil of Fire: it procs just a little over every 5 seconds. There is no reason why Superior Sigil of Air would proc at the exact same times for minutes on end.

If you have experienced it proccing twice in a 3 second window, I would like to see evidence of that. As far as I’ve been able to see, ANET just didn’t change the cooldown even though they said they did. Maybe the programmers simply forgot to implement the change.

At this point, there is barely any reason to pick Air over Fire. That would be different with a lower (the right) cooldown on Air.

maybe the sigils share an icd.

I tested the air sigil without sigil of fire.

Even then, it would still be bugged as that isn’t supposed to happen.

I just tested it myself though (without fire sigil) and the result stayed the same: Superior Sigil of Air has a 5 second cooldown.

I just looked at the leaked balance changes (http://pastebin.com/2bk8bnHx), and funnily enough Anet seems to have decided Air sigil with 3 second cooldown is overpowered and it needs a nerf to 5 seconds again.

That makes me wonder if they are actually aware it still has a 5 second cooldown, or that they simply can’t be asked to make it 3 seconds as the tooltip now states. (technically, they would only have to change the tooltip to incorporate the ‘nerf’)

Luijtjuh.5964:

I just looked at the leaked balance changes (http://pastebin.com/2bk8bnHx), and funnily enough Anet seems to have decided Air sigil with 3 second cooldown is overpowered and it needs a nerf to 5 seconds again.

That makes me wonder if they are actually aware it still has a 5 second cooldown, or that they simply can’t be asked to make it 3 seconds as the tooltip now states. (technically, they would only have to change the tooltip to incorporate the ‘nerf’)

Those balance notes aren’t reality.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Leaked-Balance-Fixes-Bugs-on-Skils/first#post4670233