This is a short pseudo-article on how my view on wrestler-building has evolved over time. This is also coming from my background as a CCG player and will include references to card games, particularly Magic: the Gathering, which was my game of choice for ten years (and still is).
When I first started out in this game, I didn't have a build philosophy. I just bought skills that I felt would help my "wrestler", and bought every move that popped up on the list to pad out my repertoire. This, in retrospect, was a mistake.
Now, several years and three stat rests later, I've become more aware of how the attributes, skills, and moves work together. The TWG movelist is akin to a set of cards in a CCG: loads of chaff that hide the real beef. Selecting the right moves, just like building a deck, requires skill to know which ones will work and which ones are not nearly as good as they seem - just there to test your skill.
The same is true for skills. It takes experience to know which skills will help you win, and which ones are just wasting your skill points. It's just like choosing the types of cards to include in a deck. For example, including countermagic in an all-out swarm deck, or a big, expensive creature in a deck that focuses on cheap, efficient creatures.
The rub lies in the fact that certain moves are unavailable unless you purchase certain skills to a certain level, and a lot of the time, the skills they require are difficult to justify spending skill points. (Head Start and Elasticity, I'm looking right at you) Yeah, the moves are sweet, but are they worth spending points on skills that barely affect the game, and could go toward other more useful skills like Lightness?
In Magic parlance, there are three main philosophies in deckbuilding, and these have analogs with TWG build philosophies as well.
The "Timmy" is the one who builds his deck with big, expensive creatures. Bigger is better is the Timmy's credo. You can see this philosophy in all the Strength wrestlers that max out their DDI, or Resistance wrestlers that pump everything they have into DR. Straightforward, no strategy involved, but pretty boring, and (usually) has some weakness that can be exploited.
The "Johnny" is the guy who wants to try some unique combination of cards that nobody has ever tried before. Win With Style is Johnny's mantra. Sometimes, a good combination comes out of it, sometimes it falls flat, but a Johnny will keep trying. Johnnys in TWG have very odd builds, like Speed wrestlers with an unusually high DDI, or Reisitance or Strength wrestlers with a submission bent (high PG/RG)
The "Spike" is the guy who is out to win. That's it. You see this most often in people who do restarts to copy a specific build (in Magic parlance, this is known as "Netdecking", or building a deck that has won consistently in tournaments). The Spike spends more time studying the metagame than the game itself. (For those of you who don't know, the "Metagame" is the "game within the game", seeing how the different builds/decks interact and choosing a build that exploits the weaknesses of the current environment)
Let me go a bit further in my metaphor. In a previous post, I made mention of how I avoid moves with a low attack bonus, regardless of the damage. This is a function of how my philosophy has changed regarding the metagame. To the beginner, a low-level move that can potentially do a lot of damage is very attractive. With more experience, though, you find that being able to hit and maintain a move chain is preferable to risking a block or dodge on a move that, even if it hits, has about a 50/50 chance of doing enough damage to make the risk worth it.
In comparison, in Magic, there is a cycle of cards known colloquially as "lucky charms", artifacts that when you cast a spell of the respective color, you gain 1 life. Again, to the beginner, this seems like a good deal: you put it into a deck that has most, if not all, spells of that color, and slowly gain yourself a crapton of life. With more experience, however, you find that you want cards in your deck that, oh, I don't know, do something?
To finalize the metaphor, building your wrestler should be like building a winning deck: have a core concept in mind (speed bleed, submission strength, attack chain, etc.), choose skills and moves that not only fit with your core concept, but have synergy with each other - this can be as simple as having a lot of sub moves for a strong submission build, or a lot of bleed moves for a bleed build, or as complicated as choosing moves that force a grounded status on a pin-heavy build or something like that - and make sure everything else on your character is tuned like a machine.
Oh, and stamina is the mana base of your wrestler; don't expect to do a whole lot without it.
I'll wrap it here. If you like this, I'll make a second chapter on what my new, upgraded build philosophy is. Put it this way: my level 14 Speed wrestler on Server 3 is 1211-945-25, and has held belts every level except 1 and 9, so something's working.
