Official Feedback Thread about Build and Equipment Templates

[Yue.5974]

Was really looking forward to these but I am really disappointed, sadly. This seems like an ok system for people that play 1 mode and don't have multiple builds. But when you play multiple modes and like to play different builds/roles on your character it's just really bad.

 

Good:

adds some inventory space

swapping is quick

build sharing

 

Bad:

Not account bound

too limited in the amount of builds

too limited in the amount of gear sets

these are load outs more than templates

lost separate pvp, wvw and pve builds that auto swapped.

not easy to swap out little things without the builds being changed.

gear and traits are separate.

feels like it invalidates legendary gear

**way too expensive!** (would be acceptable if unlocks were account wide not character bound)

triple monetized...

can't easily switch between the location of gear and build templates to tweak things.

build storage seems like it would be more useful if they worked per profession.

 

At this point I feel like I should just shelve multiple builds as I will not be buying any of this.. It just overall feels like this is a step backwards.

 

 

 

 

[Draygo.9473]

Overall a positive, my light criticisms for now are the following:

Build template pricing is a bit out of line, same for build storage. I am going to be using notepad going forward to save uncommon builds and just use the tabs for common builds. I'm sure someone will make a handy website for us to make all sorts of codes to paste into the game and then everyone will have unlimited storage anyway. If the price drops significantly around 100 gems for 3 slots or 20 gems a character bound slot then I will purchase some. Pricing is way out of line on this one.

 

Equipment templates are quite handy but do have some downsides that I believe could be improved. Many have been pointed out already.

Modifications to the template should not save unless we tell it to.

 

The price is almost right for me as I expected this feature to be around 400 gems. I would prefer it to be a little bit cheaper but its not too out of line.

 

 

[Poormany.4507]

IMO, GW1 had much easier to use build templates than these, and the current ones are very clunky and confusing with all the different types and tabs - not quick and easy to use like GW1's 1 or 2 click templates.

 

Putting an obvious cashgrab in game for a system that was done better 15+ years ago in **your own** **game** and should have been in the game at launch, when the community is already not feeling good about GW2's current and future state just seems like a very bad move to me.

[Hurja Pullo.4193]

"Build Storage Expansion"

"Double-click to add 3 spaces to this account's Build Storage."

Cost: 500 gems

 

6€ for three extra database rows.

Are you f*cking kidding me?!

 

If ACTUAL software developers or database admins charged those kinds of rates, they'd be all billionares by this point.

Not even Activision has microtransaction payments for extra Create-A-Class slots in recent Call of Duty games.

But hey, ArenaNet is full of innovative artists who came up with the brilliant idea that a single row in a database should have the pricetag of 2€.

 

Nevermind the fact that a popular community addon was strongarmed to remove a similar FREE, ALREADY EXISTING FEATURE from their addon, just so ArenaNet could monetize it.

[Darlgon.9273]

Just going to ask for an "Apply" button, so I can look at my build/gear set without actually swapping to it. Other stuff can wait.

[Pikls.8710]

Just let us use arc templates again and we can forget this whole fiesta.

[Chrisco.5732]

Essentially, if we ignore the gem store drama (which is really hard to do). We had PvE, WvW, PvP traits autosaved. Now we have 3 templates, so it’s the same. Though now we have 1 extra equipment tab per character. Which is nice, extra storage is always great. But we lost the convenience of saved and auto load traits when you map into the respective zones. It just seems like a step backwards.

 

We should be able to set defaults for wvw and pvp. That when you map in they autoload. (crazy idea right? guess where i got it from?! this crazy place called yesterday)

 

Also the builds saving every change automatically is kinda annoying. If i load my saved build and change 1 skill because i'm fighting a random mob that needs more cc or something. Now every time i load it up again its changed the skill. It should just load the template, not use it actively, if i want to change the template i should be able to modify the template itself. They should be two different entities.

 

thats my thoughts though /shrug

[chris.6583]

I honestly thought that the equipment put into the templates could be used among compatible characters, like ele, mesmer and necro; after all they already did something similar (shared inventory slots)

I was a bit hyped to use other characters equipped with legendary gear (without having to transfer items to the bank and stuff), I'm somewhat disappointed

[Nidome.1365]

This is a quality of life downgrade. Please give an option to use the old system.

Having to remember to switch builds every time I enter/leave WvW etc. is a pain up the rectum. We need to return to autoswitching on gamemode change asap.

[AzureNightmare.3914]

I haven't read MOST of this thread, I haven't had a chance to play it, I'm going in with a very casual review; I am a heavy PvE player and RPer, so I'm already mostly used to having different characters with different playstyles; my Thief Daredevil and Thief Deadeye are different characters with different playstyles, and maybe a few different weapons in case I do dungeons. So as you read this keep in mind this comes from the perspective of a very casual kind of player, with 8+ characters on her account primarily for roleplaying purposes as this is the reason she plays.

 

I don't think its that bad, but I think there's room for improvement. I do feel its kinda weird there's no buttons to quickly swap between them, and I speak this as a GW1 vet. I think there should be some kind of hotkey system you can implement to switch between, that's what I was expecting with the equipment at least. If you could hotkey to swap between the three Traits and Skills that would be awesome. That's my biggest thing.

 

The other is that I feel that Equipment Tab is basically worthless with only two options. Why shouldn't I just take 30 seconds to just swap a few armor pieces and the weapons I have equipped? I feel like everyone should have 3 by default, not 2. I know this is probably gonna fall on deaf ears; but give everyone three Equipment Tabs. That would be good; three dedicated towards it that you only need like 10 seconds to swap outside of battle. But as it is? If anything I feel like I'm gonna forget the option is there. "Eh, I just gotta swap my armor quickly... oh wait, I could have saved that? That's right. Huh." I dunno. Just feels like everyone having 3 is more of a reason to be able to save it you know? Maybe I'm overthinking it. 2 just doesn't feel practical. Give everyone 3 for free.

 

Cut the demonetization in half. I'm gonna play kitten's devil's advocate for here; I hate aggressive monetization, but this is a F2P game now and of course anything can be motenized. I hate it, but oh well. But please consider, please, cutting it in half maybe; not just as a sale, permanently. Its nice that as a goodwill you're giving everyone 2 free slots by making it worth 0 gems in the store for loading them on multiple characters, but its STILL expensive. 500 gems is NOT cheap. $10 will get you ONE Build Storage or ONE Equipment Template and ONE Build Template tab: THIS is the problem. THIS is the REAL problem at heart; guys, this is WAY too much money. This stuff should cheap. You want my suggestion? 250 gems for a Build Template Expansion, and 150 gems for Equipment Templates and Template Tabs. $10 should be able to buy you a lot of Template stuff; that's what I think. Its one thing to monetize, but this is nickle and diming. This is genuinely way too much; make it so if we spend $10 with Templates in mind we're able to get quite a bit. It goes beyond just "OK, well, we're gonna give you some for free, and then you're gonna pay more for more, alright?" That is just WAY too much. Give everyone five Build Storages for free, a few more for free if they log in during a time period where it costs 0 gems, and then have every purchase for it be cheap. From a casual perspective, this feels like your best investment.

 

I don't use Arc, never have, never will now; and brutal honesty? Neither did most players. Something I always keep in mind when on forums is this; the vast majority of people playing the game doesn't frequent forums and reddit to talk about it. If you did you'd think GW2, WoW, and XIV are all dying, terrible games. People are still saying Runescape is dying and will be dead soon and people are spending kitten thousands of dollars on their accounts, so I take all the "I'm gonna quit this game and so will everyone else" talk not seriously.. If you look at this, you'd think the game is imploding on its head because of this update, but I'm fairly confident most people playing are probably satisfied. **_However, _** you **_are_** asking for advice and feedback, so I"m hoping someone somewhere sees this and sees even from this super casual perspective: you can improve it. Doom and gloom is a standard of MMORPG forums and subreddits, so I really think the majority of players are either positively accepting it as they didn't use Arc, or are apathetic about it. But you are asking for feedback, and I hope someone actually reads this and takes notes.

 

TL;DR;

1. UI is alright, I don't think its that clunky to use, but also I don't use a lot of builds on my characters. More than anything I'm likely just going to use the same weapons and armors and swap between Specializations.

2. We need to be able to conveniently swap between them with a hotkey; I WISHED we could do that in GW1. I know a lot of us are talking about how it was in GW1, but lets not pretend that wasn't a bit clunky in its own right; hell, they weren't even saved to the system, they were saved on your PC and you had to manually back them up. I don't wanna do that again. But its 2019, I'm sure there's gotta be a way to hotkey something.

3. Give everyone 3 Equipment Tabs for free.

4. Make the monetization much more reasonable.

 

Thank you for your time, I hope you all have a great day.

[Ashantara.8731]

## "Available upgrade item found. Returning unused extra to your inventory."

 

Could you please change your Equipment Templates feature so that swapping a legendary weapon w/ legendary sigils for another weapon won't result in the former item and upgrades being disassembled each time? It is a **major pain** to have to redo the stats each and every single time, and it devaluates legendary equipment even further if the only solution is to create an additional loadout for such small changes.

 

**Please** make the item memorize which of the many legendary sigils it is supposed to use so that removing one item from the loadouts won't remove its upgrades!

[Kythan Myr.4719]

As has been said countless times, the free ones provided through volunteer hours of a hobbyist programmer were much better.

 

Yours are clunky, a mess, and not very-user friendly.

 

I can understand why you would monetize this, but as they stand they are not worth what you ask. If you need money to keep the game in development this is NOT the way to do it. I would gladly pay (and have been) for extra/new stuff. I love the game and content, but this is down right embarrassing.

 

It seems as if you are desperate to stay afloat. With everything that has unfortunately happened this year this fiasco doesn't bode well either. It will be interesting to see if these new build templates play out the way you hope.

[SerynNovah.4319]

I love this new feature! I can swap between builds with only 3 clicks vs having to change every item and trait and skill out now. Thank you so much for the new feature!

[skeet.1390]

I had been mulling returning to the game after a long break but caught wind of the build template thing and decided to wait and see how that played out before trying to get back into it and convince a group of friends to do the same.

 

You took a system your 10 year old successor had for free and bastardized it in the name of money. It can't even really be defended how grimy a move this is for a blatant cash grab. Not only is the system clunky, its painfully limiting and for anyone who either plays multiple modes, has multiple setups or has alts its laughable.

 

I've joked for a while that its been money over content, but this is the cherry on top. There's so many other games I'd rather play than this one now and strongly recommend other folks do the same.

[Sobx.1758]

The ability to set a "default wvw(/pvp) template" (so it changes to it when entering wvw/pvp) wouldn't hurt anyone.

 

Also I think the equipment template slot price -while not terrible- is higher than it should be, actually wouldn't be surprised if that's just a set up for 20-40% discounts. :sleeping:

[Balthazzarr.1349]

The notes say to use the helpful guide... where IS it? This old guy can't figure out how to make use of the build templates really at all. The gear is easy to figure out but these build things have got me messed up. All I seem to do is overwrite the current build... I want a build applied to each of the character gear builds but it seems that's not possible? I have to pick a build template and apply it somehow? But so far I just mess things up...

[PirateSpice.8735]

As much as I want templates in the game, it seems you blew this one, Anet. I never used ARC, so I can't speak to that, but I've yet to hear from a single ARC user that isn't upset at how poorly these templates perform by comparison. The one thing I can comment on is the price. Way, way too expensive. 500 gems for an Equipment Template slot? Are you out of your minds? If that were account wide, I'd pay upwards of 1,000 per slot. But as it stands, you're asking for 2,000 *per character* to fill out all six slots. That's ridiculous, and that doesn't even touch on Build Templates.

[draxynnic.3719]

[Here's something I prepared earlier.](http://virtuallyinterrupted.com/build-templates-and-monetisation/ "Here's something I prepared earlier.") I think everything I said there is valid.

 

One thing I'd particularly bring attention to is that even from a business standpoint, the heavy monetisation of build templates (up to 300 gems for what is essentially a line of code) makes sense only if your strategy is to harpoon whales. At that price, most people are going to copy-paste codes, either from websites or from some form of storage on their own system. You can't avoid that short of removing the ability to share builds through chat codes altogether, so you might as well embrace it and support local storage of build templates just like in _Guild Wars Nightfall_. Equipment templates are justifiable because they do represent a similar amount of additional space on the servers as an equivalent number of inventory slots and that's something that can't really be stored client-side, so that's what you can rest your monetisation on: let people store an unlimited number of builds on their own system, and they'll have more incentive to collect multiple equipment sets, and the equipment templates can then be the most convenient means of storing them if reasonably priced (500 seems a little high to me, but not ridiculously so: 400 is probably reasonable).

 

For the people like @"AzureNightmare.3914" who like the hotkeys and having the templates stored somewhere other than their own system, the current system for build templates is probably reasonable, but overpriced. Honestly, I couldn't consider a fair price for server-side storage of a build template to be anything higher than a hundred gems _at most._

 

Keep in mind that, depending on the elasticity of the demand curve, lowering the price can result in higher profit overall, through bringing the ((profit/unit) x quantity) function closer to its maximum.

 

As an additional comment that goes broadly towards monetisation strategies in general: People are already concerned about what a possible expansionless future might mean for content generation and monetisation of _Guild Wars 2._ Aggressive monetisation of a feature that was free with _Guild Wars Nightfall_ is only going to exacerbate those concerns.

[Nexxus.5347]

I'm happy templates have finally made it into the game. I'm having a blast setting up different templates for PvE, Raids, WvW and PvP. Also love adding equipment that's been sitting in bags into the extra equipment slots. That being said. I wasn't looking forward to templates so I would get extra bag space.

 

I will not buy extra templates. To max out the equipment and build templates on a character it will cost me 2900 gems. I can buy 4 character slots for 3200 gems. Buying 4 more character slots gets me more equipment and build templates than maxing out a single character. Character gets 6 equipment and 6 build. 5 characters get 10 equipment and 15 build templates. Considering I have 6 scourges already. I'm already ahead of the game and I have a total of 20 character slots. I have no incentive to buy addition template slots. This should have been priced, where I didn't even have to think about it. Oh hey, I need to switch to a different character for a build, hell no, let me drop 100 gems to get an extra equipment or build template. Oh hey, I spent 10 bucks on gems to get a new outfit let me drop the remaining gems into a new template. No brainer purchases.

 

Additionally, I cant share legendary items with different characters. You need a shared equipment pool for legendries. I earned it I should be able to share it across professions. Character lock for Ascended and lower, yep makes sense. Legendary not so much. Maybe you can implement that in the future. I also cant share my infinite harvesting items. This also need's to be shared across characters. I have to continue to move them to shared storage back and forth between the characters I'm playing. I cant template outfits, or mini's, or gliders, or mounts, or finishers. maybe in the future. I cant set default equipment/builds for WvW, PvP, PvE or Raids. It would have also been nice if the UI had a button I could click to switch to a different templates. Hot keys are great but I like UI.

 

So good start. Think about what the users of your game are saying, make adjustments, and plan for future updates to the system.

 

Side note... I use to spend 50 dollars a month on gems, no more gems since you change my scourge elite. 100$ not spent on gems so far since the change. Think about it.

[B is for Bass Players.9845]

For people who use the same ascended set of armor on several characters, this new system is so much more annoying that my desire to play just went through the floor. I used to make new characters all of the time, mostly of my favorite profession, and now this gives me no reason to continue this process. Too much hassle, anet. Loss of revenue to you since I will no longer be buying slots and making toons which is what I like to do. There is no chance of me buying build template slots. Nice work. One thing that WOULD make this a lot easier is one right click option of unequip all. It still messes with the equipment template (which is annoying), but at least it would help with how much more hassle it is to change equipment to another toon now. Unequip PLUS remove from template, c'mon.

[Nightcore.5621]

The price is to high and is not event account bound. Eveything is just bad Whit this build template. New bag Slots or character Slots are Better deal for that price. Make IT account bound Slots and than we can talk..

[Ronnie Hu.1694]

pve wvw pvp . 3 fucking mode. ANET u forgot to give us 1 more equipment template

[Ganathar.4956]

I'll try to make this as brief and easy to read as possible.

 

# The Good

1. Transitioning between templates is very smooth, especially with the hotkeys.

2. Very good for the most casual of players, because it allows them to experiment with an extra build or two and start learning more about the game.

3. Linking builds is great for teaching new players or for general sharing.

 

## The Bad

1. PvE, WvW and PvP builds were all put together and are now shared. You can accidentally use the wrong build now instead of swapping to your competitive build automatically when entering another game mode. This also means that players gained no additional build templates, unless they only play one game mode.

2. Legendary gear was devalued. Ascended now saves the same amount of space, while also giving you the ability to swap looks. This makes purchasing equipment templates way less appealing for players with legendary gear because they are getting less for spending the same amount of gems.

3. They are not actual templates, but they are loadouts instead. Only the account wide ones are real templates. The rest of them change automatically when you make gear or skill/trait changes.

4. The amount you can acquire is too limited and the build templates (not equipment) are overpriced for what they do. They do not give any storage or anything, and they save builds that you can literally save on a txt file.

 

# Possible Solutions

I believe that the most critical improvements that need to be done immediately are the separation of templates by game mode, as well as making them actual templates. Making them templates means that you need to press a confirmation button to change your template permanently. Instead of small situational weapon or upgrade swaps changing the template automatically. Separating them by game modes solves many problems. It makes them more convenient because you do not have to keep in mind that you need to swap every time you change game modes, just like it used to be. Another benefit would be that it would increase the maximum amount of slots to 18 (6 per game mode) instead of 6, which much less limiting. You can probably do this without the coding issues that prevent you from expanding beyond 6 right now. This would also make purchasing build templates way more tempting because now you would get one for every game mode, which start being a pretty good deal as opposed to now. Admittedly, it may be difficult or even impossible to do this for equipment templates because of how the inventory would work. However, it should be very doable for build templates. Build templates are what has the biggest issue here anyway and it needs a bit extra to justify the price compared to equipment templates saving inventory.

 

After you do all of this, then you could work on coding in even more slots, which would still be desirable for some even with 6 templates per game mode. Legendaries are a bit harder to deal with. I cannot see how free equipment slots could be added for legendaries . It seems like it would be a coding nightmare. The only thing that I can think of is improving legendary functionality further to make it an appealing endgame reward. I am not sure exactly how you would do that.

[ListenToMe.5130]

didn't read anything in this thread, but here's my feedback:

 

build templates don't work properly in their current form until equipment, skills, everything is equipped in a single click from the main template menu. i appreciate the hard work listening to the community and implementing a long sought-after feature, but it just doesn't make sense to me: equipment and skills in different tabs. why not connect the whole thing? make it easy as possible? then i would buy it. i really don't have any problems with the prices, but it has to be perfectly functional for me to swipe my credit card.

 

i feel for anet--they work hard and get trashed at every step (it's in good faith). though their forum moderators warn me over nonsense... but the game is essentially free to play. there is no sub. it's a business.

 

lastly, once you guys fix the templates, please provide an option to buy it all for a discount.

 

edit: alright, i read some posts in here. i really agree with another poster: current "build templates" are not templates at all!! they change when you modify skills on your skill bar! makes no sense!

[Hoover.6394]

I would love to see for different equipment template, item like shoulder or glove can be hide in one and showing on other template, currently they are on or off for all templates