Attribute

Attributes are the cornerstone of your character's development. Their value indicate, among others, how powerful a character's skill of the respective attribute are. Every profession has 4 or 5 attributes, and one of them always is the primary attribute of this Profession. The primary Attribute of a Profession is only available if the respective Profession is also the character's primary Profession. For example, an Elementalist's primary attribute is Energy Storage, and a Mesmer's is Fast Casting. An Elementalist/Mesmer only has access to Energy Storage as his primary Attribute, while a Mesmer/Elementalist only has Fast Casting.

For each level you attain, you are given a set number of attribute points to allocate to the given attributes of your profession(s). Most of your professions' skills are linked to these attributes. All of those Linked Skills' effects, or more exactly their increase from a certain base value, are directly proportional to their Linked Attribute's level.

Attributes provide a passive benefit, an active benefit, or both. A Warrior, for example, has an attribute called Axe Mastery. It has the active benefit of increasing the effects of its linked skills, as well as providing the passive benefit of higher damage and higher critical hit ratio when using an Axe weapon. Some attributes currently provide only a passive benefit. The primary attribute Soul Reaping, for example, increases a Necromancer's Energy by a certain amount each time an opponent, ally, or undead minion dies in battle nearby. It currently has no skills linked to it, thus providing no active bonus. Finally, Fire Magic gives only active bonus because it increases the effects of all skills linked to it, and does nothing beyond that.

All Linked Skills have an effect directly proportional to their Linked Attribute's level. This means that the increase in a certain effect of a skill, for example damage, can always be described as a certain constant number, multiplied with the linked attribute's level. For example, Flare deals 16 Fire Damage at a Fire Magic value of 0. For every level of Fire Magic, its damage increases by 2. Thus, Flare's effect increase is proportional to Fire Magic's level.

However, as shown in the table below, raising an attribute becomes over-proportionately more expensive with growing attribute level, in terms of Attribute Points. For example, if these costs were directly proportionate as the effect increase is, then the total cost of an attribute level of 6 would be twice the costs of level 3; the cost factor, however, is 3.5 instead of 2. Thus it can be argued that a level 6 attribute is overpriced by a factor of 1.75 when compared to level 3.

Likewise, the cost factor from level 4 to level 12 is not 3 but 9.7, which makes a level 12 attribute overpriced by a factor of about 3.2 compared to level 4. If one calculates all of these "Overprice factors" for an attribute level and its corresponding (for example) double level (i.e. 1 and 2, 2 and 4, 3 and 6, etc.), one can clearly see that even this disproportionate increase in costs itself steadily increases.

The maximum base level an attribute can be raised to is 12, but the final level can be modified by various methods:
 * The most common of those methods is using a Rune of the corresponding type, which give a character an attribute bonus of up to +3. Note that positive Rune effects of the same type do not stack, so having a Rune of Minor Fire Magic and a Rune of Superior Fire Magic equipped at the same time still gives +3 instead of the expected +4, because only the highest positive effect counts.
 * The second-most common method is wearing crafted Head Armor, which can give a +1 bonus to one attribute.
 * The third method is using a Weapon that has the ability to give a +1 bonus to an Attribute when the player uses a skill that is linked to this attribute. This ability is always chance-dependant and has a low chance of success (less than 15%), which seems to make it the least valuable of all possibilities, because it replaces a potentially more powerful weapon ability.
 * The fourth and currently final method to increase an attribute is only available to Necromancers and Elementalists. Necromancers have the spell Awaken the Blood, which gives them +2 Blood Magic and +2 Curses for a certain time span. Elementalists have the Glyph of Elemental Power, which boosts all elemental attributes (Air Magic, Earth Magic, Fire Magic, Water Magic) by +2 for the next spell.

Many players prefer to specialise in 2 or 3 attributes to make most effective use of points, since only 200 points can be gained by the time you reach the level limit, 20. For example, a monk dedicated to healing might decide to have 12 points on both Healing Prayers and Divine Favor, making as much use as possible out of the healing attributes that a monk posesses. This would cost 194 points in total, but allow basic healing spells to be considerably more effective; with Healing Prayers and Divine Favor both at 12 Orison of Healing will heal for 96 Health (60 thanks to Healing Prayers, and Divine Favor adds 3.2 health for every level) compared to a mere 20 Health with those attributes set to 0.

However, because of the quickly diminishing returns of higher attribute levels, it is a viable strategy to diversify into 4 or more attributes, if a build required doing so.

Attribute Refund Points
Every player has at any time a maximum of 24 Refund points. By spending 1 Refund Point, a player can, even in Explorable Areas, Missions and Arenas, lower one of his attributes by 1 base level. The Attribute points spent to gain this level will be fully refunded and can immediately be spent on any attribute. This feature is very useful for re-skilling a character, i.e. re-distributing its attribute points to better suit a new strategy.

For each 250 experience points you gain, you also gain 1 refund point, if the character has less than his maximum Rrefund points. Also, every time a character's experience bar is filled to the maximum, all Refund points will be regained, regardless of the normally required XP.