I'm gonna post my more successful character builds. I'd like to see how other people build their chars too.


Necromancer Minion Master

16 Death Magic
15 Soul Reaping
3 Smiting Prayers (optional)






(optional)
(optional)
*elite* (optional)
(optional)

Notes: The important stuff is the maxed death magic and soul reaping, then the 4 minion commands. With 15 soul reaping, every time anything dies (including my minions) I gain 15 energy. I need 25 to animate either a single bone fiend or a pair of bone minions. Once the death starts flying, I never run out of energy and am typically just animating creatures back to back. I animate bone fiends exclusively unless I'm waiting for the skill to recharge and have the energy and bodies required to make minions.

Necromancer Curses

15 Soul Reaping
16 Curses
3 Protection Prayers (optional)





*elite*




(optional)

Notes: Maxed curses of course, and maxed soul reaping for the energy benefits, though that's not quite as important as with the minion master. The first three skills are area attacks, so I try to use those first to affect as many enemy as possible. Spinal shivers is excellent against bosses when teamed with winter and something like fire storm, since it'll interrupt all their skills for 42 seconds (or as long as I have energy, or as long as the firestorm lasts). That's great against those bastard monks that heal themselves constantly.


...bleh...I might post my monk and ele builds at a later date. I want to see Ox's tank build.

Great idea...I've been wondering at who's bringing what skills when we go out. Btw, I love spinal shivers...that seems a total killer together with Pev's winter...no wonder you always wanted winter. Minion master skills seem neat too, i just wonder about the armor and dmg of the bone horrors and fiends. And don't you need a good amount of HP for all those blood sacrificing spells? Also love the infuse energy thing, even for a warrior that's really helpful.


Anyhoo...my tank build. Mind you, this is almost purely damage taking frontliner, with a minimum on offensive skills. In fact, i'm most dangerous when I am at the center of (melee) damage. This is also a sword/shield build. These skills are 99% of the time the basis (savage slash sometimes gets replaced when there aren't really any casters to fight)



[Elite]



The other three are chosen from












I know, I know, the optional list is long...but it really depends on the occasion if I bring bleed, more defense stances/shouts or damage skills.

For main stats this build goes

Tactics: 12
Swordsmanship: 12
Strength: 9


The idea behind the build should be obvious enough: take damage on the frontline, while dealing out at the same time. Riposte, deadly riposte and gladiator's defense all fit in there: they block attacks and deal out at the same time. It's awesome to see a cleave against you turned around into damage for your opponent. I've seen a lot of n44bs beat themselves to death on me in pvp too...didn't know what was happening.

Anyhoo, those three are the basis. Apart from gladiator's their cooldown is good, riposte (as an adrenal skill) is even almost instantuous in battle. By juggling those three you can already avoid a lot of damage, and if that's not enough you just throw in defensive stance or bonetti's or something alike. Healing signet should be obvious...only to be used during a stance because the casting time is rather lengthy for someone whose job is taking blows (even though 130 instant healing is massive). Avoid having rust cast on you at all costs.

Savage slash is for stopping those extra badass/long spells to be fired off by you opponents, genre rust (heh), firestorm, troll's, mark of protection...you name it. It's hard to disrupt properly with a warrior but for those 3-4 second spells it's doable.

---------------------------------------------- (optional)

Then there's I will avenge you, which -ironically- works best when most of your party is eating dust. But since henchies and possibly even minions seem to count as "fallen partymembers" this skill can be exceedingly useful. The extra attacks also fill up your adrenal skills quicker, which is where berserker's stance comes in as well.

Sever artery obviously only works well against fleshy creatures, so it's not universally useful. I found it good against monk bosses because they tend to cast "mend ailment" almost immediately after being cut, which happens a lot with the low adrenal requirement of the skill. So I figure it takes time/energy away from their more dastardly spells such as orison and mark. Galrath slash is just for more offensive damage, if required. Watch yourself is a skill that works well in areas with lots of rangers, who tend to go for the casters...because it gives +20 armor for everyone in the party for a few seconds.



Meh..that's it, hope you like it. I'll prolly post another variation (the elementale knockdowner) later on.

Ok well I'll post my builds that I have and also the ones I'm planning. And as those reach lvl 20 and get succesful, I'll edit and update. I'd like to see other peoples planned builds too.

Successful

Ranger/Mesmer
I tend to swap my build around a lot depending on the situation. However recently my build has been a variation along the lines of this:

Attributes:
15 Wilderness Survival (+1 from rune, +1 from mask) - for skills
12 Marksmanship (+3 from rune) - for bow requirements
rest into Expertise with 5 left over

Skills:







and any 2 others (usually res sig and cap sig)

I change around though as and when. That's a degen/disrupt/defense kinda build. If I know we're up against a lot of casters, I'll usually take in instead of Poison arrow. If I'm gonna be up against large but tightly packed groups, I may take instead of Ignite and drop out Choking Gas and Poison Arrow for Charm and Comfort Animal.

Future Builds

Mo/E: Healer all the way. All points into Healing and Divine Favour (max out Divine) with the rest put into either Protection Prayers or Earth Magic. So far lvl 16 and doing nicely with just Div/Heal.

N/R: Minion Master with Beast Mastery. Maxed out Soul Reaping along with high (probably fairly equal) blood magic and beastmastery.

W/Mo: Well... duh. Probably be my farming build.

Me/N: Having a blast with this one so far. Curses will be high, along with Fast Casting and not sure which mesmer line yet. So far loving to cast Soul Barbs on a creature, then cast 4 mesmer hexes on it. Sorts all (pre-searing ) monsters out in about 3 seconds flat.

E/Mo: Going for full on damage here. Maxed out Energy Storage, along with high level Fire and Smiting. Pretty much a sit back and slaughter build.

ok, been awhile, but I'm gonna post some more builds of stuff.

Healing Monk
I play this alot. Usually when I'm helping people with stuff...everyone always wants a monk. So I've had a great chance to try out various builds. This has been my latest build and has been effective in very difficult areas like UW, FoW and SF, not to mention the later story missions.

Heal Other
Healing Breeze
Healing Seed
Divine Healing
Dwayna's Kiss
Divine Spirit
Peace and Harmony *elite*
Rebirth

Attributes:
Healing Prayers Max (16)
Divine Favor Max (13-16)

Keep Peace and Harmony on yourself at all times. You can't ever attack anything, or you lose it, but as a monk you're not supposed to attack anyway. It gives +1 energy regen for ~1:30 and recharges every 45 seconds.

Healing breeze and Heal Other are the primary spells. Healing seed goes on tanks taking a beating. They heal themselves and anyone near them whenever they get hit. Divine healing does some mad area healing, and as a bonus doesn't heal the enemy. On the other hand, it doesn't heal minions, so could be replaced with heal area if you have a MM with you.

Dwayna's kiss heals around what Orison of Healing does, but doubles the divine favor bonus and also gives added healing for every enchantment on a character. If it's a spell caster with a bunch of enchantments on em, this can easily heal as much or more than heal other for half the cost.

Finally, divine spirit reduces spell costs by 5 energy for 12 seconds (for me). I usually use this when I'm down to about 20-25 energy, since it costs 10 energy to use. At that point I can use Dwayna's kiss for 1 energy and healing breeze/heal other for 5, which makes me a healing powerhouse for 12 seconds.

The only shortcomings are that you can't attack at all and you have very limited self-healing ability. The only spells you can heal yourself with are healing breeze and divine healing.

yea, fast casting meteor storm and stuff like that would be badass. Especially if you had arcane echo and echo as skills, so you could fast cast 3 meteor storms. Only problem with that is energy....

...but....if you had me along with BiP and blood ritual...I coudl give you a constant +8 energy regen...you could probably cast meteor storms all day long. Well...3, at least, until the first recharged. Hmm...you need to make a mes or talk Shiny into something like that with her mes.

Anyway...my smiter isn't finished (and isn't awesome yet), but I'll post what I have so far.

Smiting Monk

Banish
Basic attack skill
Target foe takes 20-49 holy damage

Smite
This attack deals 10-46 holy damage. If attacking, your target takes an additional 10-30 holy damage.

Shield of Judgment *elite*
The fat meat of my smiter. This skill PWNS.
For 8-18 seconds, anyone striking target ally with an attack is knocked down and suffers 5-41 damage.

Zealot's Fire
For 60 seconds, whenever you use a skill that targets an ally, all foes adjacent to that target are struck for 5-29 fire damage.

Then the rest of the skills are usually protection skills.
Rebirth
(duh)

Reversal of Fortune
For 8 seconds, the next time target ally would take damage, that ally gains that amount of health instead, maximum 15-67.

The last 2 skills vary. I used to take Symbol of Wrath and Balthazar's Aura, but the AI update made those skills totally useless. I may still pack Symbol along just to keep baddies away from me and other casters, but it's totally useless as an offensive skill.

I'll usually sit in the back with zealot's fire enabled at all times. When the tank starts getting whaled on, I put shield on him...that massively slows down the enemy attacks (they keep getting knocked down) and does alot of damage....usually it lasts about 20 seconds (I have maxed smiting) and does 50 damage per knockdown. I'll use up my attack spells on the most dangerous foes, and then just spam reversal of fortune on the tank. With zealot's fire, all the baddies around him take 30-40 damage each reversal I spam, plus the tank gets healed instead of injured.

I'm still working on the build, though.

Satis, I did a quick try on mesmer fast casting + signets yersterday with a PVP char...it doesn't work. Fast casting only applies to spells. :§

I'm still somewhat digging the idea of a signet master, tho. And fast casting made me realize what enormous potential a mes has in PVP. Empathy, clumsiness, ineptitude, stuff like that; coupled to perhaps a necro secondary with SS.

had fun in SF the other day with a mass degen R/Me. I think my build was something like:

Expertise 12 +1
Wilderness Survival 9 + 3
Marksmanship 7 + 1
Beastmastery 7 + 1
Illusion Magic 8

Skills:
Kindle Arrows (swap for any other prep you like)
Poison Arrow (elite)
Conjure Phantasm (5 degen for x seconds)
Feral Lunge (bleeding damage from pet)
Comfort Animal (could be left out if you didnt mind not being able to pet res)
Charm Animal
Troll Unguent
Whatever you like (i had res sig for those morons Mhenlo and Lina)

Basically stick poison, bleed and phantasm on anything you see. I did want to get the immolation from flame trap or Inciendiary Arrows as well but Inciendiary is an elite (even if apply poison was taken instead of poison arrow it wouldn't work as inciendiary is a prep too). Flame trap would work, but only against melee (or if you run next to them).

Build worked very nicely against anything though. The monk boss/priest combo I met was being a bitch; I think i coulda taken them but it would have been a long battle. Wroth and one of his Dolyak Master bitches were no problem to take out; even if one of them had mark of protection on, the degen did some serious damage.

there are some nice necro degeners....I bet if we teamed that build with a necro/mes degen build we could seriously screw people up. I'm quite happy with necro curses anyway.

Also been playing with ele mark of rodgort recently....that's nice. Virtually constant burn, take out even monk bosses pretty fast. I'm sure if someone had a fiery dragon sword or some other flame weapon/attack I could keep unloading regular spells, too.

Mark of Rodgort sounds pretty uber when use correctly yeah..gonna try that trick.

Somewhat inspired by Pev and Satis here, I started thinking of a hex-build that pwnz ass in PvP. I made a list of all hexes or hex-related spells/signets today, then narrowed them down and ranked them according to energy cost.

Unsurprisingly, mesmer and necromancer pack the vast majority of the spells that made the final cut. Then, because this is supposed to be a PvP build, mesmer becomes primary. Fast casting seriously tops soul reaping in PvP. With sufficient point, it almost completely ignores casting times for the build which means that all that has to be kept into account is energy cost and cooldown.

I haven't made a decision yet as to what it will look like, but I think it's promising. Oh, and it's supposed to be a true incapacitate build messing with melee attacks/skills/casting; rather than one concerned with causing direct damage (or degen). I attached the list of the spells I'm left with so far...check it out if you like.


P.S. my internet has been an idiot all day long. Well, not even that, I get kicked off after 10 minutes on most of the time...and when i'm online I go slow. I'm starting to think it's the modem...of the drivers, anyway. And the complete idiocy of it all is that I can't re-install them to see if it helps because of my bro trashing my drive. Sigh. i'm really starting to hate that moron. Guess I'll have to go stricter on him. And make him pay for a new drive.

heh ox, thats kinda like my Gearrika (Me/N) though she's PvE. I chose the Me/N coz I intend to hex the crap outta people, by stacking hexes that complement each other. I'm only lvl 8 in Ascalon at the moment, but its been working nicely.

For any char (caster or melee) simply use Soul Barbs (every hex or enchantment cast on the target whilst its active does x dmg), followed by Weaken Armour (hex), Empathy (hex and dmgs them everytime they attack) and then Conjure Phantasm (hex and degen). In pre-sear this combo was dropping stuff in less than 5 seconds. In post sear most stuff drops within 10 seconds. Monks tend to go down in around 20 seconds. Through in a Backfire for the casters you come across and it's all good.

Reason I went for the damage side of it more than the interupt/mess with side is because I love interupting with my ranger. Plus the mes has few good interupts til later. Though when I've messed around with true interupts on my R/Me, I do love the mes ones such as Backfire, Power Spike and another that I forget. At 12 attrib, Backfire does something like 119 dmg everytime they cast; 5 spells cast under that and you'd be dead. Imagine running into a 'n00b' ele who still spammed Flare as the main attack... around a 5 second kill would be pretty damned sweet in PvP Power Spike interupts a spell and does something like 60 dmg at 12 attrib. Not to mention the energy stealing spells that the mes has would be great in PvP. "ooh look at me, I'm a big bad nuking ele with 80+ energy...wait... where did it go? oh noes, a warrior is coming towards me!"

and this is only looking at the mes skills. I haven't properly had a look at the necro skills yet, so there must be some great skills that will compliment my "hurt yourself" plans. Parasitic Bond (I think) is one I'm interested in... nice way to help keep myself alive (self-heal is the area mes sucks most in) AND to hurt the enemy

Ele Ettin Farmer Build

Skills
Glyph of Renewal (elite) - recharges next skill instantly
Meteor Shower
Aftershock
Flame Burst (can be switched out)
Fire Attunement
Armor of Earth / Kinetic Armor
Ward Against Melee (may be optional)
Healing Breeze

Points..
Healing: 7 (for 6 points of regen)
Fire: 16
Earth: 11
Energy Storage: the rest

Fire attunement of course.
Aggro the enemy, then immediate cast armor of earth and ward against melee.
-Glyph of Renewal,
-Meteor Shower
-Healing Breeze
-Aftershock timed with metoer shower knockdown
-Meteor Shower
-Flame Burst

Typically that kills everything. I've had it work against as many as 4 ettins at a time. It's possible to substitute kinetic armor for armor of earth, but it's hard....8 seconds is barely enough to shoot off meteor shower, and if you don't get that off before armor expires you're screwed. Flame burst is optional.... you can switch that out with your choice of damage-inducing skills. Also, ward against melee seems almost optional...you could maybe substitute something else in there.

I'm playing around with the idea of a build using Shield of judgement. SoJ's effects could replace both armor of earth and ward against melee, probably, as well as make aftershock more useful. But I don't have it yet, so I can't play around with that.

War Ettin farmer build


This is my fav ettin farming build...and if I say so myself, darn effective and efficient. Low chance of dying (none really if you don't fuck up), relatively fast, and no need for slow natural regen. I might be prejudiced cos I just play my war a lot and therefore am "better" at it, but meh, here we go.

It's an adrenal build...so I recommend using an adrenal axe, if you have one.

Stats (not counting runes...only have +1 runes anyway, except for vigor and absorption)

Axe mastery: 12
Tactics: 10
Strength: 7
Inspiration magic: 6

You can add or subtract points here and there according to your weapon req and such, of course.

Skills

Cleave (Elite): extra damage, fast adrenal charge
Executioner's strike: extra damage, slow adrenal charge
Cyclone axe: little extra damage, hits multiple targets, 5 energy. Great for building up adrenaline.
Disrupting chop: adrenal skills, slow charge. Disrupts action and disables skills for 20 seconds. Crucial!
Healing Signet: duh!
Physical resistance: 10 energy, but long-lasting and very effective. With this stance you'll barely feel anything except the ettin's power attacks.

Those are the core of the build. Then you have

Sprint vs. Penetrating blow: I like to bring sprint cos you should have more than enough damage with the core skills, and it's just easy to get rid of tengu or skales. Makes life easier, in general. If you desperately want damage take penetrating blow along tho.

To the limit! vs. For great justice! : both awesome shouts, but I prefer to the limit. It's lower energy (5 vs 10 for FGJ) and instant. Since you should be fighting about 5-6 opponents tops at the same time, it should be perfect. (only affects up to 5 opponents)



There you go...you should breeze through ettin farming like this. Only thing you need to learn is to time the ettins' tendency to activate their healing sig. Once you get that right, you're in. So keep in mind: don't use disrupting chop for anything but disrupting healing sigs! It charges slowly, so you shouldn't waste it. Other than that it's just chop, chop and heal. And use a shout or a stance now and then. Have fun.

Ice imp cave W/Me solo farmer



So, this guy is virtually invincible farming ice imps. Satis is a witness to that, and I'll post a vid of it soon. Anyway, first things first: try to stack on damage reduction items and runes. Mine has the close to the best of the best, try to have something equal. I.e., a piece of knight's armor (not chestpiece), a rune of sup absorption, and a shield that has -2 dmg reduction (while in a stance, preferrably. Or while hexed).

So, on to the skills:


Sprint: Duh. To run from Granite Citadel to the ice cave.
Elemental resistance: crucial. This stance will have to be on at all times when farming the imps.
Watch yourself!: Shout...for that easy armor bonus.
Dolyak Signet: Relatively crucial vs. the imps and to get past the ice giants.
Healing Signet: Well...to heal.
Power Drain: Very important. Used to interrupt the Ice Golem's use of rust. Costs only 5 energy, works instantly and from a distance; and has a slightly slower cooldown than rust. Ftw! Can also be used to own maelstroms when there's no golems around.
Cleave [elite]: Quick-charging adrenal skill. Spam it!
Executioner's strike: Slow-charging adrenal skill, but massive dmg.


There are some variations possible, but ele res/dolyak sig/watch yourself is the basis if you wanna survive. You can switch around the weapon skills...if you don't mind the energy cost of other fast-charging attacks.

Then, for attributes:

->put the minimum required points in your weapon and/or tactics skill, depending on your weapons or shields.
->try to have about 10 in strength...it's good for sprint and Dolyak's. And the more you do, the less time Dolyak's take to recharge. (duration is 17 seconds at 10, cooldown 20...so only down for 3 secs)
->then put 5-6-7 points in inspiration magic.

That should do the trick. Now you'll have a super-duper IDS farmer. Good luck!