Guild Wars 2

I see a lot of builds using SB + Cele gear.

Im just curious, aside from the stat spread of cele, does it really benefit SB that much, I mean the SB weapon skills are not that high damaging and they dont scale that better with power, so yeah just gonna ask whats the use?

A lot of players like SB for the rate of fire but you’re correct in that another gear stat such as Rabid or Cav would benefit a condition based build more so.

Aside from the rate of fire, so why do people still use it with cele? Im just really curious, I might be missing something you know.

You can get a nice bleed stack with sb auto, and with the high rate of fire, even the regular damage it does, can add up quite quickly. Celestial is good with SB because sb is a kind of hybrid weapon. You can stack up tons of bleeds, crit very often with the rate of fire, and deal quite high overall DPS if you run a hybrid build.

That’s not to say cele is the only good stat that works with SB, but it maximizes both aspects of the bow.

warriorjrd.8695:

You can get a nice bleed stack with sb auto, and with the high rate of fire, even the regular damage it does, can add up quite quickly. Celestial is good with SB because sb is a kind of hybrid weapon. You can stack up tons of bleeds, crit very often with the rate of fire, and deal quite high overall DPS if you run a hybrid build.

That’s not to say cele is the only good stat that works with SB, but it maximizes both aspects of the bow.

but the sb AA scales low with power right?

Celestial is just a good choice for PvP rangers. Almost all of our weapons are hybrid power/condi. The power damage of a shortbow is not outrageous, but its fast ranged attack definitely adds up. And the condi element is effectively non-existent in 1v1s.

So which one would be better, cele or condi amy? like dps wise.

Eh, lose the SB.

StickerHappy.8052:

So which one would be better, cele or condi amy? like dps wise.

you can not really compare celestial to a condi amy in terms of dps of as it has a variety of stats. if you want go full dps with condi use a rampages amy.

comparing stats of amulates, is kinda pointless unless you have a particular build and play style I mined

StickerHappy.8052:

warriorjrd.8695:

You can get a nice bleed stack with sb auto, and with the high rate of fire, even the regular damage it does, can add up quite quickly. Celestial is good with SB because sb is a kind of hybrid weapon. You can stack up tons of bleeds, crit very often with the rate of fire, and deal quite high overall DPS if you run a hybrid build.

That’s not to say cele is the only good stat that works with SB, but it maximizes both aspects of the bow.

but the sb AA scales low with power right?

With celestial and depending on your traits you can get between 500 and 900 w/crits.
But the SB does hit quite low, but the rate of fire and the bleeds combine to make a very nice DPS with celestial.

Actually, if we are talking about maximizing the damage output, Sinister is definitely a way to go. It currently has the potential for the highest damage output so far, since the meta Weapon for rangers is Sword (not in every scenario though. Some encounters do not let you flank your target with the SB).

Actually, if you take SB into sinister armor – it deals a huge lots of damage, especially if you pair the build with either a torch or Flame Trap. You also get Fire field this way. (taking both is a waste, you can get perma Burning from either of those alone)

Celestial is just waaaay too comfortable in it’s versatility. For the damage – Sinister is the answer. For the overall WvW,PvP, non-Zerk runs : Celestial is just fine.
And most of Rangers are lazy kitten =D That’s why you see so many celestial oriented SB ones.

Did they add sinister to PvP? That could be really interesting. I don’t play regularly enough to have noticed.

They way I’ve thought about it is basically “how is the damage being dealt.”

Shortbow has the flanking requirement to stack bleeds, which imo without power investment (or Sharpened Edges on Rabid) is weaker than celestial since Condition is only augmenting once aspect of your DPS and the power output of the shortbow can be considered more “reliable” or guaranteed than applying bleeds.

The swap weaponset plays a big part of that as well. The “meta” build that runs SB and Axe/Dagger can benefit more from Rabid than running Sword mainhand, which would generally, from a purely autoattacking standpoint on just the sword, be paired better with Celestial since sword lacks condi outside of poison (where as Axes main damage comes from maintaining Axe 2 bleeds and Rabid benefits it more in that regard).

BUT, the other aspect that doesn’t really seem to be discussed as much outside of the damage is the survival. Rangers in general lack on demand condition removal on low cooldowns (which is why the current popular builds go all in on removal with EB and SotF) and the current PvP metagame is extremely condition heavy (burning and poison are particularly common with the Warrior/cele/engi core and doom sigil popularity). Combine that with good evasion access and “enough” protection access (which is what made Carrion spirits so strong, high vitality + protection access), and vitality investment is a very good way to get “beefy” in PvP.

THEN, factor in also gaining toughness on celestial and healing power (not the most prominent investment in the world but the improvement to healing power helps improve the ability to restore health which does contribute some degree of survival to a build) and then having “enough” of every stat to then use runes to specialize further.

That’s my thinking behind it though.
It’s easier just to make a pros/cons list using the counter argument of what you would consider over celestial if you want to give yourself a quick breakdown.
So instead of asking “why celestial,” think “why would I use rabid over celestial?”

tl;dr: it’s a decision of “do I min/max or do I build versatile, and do my weapon choices support my stat investments?”