Guild Wars 2

I do believe your comparing apples and oranges, when you say “SB is better than the LB”. Firstly, the LB requires different traits, different attributes and a different play style. When I equipped a SB on my ranger, who is build around the LB, it’s damage was ridiculous.

Back to OP’s question .. why use a LB? In my experience, the LB does good damage at very long range. Also, the LB is a much more stationary weapon, which imo makes it great for dungeons. It’s OK-ish in WvW also, because of its range, but most ppl will just evade your Rapid Fire, leaving you with auto-attacks. It sucks donkey balls in small PvP.

In the end, the LB is by no means “clearly” inferior to the SB. Give a shot, but pay attention to how you are supposed to play with one equipped.

Pets

On land I use a Snow Leopard for pretty much anything: solo play and dungeons. I do so because of its high damage output. For dungeons I should probably switch to a Lynx, which seems marginally better because of the bleed effect on pounce. For tough opponents where the cat can’t survive I use a brown bear for tanking.

Under water I use a Jellyfish for tanking and a shark for damage. While the first is OK, the second is very bad, because of very poor survivability … so I’m still looking for a good amphibious DPS pet.

Weapons

Mostly a Longbow for just about anything, with Axe/Horn for AoE and kiting. I also tried a Short Bow for a while and found it to be ineffective .. maybe having Longbow traits has something to do with that :p

Stats

Traits into Marksmanship and Beast Mastery, with the left overs in Skirmishing. This turns your pet into a good damage dealer, or tanker depending on what pet you have active, while giving your own DPS a good boost.

I’m looking for Power, then Precision as the main attributes on my stuff, with Power being the highest value in my eyes. Reasons … the Longbow has low firing speed and you can achieve a decent critical chance from secondary stats and other sources.

I can confirm this.

P/P is a single target nuke set-up, and a good one that is. To answer your question, yes, it can work while leveling. Simply nuke, roll out of the away, nuke again, rinse and repeat. By the time you run out of energy anything should be dead already. For tough opponents, dual pistol is not that great, better go P/D which gives you infinite kiting. Against packs of mobs go shortbow.

In the end, don’t expect to be able to level using just on weapon set. It’s much better to swap and adapt to what your put up against.