
Talking about your build in an MMORPG can be oddly contentious with people. On the one hand, you are inevitably going to have people who will critique your build because it does not have the best-in-slot options and you could be eking out more from your character if you just did one or two things. On the other hand, you are inevitably going to have people who look at any critique or even acknowledging the existence of having a character build as being anathema because how absolute dare you have any feedback on how I play a video game.
So this can be not fun.
As someone who really does quite enjoy MMORPG character builds, I think this is a particularly unfun space to be in because I do actually understand the non-awful place that both of those viewpoints can come from. So let’s talk a little bit about builds because yes, you have a build no matter what game you are playing. As long as you are making choices about your character, you have a build.
Now, the degree of character build you can actually have varies a lot from MMO to MMO. Final Fantasy XIV has a pretty narrow range of character builds for each job, based primarily on the secondary stats you meld for, and outside of a handful of jobs that can really play differently based on speed you are probably either playing just better or worse. Guild Wars (the original, yes) offers you a very, very wide range of character builds that can all still basically work, and even more if you’re willing to tweak your personal definition of “basically work” to the limits.
But as long as you’re making choices, you are still making build choices. You still choose which job you’re playing in FFXIV, for example, and you choose how to meld your kit. The game doesn’t do it for you. And you can, in fact, make bad choices; you could meld Tenacity on your Ninja, for example, which is not going to do anything useful for you at all, but the game will let you do it. It is mechanically possible.
The problem is that sometimes you make sub-optimal choices that you do, in fact, deliberately make for a good reason.
Case in point: In Warframe, there is a particular build you can employ on Mesa by pairing Combat Discipline with Arcane Avenger. You take damage when you kill something, and Arcane Avenger boosts your crit rate when you take damage. By stacking your abilities, you can minimize how much damage you take and then just keep gunning things down with insane crit chance. Hooray, big crits! Assuming you can survive the torrent of incoming damage hitting you!
But I find that in most situations, that’s not a safe bet. So I don’t run that particular build. Not because it’s bad or anything but because I prefer a build that’s maybe a touch worse but isn’t reliant on intense hope that Combat Discipline will not kill me.
Is this a sub-optimal choice? In a pure numbers-on-paper way, yes. In a “this is a video game and I want to have fun” sense, it’s a good choice made for good reasons. But there are people who will look at that as well as some of my other choices and ask why in the heck I am deliberately making myself worse. And when that’s the other side of the equation, you can hardly blame some people for preferring to occupy a world where they do not make builds, they just put stuff on a guy or a gal and stuff happens.
The problem is that you are, in fact, still making a build there! You are still making decisions! And I get that you may not want to do hours of research into what the best build options are and farm the content where things drop to increase your DPS by 0.45%. I get it. You should not have to do that to just make your character do stuff, and acting as if that is the basic level of engagement is… kind of crazy.
But as someone who does actually like doing that research and looking at these things, I know this is not a binary choice! Builds in video games are not, in fact, some arcane set of numbers no human brain can comprehend. You can look at the details of a build, figure out how it’s supposed to work, and more often than not change it in order to be more fun for you even if it technically makes parts of the build slightly worse. There’s not even a law against it!
You do not have to make every build in every game the Best Thing Ever, but you also don’t need to aggressively pretend you aren’t making build choices just to save yourself from the possibility of ever dealing with potentially bad choices.
Obviously, the caveat here is that we have to keep in mind what the designers of the game in question want to be true. It is possible for designers to push their fingers down so hard on one side of the scale that it is functionally impossible to clear things without builds that are optimized to a certain degree. That’s acceptable enough if the content in question is meant to be challenging, but again, there’s no law saying that designers have to be good at this. It is possible and sometimes even common to wind up with games that have a floor higher than your ability to comprehend a build.
But that’s also why players tend to coalesce with knowledge about builds. Lots of sites offer players conventional wisdom for builds. And you are allowed to think that the people who care way too much about builds are kind of weird or even outright unpleasant, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from them.
It’s also overlooking the fact that most people who try to make builds aren’t doing so because they want everyone to reach an arbitrary standard. Oh, sure, the elitist tryhard demographic exists, but most of them aren’t the same people who like making builds; people who like making builds understand the game systems and thus want to make something they find fun, often using weird pieces to put it together. The elitists aren’t making builds but regurgitating what they see as the best ones, while the people who like making builds are trying to make that hypothetical City of Heroes set that just makes you capable of soloing +4/x8 maps.
Am I saying that you should embrace ornate builds and you must go that route? Of course not. That is the opposite of what I’m saying. Rather, I’m saying that there can be midpoints – a lot of midpoints – between pretending that you have no control over your character’s abilities and optimizing everything. You can optimize for fun. And that might mean that your build is not quite as good as it could be, but you can still make the best dang build for what you want to do even if there’s a theoretical better one out there. Have some fun with it.
