Team Builds

Much of the effort on these boards and elsewhere revolves around the creation of builds. But only for builds for an individual character. It's perhaps a natural urge given that we're all individual and therefore likely to see to our own wants and needs but it is a dangerous and somewhat fallacious practice in a game like Guild Wars. A game that's most decidedly team based (Depite what the tutorial may tell you otherwise). Your character, and that character's build will not work in isolation but instead work inside the context of a much larger build: a team build.

Even if you're playing in the random Arena you'll still find yourself in the middle of a team. Just a team you have no control over and is not set up very well as a team. In other places, in other maps, you're free to choose your own teammates and, therefore, you have a bit of say in just what you'll all be doing. Your team should be built up around you or you should be built around your team. The simplest way of going about this is through roles. I think most of us have been in lobbies looking for a Warrior or a Monk or a Mesmer or whatever else. And we'd all back away slowly if we found ourselves in a group of seven Necromancer/Mesmers. That's because each profession gravitates towards a certain role. You know with a Warrior you're getting someone with a lot of armor and melee staying power. With a Monk you're getting someone who'll have some defense for your party. And on and on. Each provides a role, each fills a niche, each gives a party something vital. Putting them all together is an important step in making sure you have a well-rounded and, therefore, much more successful party. In other words, it's the very beginning of a team build.

Building for a team, then, is a matter of mixing and matching those roles, those strengths and weaknesses to find the best results overall. Your Rangers aren't going to provide healing, your Monks are, and while Monks won't deal damage the Rangers will, and so forth. It's where you push and pull that balance that defines your team - are you defensive, are you offensive, are you out for the long haul or the short term, are you disruptive, are you hard-hitting?

The point is this; rather than looking at a team as a collection of 8 individuals builds it's best to look at it as one, single, massive build with 8 interworking parts. Your teammates, your characters, your skills, your equipment, all of it interract and build upon each other, reinforcing and supporting your strengths and shoring up your weaknesses. Understanding that is the key to understanding what it takes to be truly successful in Guild Wars. You play in a team. Not by yourself. Build - plan - accordingly.

Building for the team rather than yourself implies a few things, though.
-For one, you're not alone. You have teammates. Teammates who can heal you or buff you or revive you. Let them. You don't have to do everything yourself. You cannot do everything yourself with a mere 8 skill slots and only so many hands to hold items. Your character does not have to be well-rounded. Not if your team is. It simply has to be effective at what it's doing. A group of specialists is much more likely to get the job done than a group of generalists. Trust your teammates. Rely on them. Otherwise you're playing by yourself. The lesson here is this: I would much rather run in a team with six damage dealers and two healers than in a team with eight damage dealers with the ability to heal themselves. You will too. Know your role, play your role, and don't try to spread yourself too thin. This also means that you'll have far less need for things like self-healing because someone else will be providing it for you.
-Next, you don't have to have a skill you really need. It just has to be on someone in your team. You're a Warrior/Elementalist and you're using Conjure Lightning. You think a good way to put that to use is through something like Glimmering Mark. Well, guess what, you don't have to put up with that energy burden at all. Another Elementalist on your team can do it for you. Skills and combinations can be spread throughout your team and not just kept on a single character. Your characters work together, each strong, each powerful in its own right. But each can supply the bits and pieces that make each other truly shine. Your build synergies. Your build talks to the other parts of your build. It gets better the more self-reinforcing it is. You don't want to be overly reliant on one character having a lynchpin skill - if they get taken out you don't want the whole build to collapse - but you do want to see to it that your skills are working in as much coordination as your players are.
-Finally, you don't work in isolation. You have teammates to cover for and to cover yourself. This is what lets things like Order of Pain be cast in the first place - the OoP spammer isn't going to deal much damage with it but everyone else will. Your characters work in concert, they do things to support each other, even if it doesn't necessarily benefit that character directly. Again, the parts of your team build work with each other, they don't work at cross-purposes. You don't have someone cast Amity while someone else is dropping a Fire Storm on their heads. The more your individual characters are on the same page, the more the cooperate and reinforce each other, the better off you'll be.

And, of course, there's a lot more to get into here. From coordination and tactics to the basic things like communication, command and control, and target calling. But when making out a plan for a team the important thing is to make sure that you're thinking of it as just that; a team.

You can also make squad builds. A squad in this context would be a unit of players less than the amount on team, that work together indepentently of the rest of the team. For example making a heal/protection setup separate of the damage/shutdown part.

Well said Saus. I'll just add a couple of things:
1. Making team build is a lot harder than individual builds. With individual build your scope is pretty much limited by the two classes that your character uses. With a team build the skill combo spans across six classes and it almost requires you to be familiar with all the skills in the game.

2. Be careful with carrying multiple copies of skills because they may not stack with each other.

3. A team of 8 healers is just silly and annoying as hell.

A good way to plan out a team build is to decide first what overall strategy you will take. Generally you want plenty of damage to push through the enemy defenses. Butyou also want some ability to interrupt and weaken them, and conversely you need enough healing and defense for your team to prevent them from killing your characters. Decide what you want to accomplish and how, then pick the professions for each character. From there you have 64 skills to assign, making sure to keep anything essential on multiple characters, and making the team build as resilient and synergetic as possible. Just play with different setups and most importantly try them in game to see what works and what doesn't.

Please put this somewhere where everyone will see and read it. It is going to get lost in the shuffle here, and there are so many readers that spend all their time working on single player builds, never looking at the big picture. At least sticky it for me, its all I will ever ask.

Aw, I think a sticky is uncalled for. It was just some thoughts I had. Bookmark it if you want to remember it, stickies are reserverd for much more fundamental inforamtion.

Anyhow, I'm casting Revive Thread here because I think I have a pretty good example of the sorts of things that planning for a team rather than an individual can pull off.

The basic idea is this. The various "Bond" skills are extremely abusive because they can trigger each other. If you cast Life Bond on a target and Essence Bond on yourself whenever Life Bond directs damage to you, you'll receive energy. It's an energy engine, basically. Of course, to do so you've lost two pips of energy so unless you're expecting your partner to get hit about once a second then you're not doing much of anything.

Ah, but here's where it gets interesting. Because you can split those skills throughout your party. Have someone cast Life Bond on a high-priority target, like a Monk, and then have the Monk cast Essence Bond on them. Best for this would be a WaMo who can rely on adrenal attacks and won't care about losing the energy from maintaining something. What this does, then, is to reduce the damage your Monk will take and, at the same time, to turn that damage into a masisve influx of energy. Sure, they can be rended, but to completely drop the combination you'll need to rend both the WaMo and the Mo and that's unlikely given that rends are precious and aren't likely to be spent on a Warrior. They can just recast Life Bond to get things running again.

Better yet, you can have that WaMo cast two or more Life Bonds on different Monks while each Monk casts Essence Bond so that when either takes damage they both get energy. The redirected damage from Life Bond or Life Barrier also triggers things like Healing Seed, too. So you can create long, interlocking chains of dependant skills being cast by different characters that makes your overall team stronger. That's the sort of planning, the sort of thinking, that needs to go into creating a proper team build.

The team build is hugely important. The combo your talking about saus actually becomes more powerful the more people use it. 2 wa/mo's each casting 2 life bonds each, then 4 monks casting essence bond and other enchantments can power the monks energy indefinantly and still maintain high damage output from the warriors. In fact it sounds more and more like the KOR build from this weekend. If you then let the 2 other chars be wa/me with echo'd fear me and/or other energy drains you can sap their healers totally and its game over.... So yeah, think about your team's build.

I'm not posting any team builds anymore. Once posted a Ranger/Mesmer team build using Greater Conflagration, Blizzard and Mantra of Frost. Next beta, Nature Rituals were spirits and Mantras had a duration.