How to build a Build

[Game of Bones.8975]

So you’re now Level 80, have HoT and PoF, and both elite specs are complete...how do you take those raw skills and determine what to use for Your Build?

 

I’ve gone through the typical build sites and found the Good, Great, Meta builds for PvE, Fractals, and Raids for DPS, Condi, and Healing already. 

 

I really want to learn why specific skills for a class are chosen for certain duties and not others? I can use a premade build, but it may not make sense to me. I’m lacking in the “know the synergy” department. 

 

Other than “find the skills that boost the attributes the most”, how should I look at skills?

[Orack.9756]

Hello :)

 

As someone who build a lot, here is how I think : 

 

- If new, read and try to understand (test on mob/dummie/etc) all skill and trait and the relation that can be made with different of them.

- Go to all the meta-video/web site you can find, check build and try to understand why they choose these trait/weap/skill in particulare.

 

Once these step done (it's not 2 fast step to understand all), look at what you like in the classe. Then, think about what you'll do with this particular build.

If you plan to solo, raid, event, wvw, etc..

 

Then, use these at base and all the reste will be to complement this main idea.

Add skill to push the idea as far as you can and try it out.

You'll usually find it horrible (for the first few, gonna be better after).

 

Look at what is wrong/lacking when you die, think well about it and don't forget to put your personnal skill level in the balance. Glass canon build on nooby is idiot.

Then add what is needed to balance it and cover is weakness.

 

Everyone will have different build when they don't specificly want to run the "best of the best". But when it come to competitive play, their will always be some build way better than the rest. But in non-competitive environnement  it doesn't matter at all.

 

My English is a bit rusty but hope it help :)

 

Hf !

 

[voltaicbore.8012]

A lot of un-clarity here. You refer repeatedly to "skills" - are you referring specifically to just the heal/utility/elite skills you can slot in? Or are you including weapon skills and the passive traits as well?

 

I'll just assume you're using "skills" as a catch-all term for every single kind of non-gear choice you can make when creating a build, for the sake of convenience and logic.

 

For me, I generally find that buildcraft falls into 3 phases:

 

Phase 1: identifying your need/want/goal

This doesn't have to be anything super insightful or knowledgeable. In fact, your goal could be as simple as "I want to use longbow on ranger as my primary weapon, but make it suck as little as possible." Maybe a certain trait can catch your eye, like Armored Attack for warriors (boosts your power by 10% of your toughness). Whatever it is, the important thing is just to have some sort of goal in the first place, no matter how simple or trivial it is.

 

Phase 2: Identifying class-specific things that help you achieve those goals

Once you have a goal in mind, find something among the traits, utilities, and weapon skills of your class that help you get the job done. This is how concepts like a healing warrior can get off the ground - someone who wanted to make a healer warrior for spvp saw that we could take Vigorous Shout to reduce shout cd and turn them into area heals, warhorn 5 grants barrier/cleanse/traited resistance, etc. Once you have a goal it should be fairly simple to identify a number of tools unique to the class that serve that goal. Other traits and utilities you pick are centered around either helping you better achieve that main goal, or any vulnerabilities you perceive (need for personal cleanses, at least some capacity to cause damage, a stunbreak, etc).

 

So clearly it's not just a matter of finding a 'skills that boost the attributes the most'. Sometimes it's a cooldown reduction that is key, other times it might be an additional boon you get for using the right type of skill. I'm not going to teach you basic comprehension here - just read the tooltip and see if it helps you achieve your goal.

 

If you find that the class simply doesn't have enough traits/utilities/weapon skills to support your idea, it means the class is a bad fit for your idea. Move on, or accept that your class/build choice will be absolutely terrible at the goal you wanted to achieve.

 

Phase 3: Identifying gear stats/runes/sigils that allow your class-specific things to achieve those goals

Admittedly it's possible that Phase 3 and 2 intermingle or even switch order. For instance, Trooper Runes (the 6-pc set bonus on these turn your shout skills into aoe cleanses as well) could be what makes you think a shout-based support build on warrior was possible in the first place.

 

That aside, once you know what your goal is and what tools your class has to achieve that goal, it's time to hunt for a combination of gear stats (you might want to mix and match so that you have an acceptable level of the stats you care about), sigils, and rune sets that- again - help you achieve your goal.

 

Edited May 16, 2021 by voltaicbore.8012

[Teratus.2859]

Seems you've fallen into the meta trap.. the whole pulling builds off some site instead of playing with the build system.
You're not alone, I've seen plenty of players who do this and end up not really understanding how to make builds.

Best advice I can give you though is to just experiment.. you'll be amazed at how easy you can pick it up and start working things out for yourself.
And don't worry about maxing DPS or making some super optimal build.. that stuff doesn't matter and there are so many meta builds out there that others have already made to do all that.
Just make fun builds that you enjoy playing and forget the rest.

Think like hey I fancy playing a ranged warrior or I want to see if I can make a tank thief or I wanna use a Ranger build that makes the most of Drake pets and just mess around and see if you can come up with something like that which you find fun to play.
You'll get very familiar with making builds just playing around like that and eventually you will get to a point where you just know what works well together on your favourite classes and you can really start making more fine tuned builds that may probably be more to your liking than the meta's others create.

The goal should always be fun when you start getting into build crafting, worry about all that optimal stuff later when you have a better understanding of the build system and how each class works.
That's my opinion anyway 🙂 

[TheAgedGnome.7520]

On 5/15/2021 at 1:14 PM, Game of Bones.8975 said:

I really want to learn why specific skills for a class are chosen for certain duties and not others? I can use a premade build, but it may not make sense to me. I’m lacking in the “know the synergy” department. 

 

Other than “find the skills that boost the attributes the most”, how should I look at skills?

 

When you say 'skills', do you mean traits, or utility skills, or all choices (weapons, gear, traits, upgrades)? 

[voltaicbore.8012]

31 minutes ago, TheAgedGnome.7520 said:

 

When you say 'skills', do you mean traits, or utility skills, or all choices (weapons, gear, traits, upgrades)? 

 

 I asked the same thing myself, it's really not clear.

 

That said, it truly only boils down to one thing: read tooltips. I'm not being facetious - that's literally all there is to it. What to know why a trait or skill was chosen? Just... read those tooltips.

 

I'm hoping that just pointing OP towards the importance of having goals for your build will solve their "I can't read tooltips to find the synergy" problem. Hopefully the practice of them being focused on something targeted like "okay, I want to make my mesmer stack as much confusion as possible" will help them reshape the way they read tooltips;

 

[mindcircus.1506]

On 5/15/2021 at 1:14 PM, Game of Bones.8975 said:

I’ve gone through the typical build sites and found the Good, Great, Meta builds for PvE, Fractals, and Raids for DPS, Condi, and Healing already. 

 

I really want to learn why specific skills for a class are chosen for certain duties and not others? I can use a premade build, but it may not make sense to me. I’m lacking in the “know the synergy” department. 

 

Other than “find the skills that boost the attributes the most”, how should I look at skills?

A couple of tips I will offer:

1. As mentioned the tooltips are a nice start.

2. Hitting up Metabattle and identifying what makes a build great is also a really good place to start. Think of it as "reverse engineering" a build. Start with the traits that are important and provide synergy and ask yourself "what can I keep from here?"
 

When it comes to identifying synergy and building around that what I do is make liberal use of the wiki.

For example:
When I was working on a PvE Reaper build I looked at the traits on reaper and identified one that sounded useful which is Chilling Nova. This trait does an AOE chill criting a chilled foe.

From there I would wiki "Chilled" and look at skills traits and sigils that interact with the effect.

I then might look at Sigils that apply or interact with Chilled such as Superior Sigil of Hydromancy or other traits that interact with it such as "Cold_Shoulder" Also I would look at traits from other lines such as the Spite line offering Bitter Chill.

 

TLDR: Wiki is your friend.

 

Also going to say if you are really wanting to get into the thought process behind this stuff, I can't recommend watching a few of Bootts Bad Builds videos enough. Bootts does some really fun stuff by going "all in" on a particular trait and squeezing the most fun out of it.