Build Template Discussion and (My Personal) Possible Fixes

A few points that will make this clearer because I know there’s still some confusion on what is what. So when I refer to these things in the post, this is what I mean.

Build Templates: These are the Templates that store your traits and skills. These are unique to your character.

Build Template Storage/Bank: These also store traits and skills, but are shared across and can be accessed by all your characters.

Gear Templates: These store your selected Armor, Weapons, Trinkets, Runes, and Sigils.

So I’ll start off by saying I am NOT a Chrono/Guardian player that has 20+ different builds for different scenarios. My main is Thief, which probably has the most simplified build and gear loadout possibly. The two main raid builds for their use the exact same gear, just different weapons. Basically I don’t need a ton of gear templates.

That being said, I DO NOT believe that 6 Gear Templates is anywhere near enough. The cap on Build Templates (and even the fact that they’re monetizing them) really does not matter, given that you also have the Build Template “Bank” AND you can store Builds off game by simply copying the code into a Google Doc, or using a personal Guild and copying the codes into the Message of the Day. Does it make sense they are monetizing Build Templates? No not at all. The reason they cited for monetizing Gear Templates actually kinda makes sense, considering that it does cut down on inventory space.

So here’s my personal solutions to this whole thing:

1) Either don’t monetize Build Templates since they’re not actually reducing Inventory Space/Or we can just ignore that it’s monetized and use the above work around to not have to buy tabs

2) Go ahead and monetize Gear Templates. The reasoning makes sense and I have no issue with that.

3) Give all characters at least 3 Gear Templates baseline to match up with Build Templates (I understand the psychology behind not having them line up, but let’s not be slimy)

4) Make purchasing additional tabs ACCOUNT WIDE purchases. This is a pretty big one. I am pretty confident that a large portion of the community has never and will never invest in additional bag slots simply because they are character bound. If they were account bound, I would have maxed them out a long time ago and I know a lot of other people would agree with me. I honestly believe they’re losing money by not making bag slot account bound, but that’s another issue.

5) Make some sort of separate Tab for Legendary Gear. In this new system, the value of Legendary Gear is actually being decreased. If they implement some sort of “Legendary Gear Tab” that can be used for separate builds and does not cut into the Gear Tabs, this would greatly satisfy people who have made the huge investment into a full set of Legendary Armor, weapons, trinkets, runes, and sigils.

6) Increase the cap. It doesn’t have to be infinite, but why does it have to be 6. Even if you ONLY play PvE, 6 is not a lot of tabs. You can have 1 or 2 builds for open world, 1-3 builds for Fractals, 2-4 builds for raids, and maybe a meta farming specific build. That’s already at or above 6 tabs. And if you play WvW, I guess you’re screwed. The cap absolutely needs to be way higher than 6.

If they were to implement these things and it meant the feature got delayed maybe another month or so, I think that we would not have this dumpster fire that we currently have. However I also know that a large number of “players” will literally be mad no matter what Arenanet does, but I’m talking about the majority of levelheaded, civil players. Please feel free to discuss what you think of these suggestions and what yours might be, but do not just turn this into an “Arenanet sucks. Games dead.” circlejerk of a comment section. ?

The other solution is to simply continue to allow ArcDPS Templates so those who want to use a 3rd party addon can do so. I am sure there will be plenty of people who still buy tabs in game. However I simply do not see this happening at all.