Builds actually pertain to one character, your build is how you have your character setup. Take WoW for example, WoW has a spec/talent system, see after picking a race and class to play you get to make more choices that will define how you play your class, first is spec or specialization which determines what role you are going to play and what type of gear you are going to be using and sometimes even what type of weapons you will use. Take the Warrior class which has 3 specs Arms, Fury, and Protection or Prot, now Arms and Fury are both DPS specs and their gear will be completely dedicated to DPS stats, and for the most part Arms and Fury will share a lot of the same gear but where they differ is what weapon they use Arms focuses on 2 Handed weapons which have High damage stat but a slow swing stat, Fury on the other hand focuses on Dual Wielding 1 handed weapons that swing fast but have lower damage per swing. Now Prot is a tank spec and its gear will be devoted to tanking stats but also to using a 1handed weapon in their main hand and a shield in their off hand. Spec can also determine which abilities your character will use, Priest for example have two healing specs Holy and Discipline or Disc, now Holy's style of healing if focused on healing thru damage basically as enemies subtract health from player with damage Holy Priest add health back too players with their healing spells, Disc on the other hand focuses on preventing damage all together with damage absorbing spells which , instead of adding health to the player, it subtracts from the damage the enemy is doing to the player. Say a Monster is attacks Player A for 12 damage but Player B who is a Disc Priest cast an absorb spell on Player A which absorbs 10 damage, that 10 damage gets subtracted form the Monster 12 damage and now Player A only takes 2 damage. After you choose your spec you get to start choosing talents and as you level up you get to choose more talents. Now when WoW first launched each spec had its own talent tree which players could work thru one spec tree to make some of their spells stronger, give some spells some additional function, or gain spec specific spells or work thru two or more trees to gain access to a wide assortment of spells. This created a lot of different builds even within the same classes and specs, but this led to over specialized builds where players only preformed well in very specific situations and were not very versatile, and it led to hybrid builds which player were very versatile in a number of situations but were sub par in almost every encounter. Later they forced players to work thru their specs tree before choosing talents in other trees, while this fixed the versatility vs speciality problem by making the lower tier talents in each tree more versatile and the higher tier talents more specialized, it created a system of optimized builds where two players with different specs of the same class had two different builds two players with the same spec of the same class usually had the same build with little variation usually in filler talents. As of the recent expansion of WoW they have thrown out the specs talent trees and replaced it with a single class talent tree with a multi-tiered set of versatile talent choices with each tier focusing on one aspect of gameplay, and now when you choose a spec you unlock spec specific abilities as you level independently of what talents you choose. This has allowed a certain amount of freedom when it comes to choosing your talents, granted there are so e talents that are going to be favored by certain specs over others, but overall one of the better systems for talent builds. TL;DR builds are simply another set of choice you will make after you choose your race and class, that will be define by your play style. What system Bungie will use for Destiny is anyone guess.

You really took the LONG way to simply say that you think builds refer to the choices you make [i]after[/i] character creation. I disagree. I still feel that "builds" refer to having multiple characters under the same username in this instance. See picture attached.

[quote]A class build is a generalized way of describing the way a character will fight. Accustomed players will be able to deduce not only what skills a build uses when seeing or hearing the name of a build, but will also know how a character will fight in game and roughly what character stats and gear will look like of that build.[/quote] That's from the Diablo 2 Wiki. A build is not a character, but a style of play. If anything, the picture your posting is just further proof that those are "alts" and not "builds". A build has everything to do with the stats of the player. It's not really a matter of how you 'feel', that's just what it is.

We'll just have to agree to disagree. My firm stance on this subject is that, until Bungie says otherwise, I won't look to traditional MMO definitions to understand elements in Destiny. Most MMOs and RPGs go [i]way too[/i] deep with these type of features using immersion as justification. It goes against Bungie's design pillars.

But 'build' is a term, and one which actually goes [i]with[/i] the design pillars. The article itself even insinuates all things that a build entails, [quote]One cool thing about each class is that they can be further tweaked and customized through weapons and gear you collect, and something we’ve not talked about yet, builds.[/quote] I agree that Destiny shouldn't have the insanely in-depth trait customization that is common in MMOs or RPGs, but some variation of it will definitely be there. There's too many things that Bungie has said which validate the use of the (very common) term 'build'. Bungie has already avoided using MMO, if they didn't think that 'build' was the proper term, they wouldn't have used it.

Those are alts.

With how Bungie like to streamline elements, I highly doubt we will have both Alts [i]AND[/i] Builds. That borders on too RPG-ish. It's a redundant feature that goes against Pillar 7.