Guild Wars 2

I’m sure this kind of thing happens all the time, but I am a new player of the game who has become inspired for a certain look for one of my characters.
The character themselves appear in a fiction series and are rainbow themed. They are also quite skillful when it comes to magic. They also have a pet unicorn.
I was thereby inspired to create a character capable of wielding both the bifrost and the dreamer…
My question is, does anyone have any build suggestions for that combo with a ranger/druid? (I’ve seen such sites as metabattle, and they don’t show any pairing of the short bow with a staff druid…so I’m really just keeping my fingers crossed at this point. ^^;
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated…

Builds for what exactly? Which gamemode do you prettend to use the sb for?

I have used SB/staff on a roaming celestial druid. It’s all right. Pretty subpar but it works.

Edit: If you meant for open world PvE, vipers or sinister would be more than adequate. Basically you just want some power and condi damage since SB is condi and staff is power. SB is where 95% of your damage comes from so lean condi with trinkets and what not.

I, too, ran a short-lived roaming SB/staff build. I kept my armor, backpack and SB in viper stats, as I had an ascended viper set, and my staff and trinkets were magi. “Subpar” is also the word I’d use for it. I tried it for WvW, and as I really dislike that entire game mode, I didn’t explore it very deeply.

I found that if I considered the SB more of a survival weapon (root/stun, dodge back and run while keeping up a moderate amount of pressure from condis and pet) it worked out a bit better than just trying to land the kill. Then again, that means I was just running and not being much of a threat, so there’s that tradeoff.

The reason why you haven’t (and never really will) find an SB/staff build on metabattle is because it’s going to force a sort of 3-way compromise. As others have already mentioned, shortbow is a condi weapon, and staff is both a power and healing weapon. These differing natures means your own gear slots and trait choices will be fighting themselves. There’s only so many gear slots and traits you can fill; committing to one set of stats (be it condi, power, or heals) will essentially validate one of your weapons at the expense of the other, while trying to split traits and stats leaves you subpar at both sides you are trying to appease.

A more popular pairing with shortbow is axe/torch. There are some ridiculously glittery, magical looking axes out there, and some very “magic wand” sorts of torches as well – especially if your budget range extends into legendaries, in which case you can definitely afford Black Lion skins. Daydreamer, Glittering, Tempest, Pact Fleet, and Timekeeper could all coordinate very nicely with The Dreamer.