Constructive Feedback concerning the upcoming native Templates

[Nick.5276]

I forgot to thank Asum for the original post which is clear, concise and excellently addresses the issues and concerns. I am sure it is appreciated by everyone who has replied and those who have taken the time to read it

[IridRadiant.1027]

@ruikarikun.9402 said:As I understand each character will have 3 slots? And other you can buy? If so it's enough I think.

I play casually, primarily on a main character (at least 98% of the time on her), primarily pve, and I'll fill the free slots on my main on minute 1. I really hope they prioritize making more available as you consider that there are multiple main parts to this game: pve and wvw - with sub-parts (fractals, raids; roamer, zerg) - and people may have different equipment builds for power dps, condi dps, and support for EACH. I'm leaving out pvp as it uses a slightly different system. So, that's 12 builds, assuming you only have 1 preferred setup for each and you don't include separate setups for prioritizing control skills. I feel like 10 would have been a better starting point for trait and skill templates with options for at least a score more in the gem store.

Since the equipment part is bag space, in essence, then I feel they should sell it as a bag space and let us fill in the bag size - something we can work on in-game to upgrade it. While I appreciate the hard work they put in to make this function in the first place, templating the equipment should have been separate from its storage - let the equipment templates all point to one equipment storage bag, if necessary. That would have helped maintain legendary equipment's value as a space saver; I don't have legendary armor or trinkets myself, but I understand the complaints. With this idea, they only need to give away 1 bag space to start and have a bunch more available in the gem store, while matching the number of available equipment templates to the trait and skill ones.

I still prefer Final Fantasy XIV's bag-size space per inventory slot, but it is unwieldy to ensure your template has all the equipment present, and I'm not sure how that would work with GW2's legendaries. I am glad Anet came up with their own template system, but I agree with many that the number available - even to purchase! - is too small for how broad this game is.

[Teratus.2859]

@"Asum.4960" said:Character Build Loadouts:

1. The limitation of just 3+3 Loadouts.Especially for players who enjoy all gamemodes on a single character, but even just simply Raiders, will hit the limit of 6 in an instant and be wishing for more.The absolute minimum for these needs to be 9, but preferably 12, if not or more.Six builds is not even enough to cover just the Raid and Fractal builds of a hardcore player, let alone additionally multiple PvP and/or WvW (such as for zerging and roaming) builds, or even simply some fun open world build(s) on top of that.6 Loadouts are overly restrictive and will severely cripple the usefulness of the Feature for especially hardcore players, or any player engaged in multiple gamemodes.Additionally, the current design of automatically assigning a build, free of charge, to a player when swapping between PvE, PvP and WvW is brilliant design, as it both makes for a fluent transition between the gamemodes, as well as encouraging players to get into different modes rather than to punish them for it.In the future, with this new system design and it's limitations, players, being free to allocate the 3 builds to any game mode, will face the decision to let's say either scrap one of their frequently used very PvE builds to try out PvP, or to simply stay away from it, and therefor by design will make transitioning between gamemodes and multigamemode play less frequent, and players may feel like they are getting punished for engaging in a multitude of content. Extending this system could alleviate that issue somewhat, in combination with point 3, concerning monetization.

6 free loadouts (I assume you're referring to the account based storage ones) isn't all that bad to be honest.Depending on the pricing for additional ones it could be very fair providing there isn't a low cap like 12 per account..If you really insist on having so many builds on a single character then I don't see a problem with buying 3+ additional account slots so you can store them.With gold to gem conversion you won't even have to pay money if you choose not to so I don't think it's as big a problem as people make it out to be.The bigger problem i'd like to know is whether equipment/build template capacity upgrades.. the per character ones will be like bag slot expansions, per character rather than increasing the capacity for every character on your account.. I expect this to be the case personally and if it is then I am defintely not wasting my gems on them.Account upgrades only for me.

As for the 3 default templates and 2 equipment slots per character.. there are sufficient imo unless you aim to have a single character with many builds in many game modes.You can buy more slots for your builds and equipment if that's the case however I would strongly advise taking a page out of Gw1's book and having a few specific characters defined for PvP and WvW instead.With each character getting 3 builds slots and 2 equipment slots for free it's likely be significantly cheaper to buy additional character slots than it would be to keep buying template upgrades for a single character.I'll personally be doing this should I decide to get more into WvW and PvP going forward.

2. Them just being Loadouts rather than Templates.I really don't know what the rational behind this decision was, but the Character Loadouts need a save and load functionality, rather than automatically saving any changes made to the character.In so many instances in the game we are encouraged to change out little things, like swapping a Trait or two, taking a situational Utility skill etc., that constantly having to remember to swap everything back to the base/general build kind of defeats some of the purpose to have these "Templates" in the first place, which should act as a constant baseline to reload, so you can be sure your build is in order at a moments notice without having to double check everything, to then make adjustments from there for the specific content at hand if needed.

I believe that's how the account based builds will work.. like a save and load function but not the 3 equipped ones.Unlike Gw1 which did work that way I think these saved builds will be stored on a server rather than your PC like how Gw1 did it.That's one reason we'll have to buy upgrades rather than the whole thing being free like in Gw1, but unlike Gw1 we have the security of never loosing our builds should something go wrong with our Pc and we'll always have access to our saved builds regardless of where or from what machine we access our account.Least that's how i'm sure this is all going to work.

3. The monetization.Obviously we didn't get any concrete information about this, but what was mentioned on stream for all of these slots was Bank/Inventory Slot level pricing for the various slots.~400 Gems+ for a single Loadout Slot, per character, is simply way to much.From the perspective of a hardcore players that is an obscene amount of money, even more so when considering possible future extension to the system like the before mentioned need for more Slots. Having to buy these for ~5€ per slot per character, if that is indeed the planned pricing, is actually quite outrageous and will defeat the usability of the system for anything but high rollers when considering having to unlock all these slots for just one character of the 9 professions.A simple feature such a swapping between Trait and Utility presets shouldn't, at least in my opinion, run a player in the possibly hundreds of Euros.In general though, price aside, and this goes for all these slots, I would much rather see them as account unlocks, rather than having to buy them on a per character basis.I personally feel like 400 Gems for a pack 3 Build Loadout Slots as Account unlock is much more reasonable, but that is obviously highly subjective.I do think though that anything more than that will not only harm the usefulness of the system, but also be extremely punishing for hardcore players and those engaged in multiple gamemodes, having a greater need for build variety.

I agree, I personally have a gripe against anything that's classified as an "account" upgrade that only actually upgrades a single character..This is why I have maxed out my bank tabs and the only bag expansion I have was either free or part of a collection thing I bought.. can't remember which but the singular bag expansion upgrades I avoid them entirely.I will likely end up buying the account build storage upgrades at some point depending on their price, but I will not be buying the equipment or character specific template slots at all.. I would rather spend 800 gems on another character slot and get 3 build + 2 equipment templates with it.I strongly advise others save themselves money and do this as well.. but it's their money to spend it they don't feel the same way.

Account wide Templates:

2. The limitation.24 Builds for an entire account is entirely too limited by multiple magnitudes. This needs to be 100+, saved locally if needed.

That a confirmed cap?.. yeah a bit lower than I expected.More reason then to substitute for Character slots as I mentioned before and define a few character for specific game modes.Atm this appears to be the best and cheapest solution imo until future upgrades can be made to this system.

[Obtena.7952]

@Taygus.4571 said:I'm just gonna wait for ....a certain person ... to come in and say all this is fine.

@Dawdler.8521 said:The most constructive feedback we can give is when it has released and we've actually tried it. Anything else is more conjecture, less constructive.

We have seen a pretty complete demonstration on the stream to have a pretty good idea of how gear and trait loadouts will work..

Someone already did ... I bolded the most relevant part of your post. There really isn't anything to add. OP would have been smart to wait until he actually tried the system out before making a wall of speculative text.

[Taygus.4571]

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Taygus.4571 said:I'm just gonna wait for ....a certain person ... to come in and say all this is fine.

@Dawdler.8521 said:

The most constructive feedback we can give is when it has released and we've actually tried it. Anything else is more conjecture, less constructive.

We have seen a pretty complete demonstration on the stream to have a pretty good idea of how gear and trait loadouts will work..

Someone already did ... I bolded the most relevant part of your post. There really isn't anything to add. OP would have been smart to wait until he actually tried the system out before making a wall of speculative text.

knew you couldn't resist :smile:

[Ototo.3214]

Just wanted to say thank you for articulating your concerns and criticisms in a way that's actually constructive, instead of just whining about a certain other 3rd party addon.

For me, the templates will automatically be a QoL improvement because I never used said addon and something is better than nothing in my case. However, I can see why some players may have issues with the way the templates will work.

If I were to just throw my 2 cents out there, I'm also in the boat of thinking the account-wide storage part of the system should be free and basically unlimited. If they really are just chat codes I don't see why they should be monetized. But, if it was unlimited it would fix many of the problems some players have by having numerous builds since you could just save all of your builds to that storage system, then load them in at any time. The cap of 6 on the per character build templates would then just be a limit on how many you can freely swap between with keybinds in an instant and you could use it for your like...most frequently used builds. But then you can still have them saved in storage so it's not lost if you mess around with traits and stuff before wanting to switch back, or if you want to switch to a more niche build in your storage that wasn't one of you top 6. It's right there, saved.

But, we'll see what Anet does.

[dodgerrule.8739]

Have the option to save builds locally and import them into the game or export to change out build slots per account