Sausaletus Rex

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.

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In my day, we didn't have virtual reality. If a one-eyed razorback barbarian warrior was chasing you with an ax, you just had to hope you could outrun him.