Guild Wars 2

So I’ve settled on raising my condition damage and duration while focusing mostly on bleeds with my shortbow. Besides +condition what should I look for in gear and pets.

Superior Sigil of Earth + Sharpened Edges trait (chance to bleed on crits) = 10+ bleed stacks without QZ. Combine this with Juvenile Lynx and you get nearly 15+ stacks of bleed. With QZ popped, reaching 25 stacks of bleed is easy with this setup.

Ofcourse you’d have to be atleast 250-500 range away from your enemy to stack the bleeds properly due to the nerf.

What nerf I’m still fairly new to the game so I didn’t know range was an issue. Also where can the lynx be found that sounds like a land choice to complement my shark.

Shortbow’s auto attack speed got reduced and in consequence bleed stacking requires you to be closer in range towards your enemy just to stack it properly.

Apparently it was an ‘Animation Bug’, when the animation of the shortbow was perfectly normal. The nerf was simply uncalled for but meh, people have disagreements with it.

Here are the locations where u can find juvenile lynxes to tame

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Juvenile_Lynx

Lynxes are very good dps pets and they stack a lot of bleed. You also might want a second tankier pet (bears etc) for stronger mobs.

So my next question is would this still be a viable build? Or should I consider something else?

Yep. It’s viable.

The only downside is you’ll have to fight close range to stack those bleeds.

I’m not sure why someone would recommend the Lynx and in the same breath say you can get bleed capped. That’s not optimal, if you are getting capped out by your pet, that’s bad. Your pet’s bleeds don’t benefit from your own condition stats, they are nice addition only if you don’t heavily focus on them yourself. it just opens you up to getting all of your bleeds (your dps) and all of your pet’s bleed (its dps) removed by cleansing at the same time.

If you are going to heavily invest in condition damage, it would behoove you to also pick up traps, specifically flame trap. It has a naturally low CD, incredibly low when traited, and adds burning to your repertoire. Other traps are very handy too.

Ranger condition works really well with Rabid gear. This is the gear that focuses on condition damage, precision, and toughness. Coupled with Sigil of Earth, and shortbows positional bleeds and fast attack speed, you can very rapidly apply bleeds which tick for a good deal.

The biggest hang up for shortbow bleeds to overcome for this to be a truly awesome method of condition damage, is the fact your base bleed duration is only 3 seconds. This requires you to stack a good deal of condition duration, preferably in the increments of 35%, 70%, and 100%. Runes are your best bet for duration increase, for a build focused on bleeding specifically, I recommend Aff/Krait 3/3. That gives 166 condition damage and 30% bleed duration.

In PvE/WvW another great source of condition duration is pizza consumable. You can get 40%. Between this and the aff/krait you are at 70% duration, which will give you 5 second shortbow bleeds, and turn your earth sigil bleeds into 8 second bleeds, and your sharpening stone bleeds into 10 second ones. Assuming roughly 50% crit, 70% with fury, you would have an average stack 17 bleeds by just attacking. Quickness could bump this to 25. That is without a pet that bleeds.