ESO has made a big change from most MMOs by making skill points unlimited. Characters can earn as many skill points as players can find for them, and many players will spend hours striving to get as many skills as possible. In most MMOs, a tradition quickly develops of creating established characters for each class, combinations of abilities and weapons that are known to be the most effective possible way to play that class. With ESO’s unlimited skill points and the resulting ability to gain access to literally every skill available to the character, it begs the question of whether or not there is any place in ESO for traditional character builds.

In fact, the ESO system itself makes traditional-style character creation impossible even without unlimited skill points. First, because many non-class abilities can be combined with class abilities in almost limitless ways, making it almost impossible to pinpoint a specific build or builds that are automatically best for a given class. Second, because a player can only spend skill points to get the skill. Spending additional skill points does not make skills more powerful like in other MMOs. Instead, abilities level up as the player uses them. Therefore, ESO builds that tell players where to spend skill points will be nearly useless for higher level characters, whose powers are based as much on what skills they use as where they spend their skill points.

For many players, traditional-style character builds will be guidelines or suggestions at best. With unlimited skill points to play with, a player can refer to an ESO build guide when he’s not sure what skill to get next, or if he wants a skill that gives him bonuses against a certain type of enemy. Otherwise, the ability to combine guild skills, weapon skills, and class skills creates an infinite number of possibilities for building a character that makes traditional builds largely irrelevant. In the ESO builds, instead of dealing with which skills to buy, there will be guides on which skill lines to combine to create different types of characters – suggestions on how to combine Nightblad with the Mages Guild for a mage assassin, or turn turn his sorcerer into a vampire if you want to be able to play a Tremere in IT.

Traditional character builds, with their step-by-step blueprints for the most powerful character possible, may still be relevant to IT. Many players, especially those focused on PvP, won’t be interested in spending their time wandering the realms looking for crystal shards and books that give them extra skill points. They will want to build the most powerful character in the shortest amount of time. These traditional ESO builds will need to advise players on which skills to use most often in order for them to level up at the desired rate, and while non-class skills will be the most useful add-ons to the basic build.