Planning a character: gear, skills and the Daevanion board

1. Gear: what the character carries

The character builder is a set, not a shopping list: weapon, armour, accessories and the stats they add up to. Put a full set on before judging it. A single piece that looks weak on its own is often the one that completes a bonus, and a full set that looks strong is often three points over a stat cap nobody needed.

• Start from the weapon of the class you are actually playing; everything else follows it.
• Watch the totals, not the parts: what matters is what the set adds up to.
• Use the codex to check what an item does before you plan around its name.

2. Skills: what you press, and in what order

The skill builder is where the gear becomes a plan. Put the skills you would actually equip on the bar and order them the way you would press them: opener, control, damage, escape. If the rotation needs a skill the build does not support —because the weapon does not bring it, or the stats are wrong— you find out here, in ten minutes, instead of at level cap.

3. Board: what the character becomes

The Daevanion board is the part people leave for last and then have to rebuild everything around. It is a board of nodes with a limited number of points, so the decision is what to leave out. Plan it with the rotation you already wrote: the board exists to make that rotation better, not to add a second one.

• Decide the nodes that the rotation cannot work without, and buy those first.
• Leave the last points for whatever the content asks for —survivability in PvP, throughput in PvE.
• If a node needs gear you are not wearing, it is not a plan yet.

Keep the plan, compare the plan

Save each version. Two plans side by side —the cheap one for a new patch, the expensive one for the guild's content— are easier to compare than a plan and a memory. Saved builds can be shared with a link, which is how a group agrees on a composition before anyone spends a single stone.

Everything the planners show —items, skills, board nodes— comes from the game's published data. If an item is missing or a node has no description yet, it is usually because the client has not published it in your region's languages; the plan still works, the label is what is pending.