Edition6

Gamer's Mantra
Edition #6
Kalendraf, LQGaming Staff Writer
20th of June, 2005

When I visit cities, I try to monitor the local channel. If I see any questions I can answer, I usually reply with the info. Despite the game having been out for a while now, there continues to be quite a bit of new blood joining our ranks which is good to see. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding or ignorance as well. I recently had one discussion much like this:

For some reason, the entire concept of using your refund points to retool your character seems to have been lost among a sizeable share of the players. In the case of a new player, it's understandable. However, even experienced players seem to be overlooking or ignoring this powerful ability to change-up their character. I've seen some 20th level characters in the Crystal Desert, Southern Shiverpeaks or Ring of Fire areas bemoan the fact that their current build seems lacking. Yet, they show no interest in trying to change up their character, even temporarily, to attempt to overcome this perceived weakness. This is like another discussion I had recently:

Changing your character build is not a hard task in Guild Wars, and it certainly shouldn't scare anyone away. For many classes, doing so is a rather simple matter of swapping points from one attribute to another. Refund points are there to be spent, and you'll earn them back at a very quick pace, so you should have no fear in using them. The other aspects of changing a build are primarily skills and equipment.

By doing quests, you'll gain access to a sizeable number of skills to use. If that's not sufficient, you can always track down the various skill traders to find which additional skills you might want to use. Eventually, you should have an adequate selection of skills to choose from for every attribute.

For equipment, your character might need a new weapon, a new off-hand item and possibly a new headgear to fully change their build. Most of the remaining armor should not need to be changed. When applying a rune that adds to one of your character's attributes, it's usually a good idea to put it on the headgear that increases the same stat. This way, you only have to swap 1 piece of armor to change your attribute focus. For items, you can obtain "perfect" max-damage weapons and max-energy focus items from the collectors in the Crystal Desert and regions past that. So if you need a new one for the new build, this is a possible way to obtain them fairly easily.

Switching builds will no doubt take some practice with the new character setup, but you can begin by using a template that you are familiar with. The template concept attempts to take a more generic view of the character, and then allows you to swap skills for the new build that will fulfill a similar role. By doing this, the player can begin using the character in a way that behaves somewhat similar to their previous build. Later, after more experience, they can change up the character again to refine it, but this serves as a good starting point.

To help illustrate this template idea, here's an example that takes a PvE Fire elementalist, then creates a template of it, and uses it to create an Air Elementalist:

In this example, the mesmer skills didn't change at all, but in theory they could have. By keeping the energy use and casting times similar, the resulting character should function somewhat similarly to the previous character allowing the player to make an easier migration to the new build. There will obviously be some major differences between playing a pyromancer and an aeromancer, but the player won't be starting from ground zero when trying out this new element. Also, in this example, only 1 armor piece (the headgear) had to change, which helps keep the change more manageable. A similar templating process can be used to try out new builds for other classes as well.

Our characters in Guild Wars are very flexible. We shouldn't think of ourselves as locked into being full-time hammer warriors, pyromancers or healing monks. The refund points allow us a much greater range of flexibility than that. While our current character setup might indeed be one of those, we're always just a few refund clicks, skills selects and equipped items away from a completely different build.

I encourage everyone to try using their refund points more often. As you gain experience, you continually earn them, yet they will just go to waste if you don't spend them. Using them can help you test out other builds at any point in the game, and you might very well come across something that works better for you. Experimenting like this can help improve your game play by making you more familiar with the various skills and attributes. It can also help keep the game fresh.

Refund Points - Use 'em or lose 'em!