Guild Wars 2

Right now I’m torn between the sigil of earth or the sigil of bursting on my bleed ranger’s shortbow. Correct me if I’m wrong but on a rabid set bursting would provide more overall damage?

If all you use is bleeds, Sigil of Agony would be better. If you mostly use bleeding, Agony would still be better. If you use poison for more than half the time, Bursting would be better, but if you only have a bit of poison and maybe a bit of burning (I’m not sure, its been over a year since I used a shortbow ranger) Agony would be the way to go. However, if your bleeds don’t even last 5 seconds Agony would have no effect, and neither would Bursting.

I don’t understand very well the question, but why don’t you just use both sigils on your shortbow? Probably you don’t know yet, but now you can equip two sigils in two-handed weapons! Yes, is that cool!

However, bursting will always provide more damage doesn’t matter the case, is 6%+ of damage over the damage of any bleeding stack you apply, so if you have ONLY one slot free in your shortbow, use the bursting one.
Earth only benefits from a build where you have really high critical chance, I am not sure you can have a powerful one if you don’t invest 25 or 30 trait points in skirmishing line. And since you are doing a condition damage build, you would have to left you Markmanship line empty to invest in better critical chance with Skirmishing – but doing so you loose a lot of cond. damage traits in that line – including Spotter.

I am not 100% sure about what I am going to say next, but I think you should be careful to do not apply in the same weapon bursting with malice or accuracy, one will cancel the other because they are of the same type – passive effect while weapon is wielded. I think sigils like that don’t stack their effects coz they are from the same category. If you are doing pvp, Agony is a clever choice too. ( I would rather use Bursting and Agony in the shortbow).

Btw, is better if you have a rampager set if you wanna use Sigil of Earth