Guild Wars 2

I don’t get on these forums often, so I do not recall if I posted this once before or not. I searched for Sigil of Intelligence/hydromancy/geomancy and the forum search yielded nothing regarding the isse.

Anyway, through my own testing and playing, I’ve noticed that sigils who’s effects trigger on weapon swap do not always trigger. Other players have also confirmed having the same issue with their weapon-swap sigils. I might go as far as saying over half the time they do not trigger. I’ve tested this with the following sigils:

• Intelligence
• Doom
• Hydromancy
• Geomancy
• Pyromancy

Despite their varied effects, they all have the same issue: they don’t always trigger on weapon swap as the description states. These sigils state that their effects trigger ‘when you swap to this weapon while in combat’. My play style uses Sigil of Intelligence primarily, as I run a crit heavy build with heavy use of weapon swapping.

Sigil of Intelligence and Doom create a little ‘buff’ icon on the player that states “Your next attack is critical/inflicts poison”. Hydromancy/geomancy/pyromancy have a very noticeable AoE skill effect on the occasion they do trigger. The icons/AoE effects are non-mistakable, so you KNOW when they trigger. The sigils used to work fine during the beta, but for some reason after release they haven’t been working like they once had. I already submitted an in-game bug report on this a while back, but I thought it was about time to make a forum post as well.

Either the sigils bug out randomly, or these sigils’ effects have an undisclosed internal cool down. So my question is: Do these sigils have an internal cool down that is not stated anywhere? If so, please add the cool down timer to the sigil’s description. If not, then please take a look at the weapon swap sigils and what is causing them to only sometimes trigger. My sigil of choice is a vital part of my play style, as I try to use precise crits to be as effective as I can.

Your friendly crit addict,
~Zera

The Geomancy and Hydromancy Sigils have a 9s CD listed, the others don’t have it listed but have the same 9s according to wiki. What is not listed anywhere is that all sigils with a CD share the same timer which means the Fast Hands traits and Rune of the Warrior are pretty much useless as far as taking advantage of faster weapon swap is concerned.

So Sigil of Intelligence has an internal cooldown? I’m guessing it’s a 9 second cooldown.

However, now with this new update that just came through, the update notes said the following about Sigil of Intelligence:

• Sigil of Intelligence: The number of uses on this skill’s effect will now decrease if an attack lands or if the attack is negated by Blind, Block, Evade, Obstructed, or Invulnerable.

What in the world does that even mean? I’m very confused. Does this mean that every attack causes Sigil of Intelligence’s effect to becomes less and less useful until it is entirely useless? Could we possibly get some clarification on the changes for these sigils? That update note is very badly worded.

The explanation ended up in some other thread. Basically it means it will no longer waste the sigil’s effect(and put it on cooldown) if you just swing at the air or try to attack from out of range but all those other things listed will still count.

Thanks for the clarification on that, I was really confused. Could you possibly provide a link to the post? I’d like to read up on it. I’ve been doing further tests with the sigil of intelligence and here is what I found:

• Against the target dummies in Lions Arch, the sigil activates every time on weapon swap to it as it should. Every 10 seconds (5 seconds between each weapon swap as only one of my weapons has the sigil). 10 for 10.

• Against normal fleshy enemies, it doesn’t trigger every time as it should. For a while there I thought that my bleeds somehow used up the crit as soon as I swapped to the weapon, but I soon debunked this theory when I swapped my traits around so I caused no bleeds or DoTs of any sort and found that the Sigil of Intelligence still just plain fails to activate at random times.

I have also noticed this with the sigils that are supposed to proc on weapon swap in combat….seems very random.

The post with the explanation https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Patch-Notes-01-28-2013/first#post1308929

Edit: Sigil of Intelligence should not work against the test dummies in LA at all. They are objects which means they are immune to both crits and conditions. I don’t have a Sigil of Intelligence to test on them I’ve tested them using both a thief with 70% crit and an elementalist using Arcane Power(next 5 hits will crit).

My issues have been the randomness of the procs of the sigil of geomancy on actual mobs….especially in Orr.

Khisanth.2948:

The post with the explanation https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Patch-Notes-01-28-2013/first#post1308929

Edit: Sigil of Intelligence should not work against the test dummies in LA at all. They are objects which means they are immune to both crits and conditions. I don’t have a Sigil of Intelligence to test on them I’ve tested them using both a thief with 70% crit and an elementalist using Arcane Power(next 5 hits will crit).

The Sigil of Intelligence does not make it so you crit against static objects, but you still get the ‘buff’ icon that says your next attack is critical. I guess I should have clarified my post on my test with the dummies. The buff is applied to the user, but the crit does not actually occur on test dummies, as it shouldn’t, but the buff is still used up Sorry for the confusion. And thank you very much for sharing the link to the post, I appreciate it.

And to Oldbugga, yes, the application of the sigil’s effects are definitely random most of the time. Once in a while, the sigil works as intended, though. I just wish the devs could resolve the issue. I know they have a lot on their plate, but I do hope they will focus more on fixing the current bugs, regardless of how minor they are, before they press on with new content. I fear it will just keep adding more and more bugs. When I saw Sigil of Intelligence mentioned in the update notes, I gotsuper excited. However, as I played I noticed the issue remained. It’s a sad time to be a user of these sigils

All active sigils share a 2 seconds cooldown. This includes crit procs and on swap.

If you swap weapons, you will only get the effects of 1 swap sigil, and no other effects will happen for 2 seconds.

If you proc a bleed with sigil of earth, you will not proc another bleed for at least 2 seconds from the sigil, and swapping weapons in those 2 seconds will not give you the swap bonuses.

Liuli, thanks for that, I did not know about that 2-second cooldown.

Now, if we could just figure out why Sigil of Intelligence randomly fails to trigger for no reason. It’s not bleeds, and I even tried not swapping out of the weapon with SoI until sometime after 9 seconds because I thought that maybe the sigil needed to be in an actively equipped weapon to let the timer run down. That theory, however, get’s debunked by my test with the dummies. I was swapping weapons every 5 seconds during that test, meaning I would only have the weapon with SoI actively equipped for 5 seconds at a time and the sigil still worked 100% of the time. I also found that SoI does have an global internal cooldown of at least 9 seconds because I tried using an SoI on two different weapon sets. Since I can swap weapons every 5 seconds, I was only able to get the sigil to work on one weapon but not the other.

So it appears that, indeed, SoI just randomly fails to work on targets that aren’t static objects like dummies/structures. I imagine Sigil of Doom will do the same thing, but I have not tested it as extensively as SoI.

Thanks for the input so far, guys. I really want to find out what’s causing this sigil to fail so I can avoid doing whatever it is that is causing it to fail. I’ll post more if I find anything else, as I will continue testing the Sigil of Intelligence.

Zera, are you using a proc sigil on your weapon set that does not have SOI on it? If you get into combat with that set, proc then swap within the 2 seconds that may be the cause of the fail. I have SOI and no on proc sigils with my main set (5% dmg and a stacking) and my SOI works 100% of the time.

ensure you have no other proc sigils on when testing, they all have differing cooldown times that stop any other non passive sigil (some have a 45s cooldown that essentially makes any other proc useless)

As a matter of fact, I am using a a sigil of rage along side of sigil of intelligence. That sigil has it’s own internal cooldown. I don’t understand how that would affect the SoI’s internal cooldown, as the sigil works perfectly fine as intended against the practice dummies in LA, triggering every time I swap to the weapon that has it while in combat (every 10 seconds I can swap back to that weapon).