After their announcement back in April, Guild Wars 2’s build templates finally have their release date: 29th October. An official blog post gave us some information, such as a split between build and equipment templates, and inklings of a monetisation plan, but questions remained. To answer them, a Guild Chat preview was live streamed on 1st October. Here’s what we found out.
Note: the feature is still in development and may change before it is released.
Build Templates
- Build templates will be found in the Build tab of your Hero panel, above your skill bar and traits.
- To start with, each character will have three build template slots unlocked. By default these will be populated with your PvE, PvP and WvW builds. You can have a max of six slots per character.
- You can use builds with untrained traits and utilities, in which case it will equip what it can. What you don’t have will be greyed out. Clicking these will take you straight to the training wheel you need.
- Changing builds will not remove your current equipment. If the equipment is no longer compatible with the build, those skills will be greyed out.
Build Storage
- Where build templates will be for each character, your build storage is for your whole account and can hold builds of any profession.
- Your build storage can be found in the Build tab of your Hero panel, on the left.
- If someone shares their build with you, but you’re on the wrong profession, you can store it in your build storage for later use.
- Each account starts with three build storage slots. For the first month following the build and equipment templates launch, you can get three more slots free from the gemstore. The max number of slots is 24.
- If you take a build from here to your character and then edit it on that character, it will not affect what is saved in your build storage.
- If you have many builds stored here, you can filter by profession or use the search bar to help find what you need. You will also be able to sort by profession or name.
Sharing Builds
- Like items, you can shift-click a build to post it in chat.
- Hovering over the link will show you a tootip preview, so you can at-a-glance see which skills and traits are used.
- Click it in chat to inspect the build. Now you can hover over skills and traits to read the descriptions as usual. If you like it, add it to one of your character’s build template slots or save it to your build storage.
- You can copy a build to your clipboard and post it outside the client. This also works in reverse.
Class Specific
- Ranger pets and revenant legends will be saved in builds.
- Your builds will also remember the order of your revenant utilities.
Equipment Templates
- Equipment templates will be found in the Equipment tab of your Hero panel. They’ll be shown as tabs at the top.
- Hovering over these tabs will show you a preview of the equipment, and also compare stats in the usual ‘green for more, red for less’ way.
- Each character starts with two equipment slots, with a maximum of six available.
- Equipment which is used in a template, but not currently equipped, will not be in your inventory. Instead, it will be in what is internally called ‘the armory’.
- Each equipment slot can free up to 18 inventory spaces. You’ll need to have all legendary items to have the full 18 free, which includes runes and infusions.
- A piece of equipment can be used in more than one template. That piece will then have a small link symbol in its icon.
- Runes and infusions can also be used in more than one template, but only if it can be freely popped out, so think legendary armor or runes.
- In the same way, you can have two equipment templates which have the same armor set with two different rune sets.
- Each piece of equipment can only be used by one character. If it is used in an equipment template, it is in that character’s database only.
- To get a piece of equipment back to your inventory, right-click it and select ‘Unequip from all builds’.
- This shouldn’t happen, but if you lose a piece of equipment to the armory, changing maps may fix the issue. The failsafe code to check for equipment stuck in the armory runs every time you load into a map.
Gemstore
- They are still fine tuning the cost for each of the slots. It should, however, be in line with other storage options in the gemstore.
- Only build storage slots will be sold in packs of three.
Everything Else
- Development started around two years ago.
- Build and equipment templates are separate because builds can be freely picked while items have a cost.
- Both kinds of templates can be named.
- They currently need separate keybinds, but the developers are working on this.
- You can swap build and equipment templates when not in combat. Templates can’t be swapped if you’re in a PvP match or in WvW, unless you’re in a keep.
- Cooldowns will work in the same way as when you manually change skills. It carries over to the new skill.
Right now, developers and QA testers are ironing out the last of the bugs as they approach the homestretch. The Guild Chat preview shared that touching inventory code is “really scary” and is something the devs usually stay away from, however they are taking every measure to make sure nothing from player inventories will be lost. Revenants also presented a challenge to code around with all the special cases they presented. Hopefully, all will be well when the feature rolls out on the 29th.
