[merged] Equipment templates offer less for those that have invested into the game more - Legendary

TL;DR - Equipment templates are worse for gained item storage, convenience and fashion wars if you invested in Legendary items but you'll still pay exactly the same. If you want the same feature set as players in ascended gear, you'll need to invest in further ascended gear sets, removing a previous QoL of your legendary gear and effectively making it an ascended set with a ~2000 gold tax for different skins.

A player storing three different builds and using legendary items gains no skin swapping feature for every legendary used and gains less item storage spaces for every legendary used.

As a solution, at the minimum legendary armor should be able to store different skins per template at no additional cost beyond setting the skins.

The boring work stuff out bit. Oh no. :#

I'll be discussing two fictional players and their characters. I'll also be omitting legendaries that aren't armor. If you include them, and they are shared across sets (such as The Ascension or other legendary trinkets) then the value of equipment templates for a legendary-using player worsens further. To avoid complications, builds will be presumed to use 2 x MH/OH items and underwater gear won't be considered. The main point is to show the disparity in what is gained from equipment templates for players in ascended gear compared with those in legendary gear.

Player A bought into the solution of legendary armour. They have three builds - power, condition and support. All use the same armor but load out to different runes, infusions, weapons and trinkets. They purchase enough equipment templates to have three to use for this character. Player B doesn't have legendary armor. They have three builds - power, condition and support. All use different ascended items. Runes and infusions are not swapped. They purchase enough equipment templates to have three to use for this character.

When player A comes to set up their equipment load outs they use their legendary armor over all three sets. They have one set of weapons (4 items) and one set of trinkets (6 items) in each of the stored templates. Since one template is being worn, this means that their total storage gained is 10 items per template not in use. Player A, who invested in the legendary armor, gains 20 item storage slots from three build templates.

When player B uses their ascended items, they wear one entire set with the template being used and in each other template store armor (6 items), weapons (4 items), trinkets (6 items). Since one template is being worn, they gain 16 items per template not in use. Player B, who hasn't bothered with legendary armor, gains 32 item storage slots from three build templates.

Finally, we've seen from the Icebrood Saga announcement that equipment templates will also allow for swapping of skins. Since these haven't been announced to be tied to a template, they can likely be presumed to be tied to the gear in the template. In this scenario, player A does not gain any skin swapping fashion ability. Meanwhile, player B can store three hot-swappable fashion looks. This is a distinct loss of functionality for players that have invested in legendary armor yet they still pay the same to purchase the build templates!

This is a major disadvantage to players that have invested in the game and purchased legendary armor. Either these players will need to be happy with their gems (and therefore potentially real world currency) buying them less features (item storage space and fashion convenience) than people with ascended armor or they will need to invest in multiple ascended sets, completely removing major selling points of legendary armor.

The boring work stuff out bit has now ended. Yay. :3

I personally think Arenanet have dug themselves into a really awkward hole here. There is no situation in which players with legendary items are not getting a worse deal - they either need to miss out on features, yet pay the same, or invest in ascended sets anyway! The situation also becomes worse the more you have invested into Arenanet's legendary system (you relatively gain less inventory storage space) and with the more build templates you buy and use those legendary items in as you miss out on more possible inventory space savings and more fashion templates. I don't think people should be penalised for being dedicated enough to make legendaries and also wanting to spend to have multiple equipment templates.

As a stop gap solution I would suggest allowing legendaries to have different skins when used in different build templates. This should be at the cost of no additional transmutation charges beyond initially applying those skins to the build template. Doing so would provide some parity between the fashion abilities of build templates for those in legendary armor and ascended armor.

Hopefully Arenanet realises how poor their current implementation appears to be from the perspective of players that have committed to their previous solutions.

[04/10] Updated in response to feedback from another source.

Why would you have to invest in ascended gear set?

If you watch the anet guild chat video you would see that you can have 2 equipment panels with the same legendary items copied but with diffrent stats so one berserker set and 1 viper set diffrent runes/sigils in armor and weapons.

The same legendary axe on ranger could be berserker on power soulbeast and harrier on your druid specs.

Seems to me your only seeing the downside of not being able to use diffrent skins without the counter balance that you can have any type of stat over up to 6 equipment panels without an additional cost

EditAfter reading abit more, how is this any diffrent then now?

If you got legendary armor if you switch stats on it its still the same skins.So no change at all to now when people with more ascended sets can have diffrent fasion on their armor/weapon pieces.

Edit 2Since the legendary gear is a copy how do you think the game engine should see a diffrent in skins on equipment panel 1 and 2?And to add to this should ascended people get the ability to forego the skin sharing in favor of being able to get multiple copies of ascended so 1 set of ascended can act as any type of ascended over all their equipment panels aswell?

Another thing is - I was always sad about ONE thing with legendary armor -> I had to have the same look on every build. And obviously tank healer assasin-like should look completely different. That was a big downside for a legendary BUT I decided it's still worth it, as I am saving ~60 inventory space on my character.

Now, people with ascended gear gain the advantage (inventory slots) without the disadvantage I still have to deal with. They can just simply transmute different ascended armor into cool different looks for each playstyle and I have to transmute every time after changing build?That's really annoying if that;s the case, cause this means I'll never use any of my legendary again.

@Linken.6345 said:Why would you have to invest in ascended gear set?

If you watch the anet guild chat video you would see that you can have 2 equipment panels with the same legendary items copied but with diffrent stats so one berserker set and 1 viper set diffrent runes/sigils in armor and weapons.

The same legendary axe on ranger could be berserker on power soulbeast and harrier on your druid specs.

Seems to me your only seeing the downside of not being able to use diffrent skins without the counter balance that you can have any type of stat over up to 6 equipment panels without an additional cost

EditAfter reading abit more, how is this any diffrent then now?For legendary gear, it's the same. It's ascended gear that gains here.Notice, that it was always cheaper to get a large number of ascended gear sets than one legendary. This was balanced due to inventory problems attached to having to lug several sets of gear.With the template system, if you use only a few stat sets, that negative side to opting for cheaper option disappears completely.The only situation where legendary armor remains better is if you use more than 6 different sets of stats in any slot. And that's only because that amount of different stat sets is something that goes beyond gear template system's ability to handle.

(edit: nvm about the dyes, looked at the stream again, an they were just very chaotic about explaining how that works. I can understand how the person that pointed that out to me might have completely misunderstood it)

@Astralporing.1957 said:Notice though, that the second consideration (skin changing) OP brought up doesn;t really apply. Why? because in the stream they revealed that all the 6 gear loadouts use the same color channel selection. Which means that the option to switch skins exists only in extremely crippled form.(that's by the way, something i am hugely disappointed with).

No, it still applies - as a player with legendary armor, I don't even gain that functionality unless I then invest in multiple ascended sets. So what advantage does the gold, time and effort that I sunk into legendary gear get me in that case aside from less benefit from the money I will spend on equipment templates?

@"Linken.6345" said:Since the legendary gear is a copy how do you think the game engine should see a diffrent in skins on equipment panel 1 and 2?

I don't know. Thankfully, as a player and customer, that isn't my issue. I'm not the one that is paid to work these things out. On the other hand, I am the one getting less for my money because I invested in the game previously. That isn't a particularly enjoyable situation! At the minimum, I would expect at least parity however I've already explained that my purchase provides me with a smaller gain of inventory space and no fashion functionality.

I have the gems saved up, so I'll be getting my slots. It is a pretty sucky situation as a consumer and supporter of the game though.

And to add to this should ascended people get the ability to forego the skin sharing in favor of being able to get multiple copies of ascended so 1 set of ascended can act as any type of ascended over all their equipment panels aswell?

You mean, make legendary armor and ascended armor completely equal with the former only having a skin difference? In that case, you are suggesting penalising players that have invested into legendary gear more.

@"Miatela.5047" said:So what advantage does the gold, time and effort that I sunk into legendary gear get me in that case aside from less benefit from the money I will spend on equipment templates?None whatsoever. Expecially if it's the WvW/PvP legendary, that doesn't even have its own skin.

By the way: are you sure you want to support this kind of cheap monetization and flawed system? Buying those slots you will be sending a message you're okay with it.

What about those players prefering to use ascended but who have invested more into the game than those who purchased legendaries?

I think we all may be overreacting... Just saying... We all know it's hard to please everyone, and people "against" are usually more vocal, but I feel there's a bit of exaggeration... I'll wait and see...

You get to use legendary armor / backpiece/trinkets for any number of equipment templates , making it no different than using the gear stat selection panel. Legendary weapons aren't as useful due to the nature of weapon skills: most weapons are either power or condi.

Legendary armor doesn't mean you invested more in the game because unless you spent gems to buy gold it has nothing to do with the gemstore. It just means you spent more time in a game mode the vast majority of the playerbase doesn't do, whether it is raids or WvW or PvP.

@Ashen.2907 said:What about those players prefering to use ascended but who have invested more into the game than those who purchased legendaries?You'd need to invest really a lot into ascended gear to exceed the cost of legendaries for the same slots.

Might just be a minor point, but legendary gear still has the advantage of being able to freely switch stats should you want to change your build from what you already have. You can do that with ascended too, but it involves the mystic toilet and losing upgrades; technically you could have stat swapped ascended gear sets a ton before it would have the same cost as the legendary piece.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't make legendary gear thinking it's some kind of awesome investment that will save me money in the long run. I accept it's more of a gold sink for aesthetic. I agree it's a bit of a shame that the PvP and WvW armors don't get a unique skin but...I've always thought that was a shame since I primarily make legends for the skins. Regardless, I'm still happy I'll be able to switch builds more easily than slowly right click > customizing everything. Though I also wouldn't mind legendary items having some kind of free switch with the skin between tabs to allow for different outfits on the fly, I'll agree that's fair considering legendaries don't have that luxury compared to multiple other gear sets with different skins that soon won't take up more inventory space.

Edit: Though, now that I'm thinking about it again, I swear they mentioned something about potentially adding I guess...outfit templates? or something? during the Guild Chat. They just weren't really sure how that would work with transmutation charges since it could potentially shake up the system. Maybe make that a perk for legendaries, Anet? :^)

I got the impression from the Guild Chat of "we plan to add a lot more stuff to templates, but we've finally got them working at a baseline level and want to get them out there after working on it for nearly 2 years."

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Miatela.5047" said:So what advantage does the gold, time and effort that I sunk into legendary gear get me in that case aside from less benefit from the money I will spend on equipment templates?None whatsoever. Expecially if it's the WvW/PvP legendary, that doesn't even have its own skin.

Buying those slots is somewhat essential for me if I want to continue playing the builds I do in PvE. Thankfully, I'm only converting gold to gems to purchase them.

@"Infusion.7149" said:Legendary armor doesn't mean you invested more in the game because unless you spent gems to buy gold it has nothing to do with the gemstore. It just means you spent more time in a game mode the vast majority of the playerbase doesn't do, whether it is raids or WvW or PvP.

"Invest" has multiple meanings, not just making a purchase. You could replace the word here with less useful alternatives relating to dedication or commitment if the meaning is unclear to you.

You get to use legendary armor / backpiece/trinkets for any number of equipment templates , making it no different than using the gear stat selection panel.

Only it is different in functionality, as I pointed out in my post.

i'm working on my third set of legendary armor (15/18). Let's say I create a build for necro with light legendary armor, then I load my mesmer. Is my light legendary armor not available? It would be great if there was an account bound equipment pool, but from what I've read it seems like equipment (even legendary) becomes "temporarily soulbound" while in a templete for another character.

@"dave.8237" said:i'm working on my third set of legendary armor (15/18). Let's say I create a build for necro with light legendary armor, then I load my mesmer. Is my light legendary armor not available? It would be great if there was an account bound equipment pool, but from what I've read it seems like equipment (even legendary) becomes "temporarily soulbound" while in a templete for another character.

You are correct the legendaties only work on the character its equiped on, you can copy it to however many diffrent builds on that character tho with dif stats and runes/sigils.EditI see now why the released legendary runes before this update since nonne would use them anymore.Its cheaper to buy 6 sets of runes then to go for 1 set of legendary runes per character.

@Linken.6345 said:EditI see now why the released legendary runes before this update since nonne would use them anymore.Its cheaper to buy 6 sets of runes then to go for 1 set of legendary runes per character.

Yip - which is why I made this post. The same also applies to legendary armor and weapons. One of the main selling points of legendary points is being lost with equipment templates while players that have ascended items only gain in both features (fashion swapping) and gain more storage in the equipment templates that they can use.

However, they pay the same.

Which means people with legendary items get less despite having previously spent more on a feature that Arenanet promoted as being a solution to the lack of build templates.

I do not disagree with the bulk of your points (I don't necessarily agree either, it's a complicated new system with a lot of pros/cons that I can't assess properly until I get my hands on it) but I need something explained to me about this "losing inventory slots" thing.

As I understand it, right now people that like to build swap can either do it be reassigning stats in their legendary gear or swapping out ascended items. They can do this either by keeping a lot of these things on one character (using bag space) or moving them around between characters. Either way, they are using inventory slots for anything that isn't permanently equipped on their characters but does get used. If they don't use the items, they don't carry them around using up space.

Now we have this new system coming. And a player will either use legendary or ascended, either fully on one character or swapping between them (with possible extra clunkiness now that you need to unequip them from a template and thus need to remember to put them back, though that seems pretty much the same as it is now, you just have 3 to 6 equipment panels to monitor rather than one). If they are sticking to legendary, why does that character need all the other slots you say they are missing? Were they fashion swapping before? It could be that using all legendary gear means not getting as much out of the new system cosmetically as people with multiple sets of exotic or ascended, but slot-wise it seems to me they aren't -losing- any and probably are gaining some beyond their current usage anyway. What am I missing?

@"Donari.5237" said:I do not disagree with the bulk of your points (I don't necessarily agree either, it's a complicated new system with a lot of pros/cons that I can't assess properly until I get my hands on it) but I need something explained to me about this "losing inventory slots" thing.

As I understand it, right now people that like to build swap can either do it be reassigning stats in their legendary gear or swapping out ascended items. They can do this either by keeping a lot of these things on one character (using bag space) or moving them around between characters. Either way, they are using inventory slots for anything that isn't permanently equipped on their characters but does get used. If they don't use the items, they don't carry them around using up space.

Now we have this new system coming. And a player will either use legendary or ascended, either fully on one character or swapping between them (with possible extra clunkiness now that you need to unequip them from a template and thus need to remember to put them back, though that seems pretty much the same as it is now, you just have 3 to 6 equipment panels to monitor rather than one). If they are sticking to legendary, why does that character need all the other slots you say they are missing? Were they fashion swapping before? It could be that using all legendary gear means not getting as much out of the new system cosmetically as people with multiple sets of exotic or ascended, but slot-wise it seems to me they aren't -losing- any and probably are gaining some beyond their current usage anyway. What am I missing?

Imagine, that you found out that having to lug several sets of ascended gear in your inventory in order to be able to switch builds when needed is too inconvenient. In order to free those inventory slots for other things, you made legendary gear. With it, you didn't need to have more than one set, so you gained a lot of inventory sets compared to the ascended option. Legendary gear provided you with QoL advantage.

Now, someone with those several ascended sets will be able to buy gear storage slots, and thus gain both storage (freeing the inventory), and ability to easily change gear loadouts. Someone with legendary gear may build additional gear storage slots to gain the ability to fast swap gear loadouts, but they won't be gaining any inventory. Basically, the owner of legendary gear paid a ton of gold before in order to get something that people with multiple legendary armor sets will now get as a bonus option. So, why did they exactly buy all those legendaries, if having multiple ascended is way cheaper?

@"Miatela.5047" said:

@Linken.6345 said:EditI see now why the released legendary runes before this update since nonne would use them anymore.Its cheaper to buy 6 sets of runes then to go for 1 set of legendary runes per character.

Ascended and legendary gear should really be placed in a separate gear storage, at least the pieces with non-cultural skins that can be shared with any character of the same armor weight category.

I think they said in the video that they would be working on such additional features in the future, but I don't see how making it like this, then having to change it again, won't result in more complications than it's worth. They should have just avoided gear storage altogether and kept swapping equipment from the inventory instead.

Equipment Templates need to remember what was in their slots when you remove the pieces in them. Especially for Legendary gear.

@"Miatela.5047" said:TL;DR - Equipment templates are worse for gained item storage, convenience and fashion wars if you invested in Legendary items but you'll still pay exactly the same. If you want the same feature set as players in ascended gear, you'll need to invest in further ascended gear sets, removing a previous QoL of your legendary gear and effectively making it an ascended set with a ~2000 gold tax for different skins.

We don't actually know yet if skins change based on the loadout.

we do know dyes don't...so they really don't have skin templates.

But this isn't new. You could always have multiple sets of ascended with different skins.......

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Ashen.2907 said:What about those players prefering to use ascended but who have invested more into the game than those who purchased legendaries?You'd need to invest really a lot into ascended gear to exceed the cost of legendaries for the same slots.

7 sets of ascended armor cost the same as one legendary set of armor

So for armor, actually works out about the same, especially when you take into consideration meta changes and the cost to stat change armor.

@Taygus.4571 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Ashen.2907 said:What about those players prefering to use ascended but who have invested more into the game than those who purchased legendaries?You'd need to invest really a lot into ascended gear to exceed the cost of legendaries for the same slots.

@"Astralporing.1957" said:Now, someone with those several ascended sets will be able to buy gear storage slots, and thus gain both storage (freeing the inventory), and ability to easily change gear loadouts. Someone with legendary gear may build additional gear storage slots to gain the ability to fast swap gear loadouts, but they won't be gaining any inventory. Basically, the owner of legendary gear paid a ton of gold before in order to get something that people with multiple legendary armor sets will now get as a bonus option. So, why did they exactly buy all those legendaries, if having multiple ascended is way cheaper?Legendary gear in this game has always been optional, and it's always been several times as expensive as the equivalent gear of lesser quality levels. You still have the stat, infusion, and rune/sigil swapping free of charge as a bonus for having legendary gear instead of ascended.

Are you seriously arguing that "it's not fair because others get more out of the update than I do"? I'm sorry, but your arguments are starting to remind me of the "it's not fair new people get to play HoT when I had to pay for it years ago" crowd.