Diremongoose
iSpy
This is an article I just wrote on how to create an efficient build in GW2 and tried to explain some of the common pitfalls people run into, and the roles in game. It's followed by a post by PsionicFox with example Mesmer builds that fit the three achetypes, created collaboratively with me for this article. I'm still trying to get full member status, so 'like' this if you find it helpful 
Theorycrafting
Background
The skills to create an efficient build probably first came about in CCGs such as Magic: the gathering, where the selection of efficient cards in the right ratio meant the difference between reliable winning and being laughed out of a tournament. Arenanet even mentioned that the skill system in GW1 was inspired by M:tG, so it’s not an unfair comparison to make. In M:tG you typically have to make a minimum of 60 value-based decisions to make a well built deck. In GW2 you only need to make ~21 decisions, easy right? (Assuming 70 traits in 10s, one 2-hand, one 1-hand and off-hand, five bar skills, three equipment skills. Yes, it changes with profession.)
Introduction
Broadly speaking there’s three things that determine your ability to win in Guild Wars 2 – Your skill level (how well you play your character, map awareness, resource management), Team skill level (build choices, team positioning, objective taking etc) and your own personal build (covered in this article). Each of these three categories deserve their own extended discussion, of course, but today we’re focusing purely on theorycrafting, if for no other reason than we haven’t had enough game time to say enough about the first two.
Theorycrafting isn’t an art, it’s a science.
Source: http://soontobeangel.files.wordpress.com/
There are hard statistics to back up your build and even seemingly subjective choices (“do I take the rune that improves swiftness or the rune that improves might?”) can be backed up with statistical value based on your win/lose ratio for the build.
Statistics? Science? I want no part of this nonsense!
That’s ok, you don’t have to know that stuff yourself, just know that it’s there, and there are objective ways to determine the strength of a build in general. It gets quite complicated later, with counter builds, meta-game and teamplay interaction all complicating the chaos of PvP and seemingly very hard to know what makes a good build. Let’s keep it simple and start with the basics – we can worry about that other stuff another time.
The Five Stages of GW2 Theorycrafting
1. Concept
You want to make a build that uses Shouts? Signets? Perhaps you just like guns or flamethrowers?
There are hundreds of ways to start, you just need to get a vague idea in your head about what you want. Throw some skills and weapons together and see what you get…
As a general rule, you build should fit into one of three categories - Aggro, Control, or Combo. Do you want to deal damage and take damage, force the enemy to play a certain way and punish them if they don’t, or do you want to set up amazing combos either with your own abilities or with others? This is an important question to answer. So important, it has its own section (see below). Take a read of that once you’ve gone through this first post.
2. Traits
Traits are where the ‘meat’ of theorycrafting begins in GW2. To return to the M:tG analogy, if your weapon/offhand selections are your creatures and your utilities/heal are your sorceries and instants, traits are your mana. Traits power your ‘deck’ and picking the wrong colour of land makes for a very inefficient and will make probably cause you to lose.
What the hell are you talking about? Make your traits count. Efficiency is everything.
The pure stat-power of traits cannot be sacrificed just because you happen to like a particular major or minor trait. If you’re putting 30 points into a trait that grants critical damage, but your precision is so low that you have a 7% critical chance, it doesn’t matter how much you like that major trait – it’s wrong for the build - find a way.
Do you really want that one trait? Does it complete you? Then you have to build your character around it. Reassign your traits, even your weapon selection, and make it work.
So, what makes a good major trait selection?
You need a major trait to apply to something with either a short cooldown or to multiple different abilities. If you have a cripple that immobilises, or an immobilise that cripples, then makes sure you can get the benefit of that trait in a timely manner. Improved bleeding duration 20% might sound useful…but if you only have 3s bleeds, will an extra +0.6s be that useful? It might be, but perhaps a skill that reduced the cooldown of several abilities including your bleed might be better?
Perhaps you have traits that are triggered by a condition – blinds cause confusion for example. You can chain that with another major trait that causes blinds to be applied to a certain effect – look – the original effect does it’s own thing AND causes confusion and blind!
[bimg=650]http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2012/014/1/1/asura_mesmer_by_g_e_e_r_s-d4mbe7z.jpg[/bimg]
Source: http://g-e-e-r-s.deviantart.com/art/
Let’s consider a build I created and use it as a case study. We’ll look at equipment in the next section.
This build is all about glamour skills and confusion. First of all, the trait lines are fairly solid – condition damage, condition duration and power cement it as a general damaging condition build. Take a look at the major traits – nearly every one of them either improves glamour utility skills or improves confusion. The end result is that every utility skill is also an AoE confusion/blindness field and that’s without even considering the primary weapon skills which benefit from the traits, some of which cause confusion in their own right. Now, I’m not saying this build is amazing, but the major traits benefit each other, and work with the trait points, which also work with the main weapons. On paper at least, this build appears to be efficient.
There are two major domination traits that don’t fit into this glamour build, so I’ve added a couple of traits to improve survivability. In theory I could take 10 points out of Domination and still have all the traits I need – but that reduces my condition duration, and there’s nothing I’ve seen that would be better than what I already have. Plus that double heal from mantra of healing is SWEET.
3. Equipment
Amulet and jewel
Traits matter, but your Amulet matters just as much if not more. Pick the one that works with your concept and traits. If you’re doing condition damage, pick a condition damage amulet. If you’re running crits, choose precision amulets. Think you’re too squishy? You can offset your damage potential with some vitality or toughness. Remember though – Amulets offer less choice and customisation than traits, so while amulets provide more points than traits, you can’t choose where they go outside of a series of narrow categories. The jewel in your amulet gives you a substantially smaller bonus however, and it gives you a chance to try and offset your weaknesses/balance your build if you so desire.
Runes
There are a lot of runes, enough for every occasion. Remind yourself of what your build does. Condition damage (bleeding)? Might, haste, regeneration? Perhaps you just want to be tough as nails? There’s a rune for that.
Source: My awful Photoshop skills + caffine
In this Mesmer case study, I’ve gone for maximum condition damage and power using Carrion items. That confusion is going to HURT.
Now, I could choose a single rune for all of my armor – but for this build we’re going to go with 4 runes of Nightmare and 2 runes of Lyssa. We lose some of the fancy six rune effects and a bit of condition damage – but instead we stack a tasty universal +20% condition duration.
Updated build
This simulator can’t split runes for simplicity, but this case study is just to show you what is possible.
Sigils
Just like runes, there’s a lot of ways to kit out your weapons/offhands. There are runes that function on critical hits, when you swap weapons, that extend different conditions or improve damage or crit chance. Some runes have activated abilities when conditions are met and some ‘snowball’, improving with each kill until you die or swap weapons. There just hasn’t been enough playtime to map the overall utility of these latter runes completely at this time.
Final build
Most of the confusion comes from the scepter skills so that will be the primary set. There are no sigils that aid confusion so we go with a couple of utility runes – extra healing and might on weapon switch. We’ll put a hydromancy rune on the staff to slow down people who get too close. Then we can pop a double portal on them for 4 stacks of confuse, 2 stacks of blind, then dump a chaos storm on them while they’re frozen!
4. Testing
This is the most important part of your build. You’ve made it the best you can. Your major and minor traits work well with your attribute points and your amulet. Your sigil provides a kick-ass buff whenever you critical…to the battlefield! Fight hard, play he best you can but also try and break your build by doing strange and wonderful things with it. Don’t be afraid to fail – you can only get better.
That’s one way to do it anyway. The Heart of the Mists map provides you with a variety of NPC golems and profession NPCs to test aspects of build on (also an army of savage Mr Bojangles kitties that will MURDER YOU WITH PURRING).
You need to test it in multiple games. Don’t assume something isn’t working just because you have a bad game, stick with it for a bit before making changes (which is step 5.)
When testing, keep these questions in mind:
“Is my build doing what it’s designed to do?”
“Is it doing something different but better than I intended?”
“What’s going wrong? Am I dying too much, not dealing enough damage, am I too close to the enemy for comfort? Is there some complication I didn’t anticipate?”
“Can I play this build effectively?”
I’ll be honest – I CAN’T play the above build well enough yet. Oh, it works, people don’t see that much confusion coming that quickly. The glamour AoE trick isn’t exactly common yet, but I just can’t use the utilities to their original intention that effectively yet. I need more practice. The best bit is, even though I suck, it STILL works.
5. Tweaking
I wanted to call this ‘iterative improvement’ but then I realised I’d be called a ‘pretentious wanker’ as a result. You’ve tried and tested your build and you know what went wrong. If you DON’T know what went wrong, go test some more!
Examine every aspect of your build. Start again and reconsider each part of the build based on your battle-tests. Try and answer the questions above, as well as any others you will certainly have thought of, and improve on it. Perhaps that group haste rune WAS better than improved might duration? Swap it out and try again. Swap your traits to see if vulnerability is more useful than bleeding or vice versa. Experience in battle will help you answer a lot of these questions without actually needing to re-test a build, but some things you may just need to learn yourself.
In the next section we go on to discuss how one example class, GW's iconic Mesmer, can be built to fulfil any of the three build concepts of Aggro, Control or Combo. Read on and enjoy.
Theorycrafting
Background
The skills to create an efficient build probably first came about in CCGs such as Magic: the gathering, where the selection of efficient cards in the right ratio meant the difference between reliable winning and being laughed out of a tournament. Arenanet even mentioned that the skill system in GW1 was inspired by M:tG, so it’s not an unfair comparison to make. In M:tG you typically have to make a minimum of 60 value-based decisions to make a well built deck. In GW2 you only need to make ~21 decisions, easy right? (Assuming 70 traits in 10s, one 2-hand, one 1-hand and off-hand, five bar skills, three equipment skills. Yes, it changes with profession.)
Introduction
Broadly speaking there’s three things that determine your ability to win in Guild Wars 2 – Your skill level (how well you play your character, map awareness, resource management), Team skill level (build choices, team positioning, objective taking etc) and your own personal build (covered in this article). Each of these three categories deserve their own extended discussion, of course, but today we’re focusing purely on theorycrafting, if for no other reason than we haven’t had enough game time to say enough about the first two.
Theorycrafting isn’t an art, it’s a science.
Source: http://soontobeangel.files.wordpress.com/
There are hard statistics to back up your build and even seemingly subjective choices (“do I take the rune that improves swiftness or the rune that improves might?”) can be backed up with statistical value based on your win/lose ratio for the build.
Statistics? Science? I want no part of this nonsense!
That’s ok, you don’t have to know that stuff yourself, just know that it’s there, and there are objective ways to determine the strength of a build in general. It gets quite complicated later, with counter builds, meta-game and teamplay interaction all complicating the chaos of PvP and seemingly very hard to know what makes a good build. Let’s keep it simple and start with the basics – we can worry about that other stuff another time.
The Five Stages of GW2 Theorycrafting
1. Concept
You want to make a build that uses Shouts? Signets? Perhaps you just like guns or flamethrowers?
There are hundreds of ways to start, you just need to get a vague idea in your head about what you want. Throw some skills and weapons together and see what you get…
As a general rule, you build should fit into one of three categories - Aggro, Control, or Combo. Do you want to deal damage and take damage, force the enemy to play a certain way and punish them if they don’t, or do you want to set up amazing combos either with your own abilities or with others? This is an important question to answer. So important, it has its own section (see below). Take a read of that once you’ve gone through this first post.
2. Traits
Traits are where the ‘meat’ of theorycrafting begins in GW2. To return to the M:tG analogy, if your weapon/offhand selections are your creatures and your utilities/heal are your sorceries and instants, traits are your mana. Traits power your ‘deck’ and picking the wrong colour of land makes for a very inefficient and will make probably cause you to lose.
What the hell are you talking about? Make your traits count. Efficiency is everything.
The pure stat-power of traits cannot be sacrificed just because you happen to like a particular major or minor trait. If you’re putting 30 points into a trait that grants critical damage, but your precision is so low that you have a 7% critical chance, it doesn’t matter how much you like that major trait – it’s wrong for the build - find a way.
Do you really want that one trait? Does it complete you? Then you have to build your character around it. Reassign your traits, even your weapon selection, and make it work.
So, what makes a good major trait selection?
You need a major trait to apply to something with either a short cooldown or to multiple different abilities. If you have a cripple that immobilises, or an immobilise that cripples, then makes sure you can get the benefit of that trait in a timely manner. Improved bleeding duration 20% might sound useful…but if you only have 3s bleeds, will an extra +0.6s be that useful? It might be, but perhaps a skill that reduced the cooldown of several abilities including your bleed might be better?
Perhaps you have traits that are triggered by a condition – blinds cause confusion for example. You can chain that with another major trait that causes blinds to be applied to a certain effect – look – the original effect does it’s own thing AND causes confusion and blind!
[bimg=650]http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2012/014/1/1/asura_mesmer_by_g_e_e_r_s-d4mbe7z.jpg[/bimg]
Source: http://g-e-e-r-s.deviantart.com/art/
Let’s consider a build I created and use it as a case study. We’ll look at equipment in the next section.
This build is all about glamour skills and confusion. First of all, the trait lines are fairly solid – condition damage, condition duration and power cement it as a general damaging condition build. Take a look at the major traits – nearly every one of them either improves glamour utility skills or improves confusion. The end result is that every utility skill is also an AoE confusion/blindness field and that’s without even considering the primary weapon skills which benefit from the traits, some of which cause confusion in their own right. Now, I’m not saying this build is amazing, but the major traits benefit each other, and work with the trait points, which also work with the main weapons. On paper at least, this build appears to be efficient.
There are two major domination traits that don’t fit into this glamour build, so I’ve added a couple of traits to improve survivability. In theory I could take 10 points out of Domination and still have all the traits I need – but that reduces my condition duration, and there’s nothing I’ve seen that would be better than what I already have. Plus that double heal from mantra of healing is SWEET.
3. Equipment
Amulet and jewel
Traits matter, but your Amulet matters just as much if not more. Pick the one that works with your concept and traits. If you’re doing condition damage, pick a condition damage amulet. If you’re running crits, choose precision amulets. Think you’re too squishy? You can offset your damage potential with some vitality or toughness. Remember though – Amulets offer less choice and customisation than traits, so while amulets provide more points than traits, you can’t choose where they go outside of a series of narrow categories. The jewel in your amulet gives you a substantially smaller bonus however, and it gives you a chance to try and offset your weaknesses/balance your build if you so desire.
Runes
There are a lot of runes, enough for every occasion. Remind yourself of what your build does. Condition damage (bleeding)? Might, haste, regeneration? Perhaps you just want to be tough as nails? There’s a rune for that.
Source: My awful Photoshop skills + caffine
In this Mesmer case study, I’ve gone for maximum condition damage and power using Carrion items. That confusion is going to HURT.
Now, I could choose a single rune for all of my armor – but for this build we’re going to go with 4 runes of Nightmare and 2 runes of Lyssa. We lose some of the fancy six rune effects and a bit of condition damage – but instead we stack a tasty universal +20% condition duration.
Updated build
This simulator can’t split runes for simplicity, but this case study is just to show you what is possible.
Sigils
Just like runes, there’s a lot of ways to kit out your weapons/offhands. There are runes that function on critical hits, when you swap weapons, that extend different conditions or improve damage or crit chance. Some runes have activated abilities when conditions are met and some ‘snowball’, improving with each kill until you die or swap weapons. There just hasn’t been enough playtime to map the overall utility of these latter runes completely at this time.
Final build
Most of the confusion comes from the scepter skills so that will be the primary set. There are no sigils that aid confusion so we go with a couple of utility runes – extra healing and might on weapon switch. We’ll put a hydromancy rune on the staff to slow down people who get too close. Then we can pop a double portal on them for 4 stacks of confuse, 2 stacks of blind, then dump a chaos storm on them while they’re frozen!
4. Testing
This is the most important part of your build. You’ve made it the best you can. Your major and minor traits work well with your attribute points and your amulet. Your sigil provides a kick-ass buff whenever you critical…to the battlefield! Fight hard, play he best you can but also try and break your build by doing strange and wonderful things with it. Don’t be afraid to fail – you can only get better.
That’s one way to do it anyway. The Heart of the Mists map provides you with a variety of NPC golems and profession NPCs to test aspects of build on (also an army of savage Mr Bojangles kitties that will MURDER YOU WITH PURRING).
You need to test it in multiple games. Don’t assume something isn’t working just because you have a bad game, stick with it for a bit before making changes (which is step 5.)
When testing, keep these questions in mind:
“Is my build doing what it’s designed to do?”
“Is it doing something different but better than I intended?”
“What’s going wrong? Am I dying too much, not dealing enough damage, am I too close to the enemy for comfort? Is there some complication I didn’t anticipate?”
“Can I play this build effectively?”
I’ll be honest – I CAN’T play the above build well enough yet. Oh, it works, people don’t see that much confusion coming that quickly. The glamour AoE trick isn’t exactly common yet, but I just can’t use the utilities to their original intention that effectively yet. I need more practice. The best bit is, even though I suck, it STILL works.
5. Tweaking
I wanted to call this ‘iterative improvement’ but then I realised I’d be called a ‘pretentious wanker’ as a result. You’ve tried and tested your build and you know what went wrong. If you DON’T know what went wrong, go test some more!
Examine every aspect of your build. Start again and reconsider each part of the build based on your battle-tests. Try and answer the questions above, as well as any others you will certainly have thought of, and improve on it. Perhaps that group haste rune WAS better than improved might duration? Swap it out and try again. Swap your traits to see if vulnerability is more useful than bleeding or vice versa. Experience in battle will help you answer a lot of these questions without actually needing to re-test a build, but some things you may just need to learn yourself.
In the next section we go on to discuss how one example class, GW's iconic Mesmer, can be built to fulfil any of the three build concepts of Aggro, Control or Combo. Read on and enjoy.
