How to Build for “Guild Wars”

Among all classes in Guild Wars, there are over 1,300 skills to learn. It can be a little overwhelming when choosing from such a vast repertoire just to be limited to a mere 8 skills to bring along with you in battle. Out of the 8 only 1 can be an Elite skill. Where do you even begin?

You can make yourself up a decent build that works well for most areas, as you do have backup from heroes or henchmen. Most of the time you won't need to fine-tune or micromanage your skills like that. However, there are some places calls for some research.

Plan ahead. Know what you're up against. You can look up enemies that are in any area and mission here (http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Main_Page). You can also find out what skills the enemies have and what their weaknesses are. Take Plants and Ice Elementals for example. They take twice the damage from fire, so be sure to equip fire skills and spells. Everyone has a weakness. Choose your skill sets around what hurts your foes the most.

When choosing skills, it's key to balance your attributes, damage, energy costs and cool down time. A castor could equip many high damage skills, but high damage skills tend to have a long cool down time and uses a lot of energy. This forces you to use only your weapon until you get enough energy back and one of your other skills becomes available to use. It's good to bring along a fast recharging, low energy skill for in the meantime. Pay attention to the casting and recharge time, and the cost of energy. Be sure to tailor your skills to your attributes for optimal efficiency and damage.

Some builds can clash with each other. If you have two Ritualists running the Signet of Spirits build, the two can cancel each other's spirits out as there cannot be two of the same spirit on the same team within a certain distance of each-other. If there are two monks in a team, one ought to be set to be a healing monk, and the other can work on protection for a better harmony. Different needs calls for different builds. Soloing, running and speed clears to name a few are some of the types of builds you can look for. There are many to choose from for each class. The pvx.wikia (http://pvx.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page) is a great place to find specific builds. It also covers PVP, PVE builds and appropriate Hero builds as well.

Please bear in mind that there are limitations to certain skill combinations. For running, you cannot go faster than 33% in an explorable area. It wouldn't be useful to use more than one running skill at a time. The same goes for health regeneration and degeneration. You can't have or cast more than +10 or -10 regen on a character or foe. Casting 2 regens or degens on the same character becomes wasted spells. Armor rating caps at +25 as well.

If you want to test the strength of your build, head out to the Isle of the Nameless outside of Great Temple of Balthazaar. There you can wander around and play some target practice with different stands that have specific armors, strengths and weaknesses. Test the damage dealt with your build and see how it stands up.