CHARACTER BUILDS

While each is useful on its own, the real strategic power of skills is how they work together as a group. Each character has a primary and a secondary profession, and each profession comes with its own unique skill set. Character and skill combinations, referred to as "builds," allow you to set up complex attack strategies while maintaining your team's health and armor levels.

Build combinations are practically infinite, but some work better than others. As you play Guild Wars, you'll discover how builds work in a wide range of situations, and which work best in tournament play. For the purposes of this guide, we've assembled a few of our favorites, along with some tips on when and how to use them.

MONK WARRIOR
The Monk Warrior's primary focus is survivability and damage output. Build up your healing and weapon attributes, and load high-damage, hard-hitting attack skills. Bring Monk enchantments that heal, increase damage, or return damage to your attacker, along with healing spells and Warrior speed buffs. Use caution when fighting Necromancers and Mesmers; this character makes an easy target for their many dispel enchantment skills.

OFFENSIVE TANK
Your primary focus as an Offensive Tank is damage output: build up attributes related to your weapon of choice, which will increase any skills tied to that weapon, and bring damage-increasing spells. Your secondary focus should be containing your enemy: bring a snare or speed skill to help you catch your enemy. Your third priority is survival: bring some defensive skills, and increase attributes related to those skills.

DEFENSIVE TANK
The Warrior's heavy armor makes it the perfect primary profession for this build. Focus points in defensive attributes and bring skills that increase survivability. Monk is a good secondary choice due to the many Monk enchantments that regenerate health over time; bring a few of these, as well as a resurrection spell and some defensive Warrior skills. You can also choose a Necromancer secondary and focus on spells that steal life from your enemies. The tricky part is that a Warrior primary is fight on energy, so bring adrenaline skills for damage output and save your energy for defense and healing. Be sure to balance your defense with offense to ensure that you can inflict damage when needed.

NATURE RITUAL RANGER
A Nature Ritual Ranger focuses on environmental enchantments that affect everyone on the map for a period of time. Many of these effects can be harmful to your group and/or benefit your enemies, so use care when choosing enchantments. For example, if your team is casterheavy, you don't need a skill that adds +4 damage to physical attacks. A skilled Nature Ritual Ranger can really change the course of a battle with well-placed and well-fimed casts.

ANTI-CASTER RANGER
Anti-Caster rangers are extremely effective in taking down healers and casters. Skills that apply the Silence condition are very important with this character A Mesmer secondary with energy drain skills helps this character focus on long-range spell interruption and energy-draining effects, allowing you to pick your target and pin him down. Focus points on bow attributes to help increase damage and skill effects and save some points for defensive attributes, which will help you to avoid those pesky Warriors.

AIR ELEMENTALIST
The Air Elementalist is extremely effective against Warrior primaries; the large number of lightning spells and knockdowns give this character an edge over those who rely on heavy armor to stay alive. Keep this character toward the rear of your team, and away from enemy Warriors, though you can drop them quickly from a distance, they'll best you at close range in seconds flat. Touch-range knockdowns and snare skills are crucial to avoiding enemy Warriors. Allocate points toward attributes that increase your lightning damage and energy storage.

FIRE ELEMENTALIST
The Fire Elementalist has many powerful both long- and short-range area-of-effect spells. Build up energy- and fire-related attributes, and load up on spells that do area-ofeffect fire damage at long-range and in sequence. Combine with a secondary Mesmer profession and use the Mesmer's spell-copying and energy-stealing abilities to lay down virtually endless area-of-effect fire. This build is very effective in missions where the objective requires you to hold or attack a particular area.

DAMAGE-OVER-TIME MESMER
The goal of a Damage-Over-Time Mesmer is to load the enemy up with damage-overtime effects (DOTs) and slow them down so you can make a quick getaway. A number of character combos work well here, including Mesmer/Necro, Mesmer/Warrior, and Mesmer/Elementalist. Build up attributes that increase the effectiveness and duration of your movement debuffs and DOTs. These characters are perfect for taking down heavily armored foes because their damage-over-time effects ignore the target's armor.


DEATH LORD
A Death Lord is a Necromancer who fouses on animating a Large number of undead creatures. The key to this build is to increase attributes that strengthen minions and absorb energy when creatures die. Enchantments that trigger when allies die are also useful, here. Animate minions and load them up with these triggering enchantments, and use spells that kill your own minions. The timing is tricky, but with a little practice you become a deadly asset to any team. It's important to keep some distance between you and your teammates, because once you die your minions will attack everyone, friend or foe.

DEFILER
Defilers focus on debuffing the enemy. They're very effective against melee targets, but can impact casters as well. The key to any debuff build is to bring skills that debuff the same attribute, but in different ways. For example, attack speed debuffs and strength debuffs both lower a warrior's damage-per-second, so using these skills in sequence really makes life difficult for Warriors. Energy-denial and interrupts are extremely powerful against casters; look for enchantments that trigger when your target casts spells. A Mesmer secondary works well here, due to the large number of Mesmer debuffs that work well with Necro debuffs.

MONK PRIMARY HEALER
The Monk Primary Healer is the most powerful healer in the game. Monks have several skills that reduce the energy cost and increase the effectiveness of their healing spells. Their primary attribute directly enhances their healing skills, and they have access to equipment that further improves their healing abilities. Bring some of each, and your Primary Healer will be a great asset to any team.

SUPPORT HEALER
As important as the Primary Healer, this character focuses on energizing and healing the Primary Healer as needed. Necromancer primaries, with a Monk secondary, make fantastic Support Healers. Bring area-of-effect healing spells, and any spells that increase your allies' energy. Combine with spells that animate corpses and build up energy attributes for a powerful Support Healer.

PROTECTION HEALER
A Protection Healer focuses on Monk spells that reduce damage and cure harmful conditions. Build up attributes that raise these spells, and look for enchantments that work well in sequence. With this build it is especially important to cast spells in the proper order. For example, if you have a skill that reduces all damage by -8, and one that caps the damage of the target ally to 10`7 of maximum health, you'll want to cast the damage-capping spell first, followed by the damage reduction spell, for best results. While Protection Healers' skills are not as strong as the Primary Healer, they can drastically reduce the amount of damage the team takes, allowing the Primary Healer to expend less energy.