Official Feedback Thread about Build and Equipment Templates

[Hoover.6394]

My ideal template would be a top level tab system, all hero equipment, build, minis, outfits, gliders and mounts all include in the tab...

[Deaths Sensei.5317]

My few suggestions:

1. Make legendary armor/weapons shared account-wide somehow so they work well with templates. Most people (like me) probably only have the legendary items for the utility of sharing them between chars & swapping stats on the fly.
2. Remove runes/sigils/infusions from gear completely, add a new tab in hero panel for infusion/rune/sigils

[LadyHawk.5319]

So, when entering sPvP or WvW, the game uses your current build and equipment templates. Any changes you make to your gear or build is automatically updated in that template. This was a feature they mentioned in the guild chat episode about the templates. Not a big deal until you realize they removed the autoload feature for builds/equipment for the 2 competitive zones. This forces you to have a build template and an equipment template for WvW and sPvP.

This means you need (1) B-Template for WvW, (1) B-Template for sPvP, (1) B-Template for PVE. Additionally, (1) E-Template for WvW, (1) E-Template sPvP, (1) E-Template for PvE. But wait, they only gave us 2 E-Templates .....

Let's say I enter WvW with 3 PvE B-Templates and 2 PvE E-Templates. I change B-Template #3 and E-Template #2 to a WvW build. Later, I leave WvW. B-Template #3 and E-Template #2 are now that WvW build. If I want to get my PvE build back in those templates, I have to reload everything ... again ... and again ... and again.

In order to avoid having your templates overridden, you must have existing templates for WvW and sPvP. Luckily, we are able to store/load B-Templates outside of the game. I am thankful for that. Unfortunately, that does not extend to E-Templates. We are forced to still manually load each piece or manually change each piece, in the case of Legendary gear once we go beyond the 2 templates (this is assuming that you choose not to pay Anet's salary or grind gold for a year just to, a year later, get the remaining 7 Equipment + Build Templates)

So, if you play in WvW and/or sPvP, be sure to have a build and equipment templates for those zones. And yes, I understand that most have more than one build, but at least have one so that you are not constantly fixing your non-WvW build. This automatic update feature is poorly designed. I get the thought behind it, some people complain about having to click confirmations so often, but it is not a good feature in this case. And the loss of automatically loading our last played WvW and/or sPvP build is a huge QoL loss. I get that that that, in effect, was a template. But now players who play competitive and open world have less that players who only play one zone.

I recommended tweaking the auto update feature and returning the WvW and sPvP auto build/equipment loads.

[Digit.1823]

It's absolutely nice to hear that the people who didn't really need build templates are satisfied. Anet will be happy about this feedback.

I'm sure we can say the same about the people who actually did need the build templates and were the ones asking for them, let's take a look on the forums and on reddit............oh.............

[ProNativE.7854]

Please remove the build temples and last update form the game. I don't need such thing. Before it was better. You can restore my old builds for pvp, pve and wvw too.I have 20 chars how much build templates i need 20x3= 60 ? Basicly now it's pay to play game, so gg not gona sponsor that ....It's more than Mau Mau!

[Ok I Did It.2854]

I do not believe that this feedback will go anywhere or be listened to but alas, it really seems like feedback is only asked for, apparently read, then completely ignored, this is what gets people angry with patches like this.

PvP has its own system for builds, do not use any part of the new system in PvP keep it completely separate,WvW should have its own system also, and be kept completely seperate from PvE, however if you dont want that you should have added a check box somewhere that asks if the build is a WvW build so that it doesnt keep changing when you enter that game mode, i would say a lot of players wont even realize that when entering WvW they are still using PvE traits etc,

Overall i feel this update was rushed out and it does feel like a massive cash grab, why are we still using character upgrades instead of account upgrades, the templates should have had their own panel completely, you should have left the old equipment panel alone, moved everything to do with templates to a new section in the hero tab, that way if someone wanted to save a template they could go into that part and do so, as it stands, if you change a weapon for 1 boss or 1 event etc, the game now saves that as the new template, if where being honest, its a badly thought out design, and feels rushed, i feel it should not have been pushed live in its current state,

You have made it now that people are forced to use the templates, its no longer play how you want, its play how we want you to play or dont play at all, I get that i am no longer the target audience for this game, therefore I personally will not be investing any money/gems into this update at all.

[Sirius.4510]

@Excursion.9752 said:There is a lot to read here so if this has already been mentioned I apologize. Its not a major issue but it is one I have because fashion wars is real haha!

On Equipment Templates could the template save if we have selected to show/hide a piece of armor. I noticed this last night with my two templates. One i had the shoulders being hidden and the other template it is not. The way it is working now what ever you have toggled goes for both templates and is not impacted by the switch. Is this working as intended? One would think that would be unique to each template.

Agreed; I think that state is universal instead of per-template, but I would find it useful since I often have backpacks hidden for some gear sets but not others.I also have previously switched gliders to match backpacks, but... that's in a totally different tab so I could understand if that's too confusing to be tied into the system.

[LadyHawk.5319]

I would rather have paid $75 for an expansion update this year than what NCSoft or Anet expects me to pay for this QoL downgrade.

[Evrae Altana.1295]

Unlocking all gear/trait/template slots for all classes costs u 663 euros worth of gems. This comes from the same dev that allowed 550 builds saved per folder in GW1.And those first "free" slots are just your pvp and wvw build slots.

Anet just went full EA with their lowest value for the highest price. I'm uninstalling this game because I don't want to support anets shameless cashgrabs anymore with their half expansions and pushed gemstore cosmetics.

[Ashamir.9574]

I stopped investing money into GW2 after the mount skin loot box drama.

I love gw2. I've played thousands of hours of this game, but this wasn't something I could stand for morally.

When I understood how the build/gear templates work I was glad I didn't go back on that stance.

This is a downgrade. With your "free" 3 build templates I now have 6 available – which still isn't even enough to have WvW builds for all my characters anymore. Not only did I lose my existing WvW builds, but now I have no choose which of my characters is worth a WvW build.

Build templates are a standard MMO feature. A base feature should never be sold for money.

The sad thing is that I'm not even mad anymore, just sad. My favorite game is being run into the ground, it hurts to watch.

[lare.5129]

1)yes, it is fail on spvp.Will be good have separate pbp build, liek old, and it automatically change traits and util inside, but IF player want he can for that chose any from his 3(6) additional. Now I have feeling that pvp biuld space s stolen.

2) I have some bug, but I can use same ancient weapon/armor on another build? for some build I use diferent armor, but some ancient jewely +backpack. So if I understand now I have put off part of my items, press swap, and put on. So in this mode there is no big point have more than 3+ armor swaps. Or may be it is bug only for me??

3)different class is seeable , but no accessible - that target do make this ?

[Oli.4597]

It got said multiple times before already but i have the same opinion

• Gear/Build Slots are way way tooo expensive. 1 Char Slot is more worth buying than the "templates". Make them cheaper
• Legendary Gear feels really useless with the Geartemplate. I have to use an extra Gearslot if i want to use other stats on my Legendary gear. (If I dont want to change my current gear stats) That just feels wrong in every way. Ascended gear is cheaper and even better now as it doesnt waste inventory Slots anymore. One main reason someone would go for legendary gear before. Would be better to use 1 Gearslot and just "save" my diffrent gearstats e.g healing power condi. That way Legendary Gear would have something unique again as its just not usefull like it is right now
• A "save" Option would generally be nice as every Change im doing with my current build is getting saved. When i want to swap back these changes i made before are still there (but what if i made these changes only for a specific Moment and i want to swap back to my "main base build"? … I have to swap everthing back again...)
• Let PvP/WvW/PvE Builds save/load for these gamemodes like we had before, so we dont need to swap gear/build manually to our WvW Build (shouldt be much coding work as we had that one already before in a simillar way)

Atm and honest answere im more disappointed than happy about how Build/gear "templates" work. Sure the fast loading everywhere and the free inventory space is indeed a nice Thing but especially the Problem with Legendarys hit me hard combined with everything else not much more to say - disappointed :/

[Glass Hand.7306]

@sajah varel.9261 said:

@Randulf.7614 said:

@Jayden Reese.9542 said:Not home yet. So if I just don't care and do nothing will my pve/spvp/wvw builds that auto switch when entering each mode still do that or will I have to do/save a bunch of things first?

Not 100% sure, but your wvw template should assigned to one of them anyway so worst case scenario you can click on it in your hero panel or add a key bind for it

I just tested it, it doesn't auto switch for builds. You have to go in the hero panel and switch it, and then switch it back when you go back in pve. It's more tedious than before.

There really needs to be an optional auto-switch mechanism. Otherwise this implementation is going to be very annoying to players who are used to using one character in multiple game modes.

[Yasi.9065]

Having now set up all my characters except my "main" with the new "template" system actually made me rather want to fully quit again.

Theres so many limitations now. I mean, I have to swap gear pieces on my chrono for when Im tanking to get the toughness just right. How do I solve this? I have to use one of the only two free gear template slots to save my base equip in. Then use my first "template" as my old gear hero panel. So Im down to one saved template on a character I used to have 6+ geartemplates with arc.Ofc I could limit myself and "just go full tank 4head" in one template and off-chrono with 1k toughness in the other. But I dislike that immensely, Im a perfectionist and I dont need 2.3k toughness to tank in most raids.Still, I could do that, but then theres also my two condi chrono builds, my two power dps chrono builds and my two mirage builds. 8 "basic" gearsets I used to have on one mesmer. Only pve raiding. No fractals gear, no wvw gear. Those - thankfully - I already have on separate characters.

Mesmer problems, you could say. But wait... theres also my firebrand -> harrier fb, tank fb, seraph qb, viper qb, power qb, condi dps fb. Not to mention, I swap weapons on my support firebrand builds a LOT. Some fights I need axe for pulls or fury, some fights I need mace, some fights I need hammer for the extra cc, etc. I now have to carry around those weapons as extras in my inventory if I use them in another template, or I cant swap without making another template for it - which isnt possible anyway since I have already 6 geartemplates planned.

My renegade -> condi dps, harrier, diviner, tank, deimos kiter, wvw zerg, wvw roaming.

TL;DRI lost a LOT of the flexibility I had before this patch, and got at the most free inventory slots on a few characters in return. Sorry, but even ranger pet saving doesnt make up for that. Not to mention that I ofc will NOT buy extra template slots of any kind, but instead will now just annoy my raiding groups by swapping characters instead - after all, I already have 30 character slots from before arc templates existed.Anet, this was well meant, but not well done.

[DinoToss.4810]

guild wars 1 had a beautiful build template system, that was added after its launch, that was not monetized. That is one of the reasons why the game had a loyal fanbase who stuck around and played for so long.

Guild wars 2 started with many good quality of life changes. but slowly over time, the mindset of trying to find ways to sneak things into the gemstore grew and grew. Till now, where something the community has been asking for for so long,has been twisted into a pay wall that is barely recognizable to what we wanted.

Im not sure if this is pressure to keep gemstore revenue, but your gemstore wont make and goddamn money if you piss off your community and they all quit.

Templates could have brought many inactive players back to the game. instead it is chasing away those who are fed up with paying for QOL

the implementation of this system scares me. we have to pay for so much quality of life. as a long time gw1 and gw2 player, this might be the end.

[ErisianMoon.1740]

My voice will only echo all of those who posted in the 7 pages before me in this thread, the entire subreddit, and the countless threads that you closed.If this incarnation of build loadouts had been present at launch, it would have been fine. It feels like a system that exists at the launch of a game, good potential, but infancy illnesses that limit its function. Seven years down the line, however, after having them in a much better form in gw1 AND having them in a near perfect state through Delta's arc... this is a downgrade.-For me it is clunky to use. Build loadouts become templates as advertised when they possess the simple ability to save, and not overwrite automatically whenever you change one thing. Swapping however is fast and effective. Make them templates and this is good to go imo.-Gear slots. It's good that we can save gear in its own storage and effortlessly swap between them. But I personally preferred arc's way over this. If I swap from tempest to weaver or from normal DH to signet share DH I am largely using the same gear with a some changes for which this system is not very useful. Not a huge deal since swapping those by hand isn't that long, but still worth mentioning. What really isn't good is that it isn't working at all with legendary equipment, and so my mesmer with her dozen builds and legy armour is a pain to play and swap everything around.-PvE/PvP/WvW. So the 3 given loadout slots were basically the 3 presets for the 3 game modes. I myself am primarily a PvE player, so this doesn't affect me that much, but it's a bit weird that when I do enter WvW for a few dailies I have to change and then reset a build slot that I rather use to store different PvE builds.-The ability to link and share a build is good, though!Edit: I made an error in testing when it comes to my second point. It is possible to simply swap out a few pieces using the gear slots. Error on my part. However I now ran into the problem that swapping for instance between DD and DE on thief, a minor change in gear, immediately fills the 2nd slot and leaves me with no room for cDD, boon thief, etc. so I still swap those by hand which is a minor inconvenience compared to arc. This relates to slot amount and monetisation problem described below.

Like I said, it's a downgrade from arc, and I hope to see it honed and improved as per the feedback everyone has been giving you since the announcement.

And now for the real issues...3 build slots, 2 gear slots per character. Do you understand how many builds most veteran players ran around with? Even if we max it out to 6 of each, it still wouldn't be enough, even for me as a PvE player. My workaround for this is just to make some new characters I guess.

The monetisation. Yes, a company needs to make profit. Yes, this is a buy to play game that lives off the extra money it earns through mtx. It would be only reasonable to put a charge to this. But not this much... Not when it's divided into 3, triple monetised for every character. If I could pay 25-30 whatever euros to unlock the full feature for all my characters I would do so in a whim. I would also pay 800 gems to unlock a new slot on all my characters at once. But I'm not paying 3500 gems per character to fully unlock. For that price I have 4 new character slots. This kind of monetisation is predatory and aggressive, similar to what EA, Bethesda, etc are doing.I will not spend neither gold nor real money on this feature or anything from the gemstore personally as long as this exists. If anyone deserves my 50 euros it would be Delta.

I want this game to flourish and succeed. And it's heartbreaking to see everyone of my friends, guildies and people here angry and leaving. But it's very much understandable that they do. I hope you finally take the hint.

[Vavume.8065]

The amount of monetization in this update looks extremely desperate.

[c space cowboy.2764]

It would cost me 118$ to gain back, SOME, of the functionality I had before with arctemplates. I dont care about bag space as the characters i played had maxed it out, and had legendary everything.

Done. Bye.

[Tenelen.7436]

Give me an option to turn off Build Templates. I don't want them. They are more work than it was in the past manually changing gear. I have to swap between game modes, and anytime I want to Legendary weapon swap I have to fully Upgrade the weapon again.

[Just a flesh wound.3589]

After looking it over for a day, this is my opinion.

This template design is a minimalistic, barebones system with the option to buy more if you really feel like it. However it’s priced as a luxury not a need, and with the template system cut up and sold piecemeal to get the maximum money from the buyers.

imo it’s designed for players like me who play the open world, who don’t do hard content and have one build they use for everything. I consider these players (and I’m a member of this group) the ‘lowest common denominator players’. We don’t need stored builds. We never needed Arc or really needed stored build auto swap for WvW/SPvP. Designing for the lowest common denominator leaves out the players that drive the game forward by doing hard content, by researching builds, by playing in Raids, WvW and sPvP. The pricing, the original set up, should have been with them in mind, not for people like me who get the two equipment slots and 3 build slots and it’s more than I had before.

As for me, while I don’t need it I could have bought a template or two for ooc weapon swap or for cosmetic armor swap. But the pricing is too high for me to set up all my alts with even one additional equipment template and I hear that the other templates can’t have individual dye set up so that kicks that option to the curb. The whole thing seems like it was designed with an eye on selling as much as possible first and with the players in mind second.

By the way, the build storage is laughable. The 3 you get with it and the 3 you can get free this month doesn’t even cover enough for one build for 9 professions.

[mortrialus.3062]

Honestly I'm pretty satisfied with the overall functionality. There are some criticisms I have but out of the box I'm pretty satisfied now that I have a lot of things up and running.

First and foremost, obviously, every is taking issue at the cost. Maxing out build templates, equipment templates, and account build storage is too much. That's probably a double whammy of both a complete build and equipment template being probably 25-50% too expensive for a quality of life feature. But also build templates are coming now that most players on their main have anywhere between 5-15 builds just for their main across PvE, PvP and WvW, so it feels like it's frontloaded years of built up cost. Imagine if we were buying all the character, inventory, and bank slots we've purchased over 7 years all in one go. It's a massive investment. I think everyone expected it to be a bit monetized but I think someone posted that it ends up being $42 to max out a character? That's just too much.

Honestly an Equipment and Build template combo, if it has to be monetized, should not be more than 400 gems for both the equipment and build template slot on a character, similar to how expensive new inventory slots are. And rather than just one complimentary build slot, we should have gotten enough to completely max out a character for both gear and build templates, to take the sting out of having built up 10-15 builds we might want to have saved. 400 gems here for a Equipment+Build combo and there when you decided you want your alt to have an extra saved build. But many players looking at potentially $100+ dollars to unlock the gear and build templates they had previously accumulated for free with ArcDPS, front loaded all at once, is staggeringly high.

My biggest issue right now is that build templates autosave. It's not so much a template so much as it just saves whatever you were last doing. I would greatly prefer if there was a manual save+load button, because I do often find myself tweaking a build by just a utility or two, or a weapon set, and it would be nice to be able to snap things back to the default by reloading the template.

When you do have everything set up I really like the feel of it. Just a couple of clicks and I've instantly gone from Support Chrono to Condition Mirage. It's faster and snappier than Arc DPS in this regard, which would often take 15s to load all your build and I found would often get things wrong. The equipment storage alone has saved me probably 30 storage spaces permanently. Even though I have legendary armor and weapons, lugging all those weapons around and the most commonly used sigils and runes took up a lot of space.

However, I find myself really wishing I had more Equipment templates in particular. While you can go a a looooong way with just the three starter Templates and keeping the rest in storage (See HERE), I STILL feel like I'm choked on gear templates in particular. I could genuinely use more than 10+ of them. Like for my main I was able to fit Diviner's Chrono, Minstrel's Chrono, Viper's Condition Mirage, Raid DPS Chrono, Labyrinth Farm Mirage, a condition WvW build I was working on. But I couldn't fit any sort of power mesmer for WvW. I couldn't fit a boss killer Staff/Staff mirage for soloing group content. I couldn't fit a scepter boonshare chrono for when I'm doing content like Auric Basin where you're fighting structures and phantasms will never become clones because their AI is bugged on certain structures. And when I play Conquest I have a lot of gear I wear for fun to make myself look different for conquest games whenever the mood strikes me and as it is now with autosave I'd be nice to have a tab to tweak my gear between different cosmetic sets I've made without screwing up one of my actual Equipment Templates that actually matter.

I also have to say I do really dislike how we've all lost the free saved builds in WvW and SPvP. I'll always have to dedicate either a built template slot or a storage template going into SPvP and WvW, when before that was saved separately. And WvW is going to need potentially need multiple templates on it's own. I'm personally a bit saddened by that particular loss of convenience and I'll also not looking forward to setting up all my characters for their SPvP builds all over again. I really wish that your full set of SPvP and WvW build templates operated like the old system where they were saved completely separately from your PvE build. So you'd go into WvW and you could customize your six Build Template and Equipment slots completely differently than your PvE templates.

now the fact that I'm going to have to save a build just for SPvP on all of my different characters and that's actively taking away from the PvE builds I could be saving, and the WvW builds I could be saving, is giving me conniptions.

TL:DR

Overall I'm nowhere near as down as it as other players. I think it needs a number of tweaks.

1. Implement manual saves for the Build and Equipment templates so that you can make quick minor changes to your build in the moment for certain encounters without having edited the actual template.
2. Remove the upper limit of the Equipment Template slots in particular over the build Templates and Storage.
3. Separate the PvE, SPvP, and WvW Build and Equipment tabs so that one character can theoretically save 6x PvE Builds Templates, 6x SPvP Build Templates, 6x WvW Build Templates, which will go a huge way towards making gear templates in particular feel far less choking.

[Lirra.5410]

nicefreed inventory spaceeasy swapping buildsbuild links (but only halfway there: runes, sigils, weapons and stats belong to a build as well)

annoying downgradeno more autoswap for build when changing between game modes (the game should remember the last used build/gear per game mode)

priceOver the years I have happily spend lots of real life money for unlocking QoL features like Shared Inventory Slots, Storage Expander or Bank Tab Expansions. The pattern here is account wide QoL.But I definitly won't buy any character based Template Expansion at this price.Maybe I'll buy Build Storage Expansions if they proove useful to me.I think I would spend money on Template Expansions if they where account wide on the current price.

incomprehensible or even ridiculousWhy only 6 build/gear templates? Players in need of build templates need way more.There is even space left in the UI for at least 4 more build tabs before having to resort to any kind of scrolling mechanism.This restriction is just baffling me. It doesn't make any sense for the players and you could have sold more slots.

[Matt H.6142]

The message is a little misleading. As long as we have to use a template as a sandbox, we really have one less template than advertised. If we had a sandbox plus the described templates, that would be amazing. As a point I’ve named my first templates “temporary” so as to not load anything I want to keep there.Otherwise, being able to save pet management and underwater skills should help not be caught out being underwater with no skills because I last went swimming with a different elite spec.

[Xar.6279]

It would be cool to get build and eq templates for pvp too.Right now its just for pve. You can't load rune/amulet and sigils for pvp.

[misterman.1530]

Can someone explain to me how Equipment Templates work with Legendary (or even Ascended) items?

I have a full set of Legendary Light armor. I built a couple of Equipment templates for my Necro. I then logged onto my Ele, but I can't select the Legendary Armor.

So, that means I have to log onto my Necro, remove the items from the equipment template, put the items into the bank, log onto my Ele, get the items from the bank, and build a template. But that means I have to destroy my Necro's equipment templates. Both of them. And rebuild them all over when I log into the Necro. Every time. Like we had to do BEFORE templates.

I honestly fail to see how this helps across your full list of characters. I mean, within one character, that's fine, but for more than one that can share items, I fail to see why this was developed this way.

I would have thought that all Legendary and Ascended items go into a general, shared inventory - one for Legendary items and one for Ascended - from which every character could draw - you can't log into two characters at once, so I fail to see the issue with that. Then another bunch of slots (under legendary) of Sigils, Runes, and Infusions that can be slotted.

But this current way? What's the point?