Guild Wars 2

tl;dr at the bottom

There have been suggestions to allow people to swap the weapon sets equipped at the touch of a key that would go a step further than swapping equipped weapon sets.

I’d like to take the suggestion a step even further and suggest that players be able to swap the following with a hotkey:
- Land weapon set 1
- Land weapon set 2
- Water weapon set 1
- Water weapon set 2
- All Accessory items
- All 5 slot skills
- Major Trait Assignments

Basically allow players to have two build templates equipped and swap between, except for any major traits associated with the template that can’t be active due to trait point assignment.

The net result would be in addition to having the existing weapon swapping functionality for hotkeys in and out of combat, outside of combat we’d also have a build template swap for hotkeys outside of combat.

People already want build templates, because its unnecessary to have to identify all the synergies and change every little thing when we who have played Guild Wars 1 and other games out there know that build templates are completely possible and great time savers for a setup change.

At a high level there’s a few things required to implement

Requirements of implementing:

- Template codes
— For sharing purposes.
— Existing functionality can be expanded upon from GW1 (optional)
- Template UI
— Includes side by side comparison of equipped templates
— Save/Load/Delete template buttons, View/Copy template code buttons
- Template CRUD
— Create, Read, Update, Delete functionalities on the backend for template data
- Equipment lock (option 1)
— Items associated with templates will need special behaviors to keep players from removing items for their equipped templates
— Items on standby associated with a template in the inventory should be locked
— Item lock prevents selling, destruction, mailing, trading post, and depositing
— Item lock can be removed through right clicking on items in the inventory
- Save template items to template UI (option 2)
— Items associated with active templates don’t show up in the inventory
— When unequipped from an active template they are placed back into inventory

RoI – there’s no return I can think of, except maybe the return would be that players are spending more time actually playing the game instead of setting up their characters? At the very least you’ll be making players very happy that they can easily share, load, and swap builds. Even trolls will be happy whether they show it or not.

tl;dr
Add build templates and sharing
Allow for two templates to be “active” at a time
Create a hotkey option for template swapping out of combat

Even if we can’t have fast trait swapping, I would love to be able to instantly switch all of my optional skills. In WvW I use completely different skills for running and fighting, and manually switching them one at a time is painful. Including equipment in these templates would be wonderful too.