Guild Wars 2

I assume completely ignoring one or the other is a bad idea, but what’s a good ratio to have?

It really depends on what role you are trying to fulfill. Where are you investing your traits/skills – what weapons do you plan on taking. There is no right answer.

It really depends what you’re looking to accomplish. Personally I focus more on power than precision since I haven’t spec’d any of the traits which proc on criticals.

I’m using shortbow with longbow as backup, skills are in Marksman and Skirmish for now and I’m level 48.

And the role i’m trying to fullfill is sticking pointy sticks in enemies so they go dead.

I feel like you can overkill Precision. It’s certainly important to have a high crit rate but when you consider the amount of sources we can get Fury (20% crit chance) then in my mind it becomes less important at some level. No I dont know what that level is

So i prioritize Crit Damage > Power > Precision until the smart math people tell me otherwise. This is assuming you have at least 15 points in Skirmishing and/or Warhorn 5 and/or Rampage as One and/or Red Moa pet etc.

look carefully at your Traits they almost always include something that indicates what you may want to favor.

Nature Magic has one that is 5% of your Vitality boosts your Power and since each point boosts your Vitality, it’s probably trying to point you towards Power above Precision

Whereas Beast Mastery has one that converts Healing into Power so it’s actually beneficial to get the gear that has +Healing (though that may be only advisable if you plan on being Support all the time)

In both cases the traits are boosting your base damage output by converting a third tier stat (Vitality/Healing) to your base damage.

but for me, since I am 10 Skirmish / 30 NM / BM 30 and I feel I already get enough Power boosts from 2 sources that I am currently favoring Precision/Crit gear, because I feel it will help me round out a little more than just stacking straight up Power.

I am, however, apparently one of those few Rangers with a Support designed build.

I did the math and it’s actually prettykittensimple once you realize Anet designed it this way on purpose.

At 80, one point of precision is roughly equivalent to one point of power if you have +100% crit damage (a crit does 2x your normal damage). This makes a lot of sense because of the way Anet designed the precision formula and I suspect they worked backwards assuming that precision = power at 2x crit dmg.

The result then is if you do less than 2x crit dmg, power > precision on the optimal dps curve (keep in mind once you hit the apex of the curve, power is no longer better than precision and vice versa – it’s just that the optimal ratio is something like 2 power : 1 precision). And of course, if you do more than 2x crit dmg, precision > power.

Thanks for the info.
So before I reach 100% crit damage 1 point of power is better than 1 point precision.

How do I see my crit damage? When I hover over Crit Chance it says Critical Damage 22, but I definitely do more than 22% more damage on a crit.

you should also consider traits like: chance to cause bleed on critical hit.

Thus if you have higher crritchance you will also get more damage due to bleeds wich is what i favor as a shortbow ranger.