Signet of Capture

General Description
Use a Signet of Capture on a dead boss. If you choose to learn one of his skills, Signet of Capture is permanently replaced by that skill. (You can only learn skills of your current professions.)

Usage
With the Signet of Capture you can "steal" skills from a dead enemy boss.

You can only capture skills of your primary or secondary profession.

To use the Signet of Capture, defeat the enemy boss and then invoke the signet near its corpse. (You do not have to target the corpse.) You will then see a dialog box listing all dead bosses of your primary or secondary profession within reach (if there is more than one). For each one, it will list all the skills this boss has and which you can capture (Elite Skills and regular skills). Click on the one you wish to capture, confirm, and the signet will be replaced by that skill. If you see nothing you like you can cancel the capture and keep the signet for a different boss.

You can equip more than one Signet of Capture in your Skill Bar at a time. Once a skill is captured, the respective Signet of Capture will be permanently replaced by the captured skill in your skills list. If you had more than one SoC equiped, the others remain in your skill bar.

Acquisition
To introduce you to the use of the Signet of Capture Magi Malaquire in Lion's Arch gives you the quest Malaquire's Test and one Signet of Capture upfront, and another one as part of the reward.

Regardless if you have completed Malaquire's Test you can purchase additional signets from most other skill trainers in Kryta, Maguuma Jungle, the Crystal Desert and the Southern Shiverpeaks.

At any time buying a Signet of Capture will cost 1 skill point and some gold.

You can have more than one SoC at a time in your Skill Inventory and your Skill Bar.

Capturing Elite Skills
Using a Signet of Capture is the only way to learn elite skills in PvE play, hence capturing elite skills is the most important use of the Signets of Capture to most players.

Capturing an elite skill with a Signet of Capture works just like capturing any other skill, as explained above.

For a comprehensive list of elite skills and bosses see the elite skills list.

Note: A player can only equip one elite skill at a time. However, if you already have an elite skill equipped and you capture another one, you will be able to use both while you are still in that area. If you had several Signets equipped, you can even use more than 2 Elite Skills. As soon as you leave the area (walk to another, map travel or some other way) you will find that all elite skills except for the one are gone and replaced with an empty box. The captured skills have been learned and unlocked, though, and are available in the Skill Inventory for the PvE character who unlocked it, and all PvP characters.

Capturing Non-Elite Skills
As explained above the primary purpose of the SoC is to capture elite skills.

However, elite skills are only available from bosses in the "advanced" areas of the game: Crystal Desert, Southern Shiverpeaks and the Ring of Fire Islands. But you get your hands on your first SoC in Kryta, long before you reach any boss that offers an elite skill. So what to do with your fancy new toy? Hold on, there are quite a few non-elite skills that are worth capturing:

Capturing Quest-Reward-Skills
Provided that a skill is available as a quest reward, then learning it as a quest reward should always be the preferred method, for one obvious reason:

As a quest reward the skill comes free, at no cost of gold or skill points. Especially skill points shouldn't be wasted easily!

''Note: There are about 140 skills available for your primary and secondary profession together. About half of these are available as quest reward. That leaves about 75 skills that you must "buy" if you want them: Buy directly from a skill trainer or indirectly in form of a Signet of Capture - either way it costs 1 skill point. But by the time you ascend you will have accumulated only about 40 skill points (20 from levelling and 20 from missions). By the time you "beat the game" (finish the last mission) it'll be something between 50 and 60. Comparing the numbers you see that you will run out of skill points very quickly if you ignore the quest rewards and try to buy all skills.''

Having said that, if a skill is very valuable to you, and it is available from a boss much earlier in the game than from a quest, then you might consider to spend a skill point to capture it.

Capturing Skill-Trainer-Skills
Capturing a skill that is otherwise only available from Skill Trainers is always worth considering, for one reason:  The fact that some skills are available from bosses much earlier in the game than from a skill trainer! And being able to use a valuable skill a few missions earlier can make a huge difference. To find skills that are available from bosses earlier than from the respective skill trainer, refer to the list of skills by capture location.