You’ve hit level 80. You have all the trait points you’re going to get and you start to think about how to gear up in stuff that won’t have to be replaced. It’s time to make a build! You scurry off to the forums and do some web searches looking for builds. You find them alright, but they are either filled with jargon, or so completely without explanation that it’s all just incomprehensible. Not to mention outdated or just plain wrong! You level so fast in GW2 that it’s easy to feel lost when you finally hit 80, so here’s a guide which I hope is written in a way that will equip people new to the game with a little more confidence.
I recently had the good pleasure of being able to help someone new to the game, and it reminded me that GW2 really can be confusing to new players because of the depth the game has. The barrier to learning about the game is made higher by the large amount of jargon and acronyms used on forums, or in chat. I’ve spoken about character builds in the past, but that was more about character concepts or team play. This time I want to focus purely on clarifying what this whole ‘Build’ thing is. I should also add; creating a character build does not, and should not, wait until you actually reach level 80. Failure to consider these elements early on, means running a sub par character and slowing your leveling. The sooner you jump into this the sooner you will learn what you do and do not want in your character build, potentially saving you a lot of coin down the road.
What makes a build
A character build consists of a concept, play style, Traits and equipment/gear. Concept is your idea on what you want your character to be. Play style takes into account your ability and preferred way of playing the game. Traits are that confusing confuzzle of numbers on your hero panel which I hope to explain in a moment. Gear is the armour, weapons and trinkets you wear, as well as the runes and sigils placed within them. A good build is never less than these four components, though you will often see them expressed either by gear or by traits alone.
If a build is expressed as traits, you will generally see a stream of numbers and nothing more. My Mad Bomber build might be expressed as 60440. That’s pretty damn confusing to a new player, it seems to mean nothing at all. The numbers actually express how the trait points are divided up on the build. Prior to the April 15 2014 patch, builds were instead presented as 30/0/20/20/0, so if you see something like this then divide the numbers by 5 to convert to the current system. This is actually a terrible way to express a build, as it indicates the distribution of the trait points is the only factor that makes a build. Often nothing is even said about what actual trait abilities you should get, because it’s assumed you’ll be able to work it out by the numbers. A more expanded nomenclature might be 60440 (III,VII,VIII,V,VII,IV,IX), which tells you the trait points as well as the trait abilities, IF you know how to unravel the code. This still doesn’t tell you what gear to wear or how to effectively play that build, it’s just a shorthand for ‘people in the know’.
You will often see builds described simply as a “Power build” or a “Condition build”. In this case the reference is the predominant attributes on the gear, while knowledge of what traits go with that gear is assumed. A Power build tries to maximise the use of gear with Power as the highest attribute; Condition refers to condition damage etc; a Crit build tries to do a lot of criticals, meaning lots of Precision and/or Ferocity. Alternatively, a build might be called by a specific type of gear, e.g. Berserker build means wearing all Berserker armour (Power/Precision/Ferocity); or Clerics (Healing Power/Power/Toughness). A guide to what each armour type is called can be found here.
In GW2 it’s less common outside of PvP, but a build might also be described by its primary function. A Bunker build is a character made really tough in order to bunker down and resist damage so it can hold an objective. DpS builds focus on high damage output, while Control builds aim to control the abilities of others. This can be reduced all the way down to tiny elements such as a Perplexity build which maximises the use of Perplexity runes. Some builds are also named after players who made them popular, or by those players themselves. It can all seem very confusing.
Concept and play style
Concept is really the starting point for me, because if you have a good concept then the rest becomes easy. Both Concept and play style go hand in hand, but they are distinctly different variables. Concept can be complex, such as a full role play back story, or as simple as “I wanna smash stuff good”, either way, you want to build a picture in your mind about what you want your build to achieve. Your concept will be your first guide which will help you select your traits and gear, so the stronger your concept is the easier the other steps become.
Play style is somewhat more ephemeral. What sorts of characters do you like to play? Do you prefer the visceral violence of melee? Do you prefer mobile ranged combat or a more sedate style? Or do you just want to look good doing what you do? Physical reflexes also play a part, because certain builds require a higher degree of actual keyboard and mouse control, so such a build wouldn’t suit a newer player or someone will physical limitations. I know I have long fingers, so I can reach the function keys fairly well, but for others the function keys require lifting their hand off the keyboard to reach. If you control character movement primarily with the arrow keys (yes, some people prefer the arrow keys), then the Function keys will have to be rebound closer to the cursor pad or a build reliant on the Function keys isn’t viable for your play style.
Another oft overlooked element for play style is Ping. If you live in a country far from the game servers, you will have to face game lag caused by Ping, which is the time it takes for signals to be passed from your computer to the game server and back again. Without getting all technical about it, here in Australia I suffer an average Ping of 400m/s, which means my action is 0.4 seconds behind the game. If the game grants me one second to react to something then I’m already down to 0.6 seconds. Average human reaction time is around 0.2 seconds, so I actually have only 0.4 seconds to react. Yeah, I usually don’t react in time :-). This is actually one reason I decided to change from my Virtuoso build on my Mesmer, as she needed better reaction time to work well. It’s also why I do not use glass cannon (hit hard but break easy) builds.
Traits
Traits are a vital part of the build, as they provide the special abilities that make your character’s combat style unique. Yes, traits give special bonuses to attributes, but for the most part those bonuses can be made up for with gear, so they shouldn’t be the basis of a build. The exception to that rule are traits that grant Boon Duration and bonuses that add to your class special abilities, as these bonuses are difficult if not impossible to attain on gear. Condition Duration might also be counted as special, though there are ways to gain more Condition Duration with food.
What you are really aiming at for your build are the trait abilities. To find your traits, open your hero panel by pressing ‘H’. Traits are on the second tab on the left of the panel, you’ll see it labelled Traits, right there under Skills and Weapons. There are five bars with your traits listed. These traits differ by character class. If you click one of the trait lines you will see a list of abilities appear in a column on the left, these are all the potential Trait Abilities. Since the April 15 patch, you might not have immediate access to all these abilities as they have to be unlocked first, but that’s a subject more suited to another article. Add trait points using the plus sign, every two points added to a line will open an ability box on the line into which you can add your ability. Abilities are tiered so some are only available if you put enough points in. Those tiers are Adept (blue), Master (green), and Grandmaster (Yellow). In theory, each tier abilities are better than the tier before, though ‘better’ is highly subjective. To add an ability, click in the grey box and then select the ability from the menu to the left.
Many of these Trait abilities seem confusing at first, and there is no real way to know what’s actually good. Is 5% more damage actually worth it? What’s a Fury? Etc. Ideally, you should look up anything you don’t understand on the GW2 Wiki, so you can learn the terms, but this won’t really tell you all you need to know about some abilities or their value to you.
At this stage you are just looking for anything that seems to compliment your concept. If you like the ranged play style of a longbow, then any trait that seems to apply to longbow should be suitable. If you want to be really tough, then any increases to toughness you can get are good. More on this process later in Part 2. Research is your best option here, and the best place for that is the Wiki. Look up how each trait functions and just take a guess at whether or not this might apply to you. Changing your attributes is entirely free (unlike most MMOs), and you can change them any time you are out of combat, so feel free to experiment away. I promise you, there is no way to permanently break your character by altering the traits, they can be reset without any penalty.
Continued in Part 2 – Available 5pm AEST 18 June 2014