Guide to making a build

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[edit] How to make a build

This is an effective three-step-guide to help you make a build.

Making builds isn't always easy to do, but for the most part one just has to keep a few things in mind.

  • What purpose do you want your build to serve?
  • What kind of attributes do you want to focus on?
  • What kind of attacks do you want to use?
  • What sort of defense are you planning to use in the build?
  • What skills are you planning to use to stay alive?
  • What weapons and/or secondary items will you need to make the build work?
  • What kind of armor and buffs will benefit it or do you need to change your armor/armor mods?

Always remember that you always have teammates to help you (there are exceptions such as pre-ascalon and solo farming), and therefore you can specialize your build more, and as an example rely on your monk to heal you or your damage-dealers to do the actual damage. A more specialized build can more quickly take down what it specializes on, which is, of course, beneficial to your group.

[edit] Step 1

  • First chose whether you will go for PvE or PvP
    • For PvE builds follow the 2nd step.
    • For PvE farming jump to number 3 in step 2.
    • For PvP builds, skip to step 3.

[edit] Step 2

Learn about your enemies on Guild Wars Wiki or by trial and error:

1: What kind of enemies are they:

2: What kind of skill do they use:

3: If you solo farm, then you need to have both enough offence to deal enough damage to kill the enemies, and enough defence to stay alive while doing it. In solo farming, balancing your build precisely is critical to succed. In multi-man farming, you do not only need to balance your own build, but make your whole team work perfectly, at least if you are less people than you are supposed to be in the area. However, if you team-farm you can focus more on either offence or defence, which, as stated above, will result in death if solofarming. However, if you want to flaunt through general play, consider planing your whole teams build sets.

[edit] Step 3

In PvP you can't know what builds your enemies are going to use.

Now that you have identified which category you chose to focus on, you need to take the following questions into account:

  • What skill have you chosen to use as the focus of your build?
  • Which skills work best with that skill that help to achieve what you want the build to do?
  • What kind of power drain will those skills have on your energy pool?
  • What attributes will the build rely on most of the time?
  • How many attributes points do you have to work with when making the build?
  • What skills will you have in the build to help you stay alive longer?
  • What kind of gear will you need to make the build more effective?

The above are all valid questions that most build makers will ask themselves at least once. Once you have your answers, you can move on to the next step. By this time, most people would already have an experimental build made up, but there are a few things you need to make sure are a part of the build.

[edit] A good damage dealing build contains the following:

  • A skill or two that will increase the damage dealt to the enemy, such as Apply Poison or Conjure Frost.
  • If possible, a skill that helps you to recover, such as Shadow Refuge or Protective Was Kaolai
  • If a healing skill isn't preffered, a defensive skill might be, such as Whirling Defense or Avatar of Balthazar.
  • Many builds will frequently have a resurrection skill of some kind If you expect to be alive when the rest of the group is dead, you might want to consider a re-useable res like rebirth.
  • Some kind of skill that can compensate for the build's weakness. E.g. if you rely on physical damage, a condition removal skill might come in handy, to battle blind.
  • You will also have to take into account the limitations of a character combo when making a build. You can't necessarily make a build for a N/Me and expect it to work on a Me/N.

[edit] A good support build contains the following:

  • A support build will have skills that benefit the group.
  • When working with non-monk support, it is necessary to know the area in order to bring the right skills, e.g. if the area is clustered with melee foes, you want to bring Ward Against Melee and not Ward Against Elements.
  • Non-monks should consider bringing damage in their builds. Then they can assist in spikes and won't be too redundant with two monks, especially in Normal Mode.
  • Bring a resurrection skill (PvP monks exempted). For fast resurrections, consider Resurrection Signet or Death Pact Signet or putting a hard res on a Mesmer.
  • Skills to counter weaknesses in your build or tactics employed against you. E.g. if you are having problem with healing because of constant KDs, consider bringing Balanced Stance.

[edit] Notes

[edit] One-at-a-time-skills

There are skills which you can only have one active at a time, due to that you shouldn't bring too many stances, glyphs, item spells, weapon spells and preparations.

[edit] Caps

Note that there are some caps in guild wars, which makes some skill combinations less beneficial.

  • Armor cap:
Armour bonuses from skills are capped at +25AL, although a single skill can raise the armor over the cap (this makes it mostly useless to have more than one skill giving +AL). For more details, check armor rating.
  • Prolonged skill activation cap:
A skill cannot activate more than 150% of it's activation time (this means that you won't have the full benefit of using both daze and migraine on the same target).
  • Degeneration/Regeneration cap:
A player can't have more than -10 health degeneration or +10 health regeneration at any one time. This means that it isn't that useful to have many degeneration hexes, or too many skills giving health regeneration.
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