How to make a good build

Unofficial Information Guides are almost always a work of personal opinions and thus results may differ. Information provided by this page are mostly filled with (usually) experienced player's opinions and can thus contain different kinds of biases and errors. Try to make your own picture of the ratings given to various mechanics.

Pretext

A good build is what every Ashes of Phoenix player strives for, yet no-one can do.

Before we begin talking about the more detailed factors of building a character, I need to say a few things right away.

First of all - unlike other projects, Stats and Perks on AoP are fairly balanced. There are almost never must-have perks, neither are there perks that are outright extremely bad. In general - if you like the sound of a perk and intend to use it - take it. Your character will not be that much worse, but you will get valuable insight in whether or not your choice was good. Remember, you get free rerolls from time to time, as well as have multiple build-slots to toy around with.

Second of all - builds are only good in what they try to achieve. That means, you will never be able to make a build that can withstand every risk. This begins with the simple fact that we have 4-5 different Critical Resistances stats, and you can not max out each and every one of them. Sooner or later you will run into the issue, that your build will need a weakness. You need to know that weakness and try to limit enemies potential abusing it - but you will never be able to remove it. Also - by tagging a weapon skill - you will automatically be less efficient with other weapons. A "Do all, be all" type of build is extremely unlikely, if not impossible.

Last but not least - As it stands right now, there are no meta-builds. At all. Even the very same class can have widely different builds attached to them. So always take someone's build with a grain of salt. It might work for them - but that doesn't mean it will work for you.

If you just want an overview of available "Meta-Builds" on the Server and get some tips for them, check out the Classes page which details currently used builds within the community.

In the following chapters, I will show you my way of creating a somewhat viable character, or at least the thought process behind it. There are most likely other ways of starting out thinking about a character build, but this should provide you a good base-line so you won't stand completely empty-handed before the character planner.

The Basics

First of all, most players use the Character Planner which will enable you to design the character without even having taken a step into the game.

1 - Classes & Weapons

First of all, I like to think about what class I like to play, with the second thing right after that is figuring out what weapons I will be using. It is important to also consider weapons at later tiers, if you intend to keep a character for a while. Those might have different strength requirements or somehow change the synergy of your perks and stats.

Classes should provide you with a good overview of what meta class you want to choose. While not set in stone, it should give you a good hint as to what you can and can't do. While we have the Weapons list, I personally check the weapons in the damage-calculator portion of the Online Planner (Scrolling further down)

Take 4-5 weapons from each tier you intend to play the character on. Then only choose 1-3 weapons out of each tier that you think will be the most fitting weapons on that tier. If you have 5 possible weapons that all have a strength requirement of 5, but one, which has 7, you might want to remove the 7 Strength weapon from the list of weapons you intend to use to have more Special points available for other things. Just as an example as to why we try to limit our character onto specific weapons. A Sniper is not a Sniper, neither is a Burster a Burster. There are different Snipers with different playstyles. Some go for the Snipers for the biggest possible range to have the range advantage and outplay your enemies that way. However, Snipers with less range usually shoot faster. It's always a trade-off in what you want to have or achieve.

2 - Skills

Since you now know your class and weapons, you can easily redestribute the skills how you want. Tag the weapon skill of your choice, take 2 additional support skills, and level them up as you need, not considering the amount of Skill Points you have for now. In 95% of cases, you want to max out your primary weapon skill, and spend the remaining points either evenly on both support skills, so you can later on (after level 24) level all the other skills to the lower of the two values, or in case you only have 1 skill you really care for, dump the remaining points into that to get it as high as possible until level 24 - however then you lose the ability to increase all the other skills as evenly.

3 - Armor

While not as important and technically interchangeable down the line, it can have some influence in your general build. If you know you will almost always wear Metal Armors, you will always have the Stone Wall (Armor Trait) trait, allowing you to save a perk point on Critical Strength for example, or take it because then it would bring you to over 100% immunity.

4 - SPECIAL and Traits

These two aspects of your build are more or less intertwined, because Traits might change your SPECIAL stats around so you need to decide what Traits you want to take (if any). Since Traits also have downsides, you might decide to just take 1, or none at all, which is perfectly fine.

The Special points part is much harder to figure out. While picking perks and other things in the next steps, you will often come back to tweak your Special stats around.

Strength - Take as much as the biggest minimum strength requirement of the weapons you have picked. If you have 1 odd outlier (Like a specific weapon at a specific tier) that has higher requirements, think about skipping that strength value and instead use a Drug like Buffout (Drug) if the rare moment comes around where you intend to use that weapon. That way all your other weapon choices benefit from more points in other Special stats.

Perception - Having high perception allows you to see further and have more critical chance. While it sounds like a Sniper Stat, and it definitely is, you also want to see the battlefield with all other classes as well. Unless you play in a very good communicative team that marks enemies positions, you will most likely have to invest some points into your perception to not be a blind mole.

Endurance - The classic HP stat. Endurance is the biggest modifier to your maximum HP. Snipers have a hard time increasing their Endurance as they want their Special stats somewhere else, classes like Bursters and Heavies however can easily dump some points into here and benefit from additional tankiness.

Charisma - Take 1 if you are not exactly sure if you will have someone in your team to begin with that will give out boosts. Taking a higher value is only advised on later builds when you know how that mechanic works and when it is beneficial to you.

Intelligence - A stat that will most likely be tweaked even at the finishing-process of your build, since you want to have as little Intelligence as possible, but since you need to get your skills up by level 24, you need to take as much as needed. Often this number will be somewhat around 6 to 10. It has additional benefits to Snipers as it will give them more critical chance. Since we already spent our skillpoints in Step 2 of this guide, you would now want to take as many intelligence that you have no left-over points, however are also not in the negative. (Since being in the negative basically means you can not do the skills you want in-game, as you will be missing some)

Agility - For some people the most important Special stat. It increases your AP+ Regeneration which will provide a huge benefit for almost every class, as this effectively gives you more energy per minute to spend on literally anything. Firing, Healing, Reloading. It has some other stats it improves, but the additional AP+ is definitely its biggest value.

Luck - Luck is a weird stat in that that Snipers need A LOT of it. But everyone else also benefits from it as this is also what counters Snipers to begin with. High amount of luck not only improves your critical chance, it also gives you more critical resistance. Luck has many more benefits, but in general you try to have a somewhat acceptable value in here - unless you are a Sniper, in which case you want this number to be as high as possible. 9 or 10.

5 - Perks

For some the most interesting part of building a character. Choosing 8 (or if you took Skilled just 6) perks will allow you to modify your character to a big extend. These perks can range from simple stat-boosts like +20 HP in the case of Lifegiver, to support perks that allow you to see your teammates HP Living Anatomy, or to outright change the way a weapon works Shotgun Surgeon.

It's usually better to start with the high-level perks, as you can not choose so many of them, and then work your way down with filling the remaining perk-slots with lower level perks.

Try to identify your "must-have" perks that you can not live without and try to keep them selected, while figuring out what other perks you might want to take with you. At this point you might decide to change your SPECIAL stats around a bit. For example, if you took Endurance only for its HP gain, you might take Lifegiver as a perk to lower some Endurance points and thus have more special points available for other stats.

6 - Drugs & Boosts

This is the step most people start the process anew and try to modify the build bit by bit to min/max specific stats. This is also the point of the build process where you simply get new ideas, so it might be beneficial to open a new tab of the planner and make a second build, then compare the two builds you have. This can technically be an infinite process, getting new ideas, trying out new combinations and so on. Try not to stay in this process too long especially if you are a new player. As your knowledge of the game works, so does your building process. Most players find great joy in creating new combinations of builds, this is half of the fun in my opinion as well! Some players share their builds, others keep them a well-hidden secret and only show them to close friends, so the enemy can not have the same builds. How you treat them is entirely your choice!