Guide to making a build

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.

Step 1

 * First choose 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.

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 offense to deal enough damage to kill the enemies, and enough defense to stay alive while doing it. In solo farming, balancing your build precisely is critical to succeed. In multi-man farming, you do not only need to balance your own build, but make your whole team work perfectly, at least if your party contains fewer people than is required for the area. However, if you team-farm you can focus more on either offense or defense, which, as stated above, will result in death if farming solo. However, if you want to flaunt through general play, consider planning your whole team's build sets.
 * Melee (bring anti-melee skills, like Ebon Dust Aura, Faintheartedness or Deep Freeze)
 * Caster (bring anti-caster skills, like Broad Head Arrow, Power Drain or Visions of Regret)
 * Condition spamming (bring anti-condition skills such as Restore Condition)
 * Enchantment removal (consider using a build that doesn't rely on enchantments)
 * High damage (bring damage altering skills: e. g. Protective Spirit and Shielding Hands)
 * Long casting time (like Meteor Shower; bring interrupts)
 * Interrupts (bring anti-interrupt skills; e. g. Glyph of Concentration, Mantra of Concentration...; or short casting time skills or casting time reducing skills)
 * Knock downs (bring anti-KD skills like Ward of Stability or short casting time spells)

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 attribute 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.

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.

Caps
Note that there are some caps in Guild Wars, which makes some skill combinations less beneficial.
 * Armor cap:
 * Armor 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.