We don't need build templates, we need equipment tabs

Build templates will never work well with equipment. They're only useful for traits and slot skills. The GW1 approach is not the solution to our problems.

We need equipment tabs.

There's two important panels regarding your character's combat setup: The equipment panel, and the build panel. In the equipment panel, you equip armor, weapons, and trinkets, with their own runes, infusions, etc. In the build panel, you select traits and slot skills.

Build templates would only work with the build panel. They can't work properly with the equipment panel. Yeah, if you stretch it out you could have the system look across your inventory for pieces that match the build and whatever, but that's a programming nightmare.

So, what are these "equipment tabs" about?

Multiple equipment+build windows you can switch between easily.

So now, instead of carrying your second armor in the inventory, you would have it equipped, with its own traits and slot skills, in a secondary equipment+build tab. You want to switch from your condi ranger build to your healer druid build? Get out of combat, and click a button. You wouldn't need to adjust traits and change equipment piece by piece anymore, because you would have everything saved on its own secondary tab already.

This system shouldn't be hard to implement. We already had something similar to it with the old PvP equipment system, before amulets were introduced.

Gem Store bag slot sales shouldn't be affected by this too much, since most veterans already bought them long ago. And even then, this new system would be very easy to monetize. Give every character 1 or 2 secondary tabs, and then let players buy more in the gem store. Easy money!

Build templates through chat codes can still get implemented to share traits easily, but they wouldn't be as necessary, since you could save your different setups and not lose them after switching to other builds, and let's face it, this isn't a game where you're theorycrafting builds all the time, like GW1.

Weapons can get their own extended independent version of this as well, so when you switch weapons you don't need to manage your inventory all the time, specially elementalists and engineers. Legendary equipment can be adapted to save the selected stat and rune depending on the build you want to use, too.

I think this is the best possible solution for the build wars problems.

Well... Diablo III Templates work perfectly with Skills, skill runes and equipment (without having to equip the gear in a secondary tab). So why wouldn't build templates in GW2 work well with equipment ? Also, remember that we could set up equipment templates in GW1 (for PvP-only characters only, though but still...)

Another remark is that being able to equip different sets of armour on your character without carrying them in you bag removes the usefulness of having a set of legendary/stat-swapping armour.

Different people use different terms to refer to different things, and not everyone is making this clear.

In general when people ask for "templates" they want something to switch gear and/or skills faster. But when we get into the specifics, all Underworld break loose. For some people "template" refers just to saving skills and traits. For others "template" refers to a loadout to quickly switch an entire preset of gear. For others the loadout includes both gear and build. For others "template" is what you can see in GW1 and PvXWiki, that you can share in chat as chat codes and save in your disk as .txt files to better share builds and explain to friends and party members what builds they could use.

For me, "template" refers to the ones you can share with other players and that you can view and attempt to load even if you do not have all the parts of that template. So you can have an idea of how the build is composed. A player joins your party, you want them to equip a build, you give them the template, and they can load it to set that build.

"Loadout" for me would be your current getup saved "as-is" both gear and build. So you can go back to the getup stored in a loadout as long as you still have the gear used in it in your inventory, or the loadout slot itself stores the gear so it won'y use up inventory space. For those it would make sense to have 2-4 slots, or at least starting with 2 and being able to buy more in the gemstore, and maybe earn one by playing the game. For example, defeating Zhaitan could get you the second loadout slot, don't play story? Spend WvW currency to get the slot.

But having what I mean with "loadouts" doesn't mean you no longer need what I mean with "templates". In act, I think the ideal case would be having an all-ecompasing rework for the future including all of these features. A complete series of additions that are becoming more and more necessary the more stat sets and upgrades are being added to the game. Do not forget GW2 is not a 'loot grind' game. Games based on loot grind are limited to loadouts because it would be simply impossible to store all possible variations of gear as unlocks. But GW2's gear is strictly modular with strictly standard attribute combinations. A level 80 exotic berserker helmet is functionally indistinct to any other level 80 exotic berserker helmet. Which means if you want a system that can apply the "berserker" insignia in your armor, you only need to save one value for the berserker insignia followed by the values of which armor slots will have that insignia. You don't need to save any specific item info, and so we can really have templates.

The ideal all-encompassing solution would allow progression towards getting access to all stats and upgrades without being forced to get legendary gear and without making you store all possible stats and upgrades in your banks and inventories:

• Build templates to share and load builds from disk. A way to give someone who just joined your party a build they can try and load. You could link them in party, squad and guild chat (and team chat in PvP), you could save them and share them freely, you could put the chat links in sites like metabattle, and they would be saved locally as txt files, so there would be no limit on how many you can have. Basically how GW1's templates were, but having gear, traits and skills in one instead having skills and attributes in one kind of template and gear in another available only in pvp.
• Stat and upgrade unlocking. You can't seriously expect everyone to have legendary gear and carry every single upgrade in the game, or a BL vendor and buy new ones at any time, or use the mystic forge recipe to switch the stats in your ascended gear. That'll be insane. And you can't go "well, then just don't do it" because then people stick with the 2-3 most meta stat sets and all the rest are forgotten and unused, because switching to them to try them or getting a full set of gear for each one is just out of the question, and not everyone can get complete legendary gear sets, all that content that may as well go down the drain, nobody touches it. Having all possible gear in any character at any time is just impossible. So what if a friend gives you a template to quickly load it? How can you be prepared beforehand to load that without having infinite inventory space? There's only one reasonable answer to that, and that's unlocks. Like spending time beforehand 'unlocking' the stats and upgrades, then having each character spend some of all those unused hero points and a single additional upgrades/insignia/inscription to 'train' access to those unlocked stats and upgrades, then paying a reasonable fee to have the stats in your gear changed.
  • A proper unlocking system would have to meet certain requirements: It has to be available to all and it can't be prohibitively expensive (that's the niche of legendary gear, skip all the unlocking to get access to everything with a huge cost). It can't be "unlock and forget" it must keep taking items from the economy. It has to use as many existing assets and systems as possible, like the list of items to the left used in the wardrobe for minis and gliders and outfits, and the icons for insignias and inscriptions from crafting.
  • Look at all worthless upgrades in the trading post. If they were made salvageable into 3 new materials for each upgrade rarity, and part of the cost to unlocking an switching upgrades was stacks of the materials obtained by salvaging them, upgrades would be no longer something that feels like junk, but something you keep salvaging and taking out of the market to keep unlocking and switching upgrades.
  • Something similar can be done with exotic and ascended gear. Dark matter and dark energy are only obtained from salvaging that gear. Look at all these cheap exotic armors that keep losing value. Unlike exotic weapons, there's no precursors or anything that valauble as mystic forge results for exotic armors, and so many of them are getting under 50 silver. But require dark energy as part of the materials required to unlock stat, and make dark energy salvageable and that material used to pay for switching gear, and there you go, to keep switching those exotics have to keep being consumed.
  • Of course legendary gear is legendary for a reason, so if you have it would ignore the unlock progress, character training and costs to switch because you already paid a lot for it beforehand. So it would switch for free to any old and new stat combinations like it does now, keeping it legendary and still worth making. But those without legendary gear would have the alternative of unlocking and slowly progressing, and even those with legendary gear who like progress systems could unlock too, and use the system for their non-legendary gear.
  • So switching stats and upgrades in your gear would be cheaper than now, but not be extremely cheap. It should be possible to save the materials to switch as you play to have enough materials to try all your stats unlocked once in a while to look for new builds, like testing stuff at the raid golems to look for new builds once in a while and after skill balance updates. But switching before every encounter would be prohibitive, it'll force you to buy quite a lot of cheap upgrades and exotics and salvage ascended items often to keep that up.
• That's where Equipment&build loadouts come in. There would be 2-4 slots per character that store presets of gear, upgrades, traits and skills; that you can switch any with no cost as long as you are not in a 'gear locked' state like when in combat and at certain points in raid.

Now, all of these systems do not need to happen at the same time. Arguably, we need Loadouts before we'll need templates, and way before unlocks, and they could happen at different points in time. But having all 3 would definitely be better. And as the game ages and more and more stats and upgrades are added, the more we'll eventually need also templates and unlocks.

When most people say build templates, they're referring to traits, skills, and gear.

If I had a choice between gear, and Traits+utilities, I'd go for Traits+Utilities before equipment.

Yes, we do need build templates.

@Lonami.2987 said:Build templates will never work well with equipment. They're only useful for traits and slot skills. The GW1 approach is not the solution to our problems.

The GW1 approach was a problem for GW1, too -- people forget that equipment upgrades were a major part of builds, too. In addition, as Mithran said, trait+skill templates is a solution to some of the issues we deal with now.

@Lonami.2987 said:We need equipment tabs.

I would appreciate if you would phrase suggestions as suggestions, rather than a hyperbolic statement about everyone's needs or preferences. You'd like to see "equipment tabs" -- that's not the only or necessarily the best holistic approach, even though I like the idea enough that I've been proposing something like that since 2012.

@Lonami.2987 said:This system shouldn't be hard to implement. We already had something similar to it with the old PvP equipment system, before amulets were introduced.Sigh. When you say something like this, I am unable to support the post. It might or might not be difficult to implement. It might or might not be more difficult than other solutions. You know as well as anyone that the old PvP system doesn't exist today and had all sorts of issues of its own; it might actually be a distracting idea for doing this well.

@Lonami.2987 said:Build templates through chat codes can still get implemented to share traits easily, but they wouldn't be as necessary, since you could save your different setups and not lose them after switching to other builds, and let's face it, this isn't a game where you're theorycrafting builds all the time, like GW1.

Face it, you might theorycraft like you did in GW1, but tons of people do. I would experiment more often in GW2 if it weren't so annoying to swap traits & skills. I sometimes completely avoid playing mesmer because there's so much micromanagement required to do it well

@Lonami.2987 said:I think this is the best possible solution for the build wars problems.

That's a fair statement -- I wish you'd use it more rather than insisting that your idea is superior to all the others out there, if for no other reason than some of us would like to upvote your good ideas, without endorsing the opinions phrased as facts.

TBCH, I personally like the idea of an all in one templated (Skills, Traits and gear) but i do not believe it is easy to program this.So perhaps we devide them a bit?

Build template like in GW1 (Traits and skills). with chat codes and saved builds to select from in a drop down menu.

And then perhaps 2 or more Gear tabs to swap between when not in combat.

I would like to see something like this done as two separate systems: (1) Named Build Favorites; (2) Equipment locker.

Named Build Favorites would allow specifying any set of traits for any profession and giving them a name. A character could only apply those favorites when the character meets those criteria (i.e., and elementalist couldn't use a favorite that included the Tempest configuration until they unlocked Tempest, they couldn't use a favorite for an engineer, etc.).

Equipment locker would allow deposit of a set of gear into a "locker tab". Each locker tab would get a name, just like for Named Build Favorites. A character could apply the equipment from a locker tab only when the character met all the criteria for the equipment in that tab (i.e, an elementalist couldn't equip a locker tab with a warhorn in it unless they were already traited for Tempest, elementalist couldn't equip a locker tab with heavy armor in it, etc.). When equipment is placed into a locker tab and that locker tab is applied, the gear from that locker tab overrides the same gear the character is presently wearing. This effectively lets multiple characters share gear (instead of having to swap them using a bank tab). Soulbound gear could not be placed into a locker tab. The locker tab would hold items similar to the current equipment panel (except for gathering tools).

If you switch build templates that invalidate equipping a locker tab (such as removing the Tempest trait when using a locker tab with a warhorn), you'd get a warning, and if you proceed, the locker items would be unequipped.

I think these two things (or something along these lines) would allow for easy sharing of gear within an account, and make switching gear/traits much easier for situation-specific things.

OK....so maybe it's a bit half-baked....but maybe it will encourage some other ideas.. :-)