Build templates: three free slots and how to stop rebuilding your character

Most newcomers rebuild their character by hand every time they want to try something, and then stop trying things. Templates exist to end that, and every account already has them.

What you get for nothing

Every character starts with three build tabs and two equipment tabs. Both ceilings are nine, reached by buying tabs from the store: 300 gems for a build tab, 500 gems for an equipment tab.

Three free build slots is more than it sounds. It covers a damage build, a support build and whatever you are experimenting with this week, which is most players’ entire needs for a year.

The two are different things

This trips up almost everybody at first.

A build template holds your specialisations, traits and skills, plus ranger pets and revenant legends. It is what your character knows.

An equipment template holds weapons, armour, trinkets, back item, runes, sigils, infusions and the relic. It is what your character is wearing (relics live here, which matters if you came back recently).

They switch independently, so one set of gear can serve several builds and one build can be worn with different gear. And the same item can sit in more than one equipment template at once, so you are not buying duplicates to fill slots.

🔴 One detail that pays for itself: legendary items can carry different stats per equipment template. That is the real reason legendary trinkets and armour are worth the time, and it is invisible until you own one.

Switching, and the per-mode memory

Both kinds switch out of combat only. There is no swapping mid-fight, and builds that promise it are describing something else.

The useful part: the game remembers your last used template separately for PvE, WvW and PvP. Set a support build in WvW and a damage build in PvE, and walking between them puts each one back on without you touching anything.

The advice under all of this

Fill the second build tab today, even if you have no reason to.

The reason is behavioural rather than mechanical. A player with one build treats their character as a fixed thing and stops experimenting, because every experiment costs the build they already like. A player with a spare tab tries the elite specialisation they were curious about on a Tuesday evening and switches back in four seconds.

This game has thirty-six elite specialisations and a weapon system that now lets almost anything hold almost anything. The slot that lets you poke at that without consequence is free, and most people never use it.