Guild Wars 2

I am looking for some clarification over distribution of weapon and armor attributes.

I have read widely about the various combinations of attributes depending on your profession and your build, however is there a difference in whether the attributes you want go on your weapon or your gear. For example – my ranger is going to focus on beastmaster and short bow. I have read that a combination of toughness and vitality is good. I have picked up a short bow that has both attributes. Would this work or should I only look at these attributes for my gear and look to other attributes like precision, power, crit, etc for my weapons? Or can you attributes go anywhere – including accessories?

Feeling a little confused and info overloaded.

It doesn’t matter which piece of gear it is on. Every piece just gives different amounts. Eventually at 60+, gear will give 3 attributes. There will be one primary and two secondary. Primary just means that it gives the most of the 3 attributes and the secondary will have less than the primary.

Remember that stats are useful for different things. Toughness/Vitality are good for staying alive, but gear with those stats will be poor at dealing damage.
Since you’re a ranged attacker with a pet that will draw attacks in PvE, you likely won’t get hit too much, so you may want to run with damage stats instead of survival stats. Ranger’s Shortbow is very heavy on condition damage, so gear with +Condition Damage may be useful to you.

You can look at weapons, armor, trinkets as a palette. As far as stat distribution, attributes can go anywhere, but they should be coherent and have synergy with your traited build. Generally you have offensive stats and defensive stats. Power or condition damage would be examples of offensive and you first need to decide whether you want to go direct damage or condition damage. If you are thinking shortbow and traps you may find that condition damage is the way to go. Precision ups the crit chance and in a direct damage build that makes critical damage important as well. Precision is also good for condi builds but often here it’s around crit procs that are available as opposed to crit damage.

Defensive stats are important but builds can vary from glass cannon to tanky—depends on the range you want to play in and how comfortable you are playing your character. Base vitality is always good and some toughness helps.

Best advice is to google builds for you profession and do some general reading on how people are thinking about builds and stat synergy in given builds. It will take time to develop the knowledge you need, but I have good news. Leveling is fairly easy while you are figuring things out. Don’t be afraid to try out skills and different weapon sets. Anet has made the game forgiving in terms of the leveling experience and you’ll find there are a lot of things that you can get away with while you are sorting out the optimum for your playstyle.

I actually have a similar build to what you described, OP. I use a Shortbow/Longbow, and have maxed out the Beast-mastery and Wilderness Survival trait trees. My pet pulls most of the aggro, so, all of my armour is +Condition Damage, because Shortbow has a heavy focus on stacking bleeding and poison, and I’m not going to be getting hit often if things go correctly. So, if you’re going to main using that shortbow, I recommend specing in +Condition damage to maximize it’s output.

Really appreciate the advice and time taken to give it. Wasn’t sure if I would get anything at all ……… cheers :-)