Bit of build information for newer players

Going through this recruitment process has brought home to me how many newer players there are out there. I know most of this stuff is present on the forums and in the guides section, but I figured it can't hurt to have it here as well. I think the lack of official info for this game hurts a lot of the newer players, so hopefully some will see this and get some tips. I strongly recommend any new player though to really invest some time in looking through the forums, particularly the Guides section and the position specific forum relative to your player.

This advice was written for a LB, but most of the concepts are quite general and still apply.

If I can give you some build tips, its generally best not to purchase any special abilities until you're at least in the late teens level wise. This is because a lot of those abilities require certain levels in other attributes in order to work. For example, Snarl might need a Confidence of 30 in order to work (note thats probably completely wrong - there's no confirmed information on how it works). Others simply act as boosters for your existing stats. This means its generally better to increase your stats a fair bit before going into Special Abilities.

The other important point for building is the attribute soft cap. Basically, once you get an attribute to 48, it starts to cost you 2 skill points to gain one attribute point, so to go from 48 to 49 would cost 2 skill points. The reason this is important, is because every time you go up a level, certain attributes get increased a bit automatically.

For a Linebacker, Strength, Agility, Stamina, Vision, Confidence and Tackling all increase by 0.33 per level increase, and Speed, Jumping, Blocking and Catching all increase by 0.25.

What this means, is that the sooner you can get an important attribute to the soft cap, the more value you get out of those free increases. So if you had Strength at 50 and gained a level, the 0.33 you gained would actually be worth 0.66! This sort of gain really starts to add up over time, and there are also further softcaps before the cost rises to 3,4,5 pts per increase as well, so it becomes even more valuable.

This means that one of the most efficient ways to build a player for the long term is to pick which attributes are most important to your player. Generally, for a Linebacker I believe Strength and Agility are the most important, as they are useful in everything a Linebacker is asked to do, whether it be pass rushing or stuffing the run. Other attributes like Tackling, while still important, have more limited use. With those attributes picked, you basically spend all your skill points on soft capping those attributes one at a time, and use your training to increase the other attirbutes you need. You will a bit less effective this way in the short term, as the more well rounded type of player such as ??? currently will be able to use his stats more fully and have more tricks. But once the other player gains his support attributes later on, he'll be well ahead on the important attributes and have the advantage.

Tying in with all this, its best to try and consolidate all of your equipment points into one or two stats at most. Particularly if you put them onto those softcapped important stats, you again get the benefit of cheap points over the soft cap.