Build Organization Guide

Hello and welcome to the complete build organization guide. I got this idea but going to where the templates were and making a new folder, going back to guild wars, and see'ing if it was there. Sure enough, it was. Here's a guide to no more random builds floating around!

Step 1:
Find where your templates are located. They should be in C:\Program Files\What You Named Guild Wars\Templates\Skills or something along those lines. Once you get there there should be a bunch of random notepad files. Tsk tsk.

Step 2:
Make a new folder! (Make sure this is where all the notepad files are) Name it something like Hero Builds (Which we will do in the example), or something that you have a LOT of builds for.


Step 3:
Here's the fun part, place all the builds of that kind in the folder!
It should slowly start to fill up.


Step 4:
Now you may think, what the heck is this doing for me...Open guild wars! You will now notice a new folder when you go to load/manage templates. It should be exactly what you named it. Double click it.

Look! There are the builds you put in it!


Step 5:
That's not all. Here is the best part. Make something like "Heroes Ascent." You guessed it. Make a folder in that folder. Got a bunch of team builds saved? How about Heroway! Make that folder and put all your heroway builds inside.

You should now have folders inside folders for even greater organization!

Step 6:
Fully organize all your builds into nice, neat folders. No more searching and searching for the build you want. Have it in 3 quick clicks. Here's what the final product should look like:


Tip #1
Make as many folders as you need. They are very useful for finding builds fast and efficently.

Tip #2
Do not edit your build names in Guild Wars, go back to where you added the folders and rename them there! It's must faster and more effective since all you do is right click and select "Rename"!

Thanks for reading, and hope this helped you as much as it helped me
~Sickle of Carnage

nice job man, i had NO IDEA you could do this!

awesome find, and ten thumbs up from a neat freak that hates messy builds everywhere!

It's surprising to see that some people still don't know how to do this. I've known about this since day one.

I even did a short guide about it in a thread asking Anet to do this.

Nice guide, though.

If you're like me, I did mine by professions.

Assassin
Dervish
Elementalist

etc..

Then I had the builds saved as say: "A^E - PermaSin" to help me organize by profession and a name to let me identify what it is.

Wooow. Nice I guess, but this has been known for ages! In fact my project (*cough cough Community Works*) uses this for its in-game organization, by game type (PvE/PvP), then game mode (General PvE, farming PvE, running PvE, RA, TA, etc), then game class. Though I have to get a proper update out for its early database build, its still fairly recent and easy enough to show you how a good organization structure can be built.

Why didn't I try this earlier? This is awesome!

DUUDE I DID NOT KNOW THAT! thanks that saves me a lot of time.

I did all mine by professions and I haven't really found a need to make more subfolders. But I suppose this is a helpful thread for those who don't know about it yet.

Gee, wish I knew this when I still played! >.>

Wow, thank you very much.. this will help to organize my builds alot.. and help to prevent mindless scrolling.

I was all like, hey I can make a svn repo for all good builds and stuff

and then I realized that that is practically useless, 'cuz most people don't even know what svn is >:

Though I'm suprised pvx wiki doesn't have a huge package of templates stored together in a zip or something.

Maybe it does, but I'm too lazy to look for it anyway, nor do I really need it.

I'm also suprised people didn't know this. They even told us in the update notes.

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Game...pril_5.2C_2007

I knew it, but I'm too lazy so I grouped only my Ranger in one folder.

I've also been using this since templates were added to GW. There are 2 things I think that need to be added.
1) On Windows Vista (and next versions) templates are stored in '<drive>\Users\Username\Guild Wars\Templates\Skills\'. You can see the actual path used in the template manager window in any case.
2) Folders can also be created in-game. If you save your template as 'Heroes\WoH Hybrid' folder 'Heroes' will be created and 'WoH Hybrid' template will be saved in it. I know this is not the fastest way to do it, but sometimes its useful.

I knew about where the templates were saved and that you can rename them via documents. But I didn't know you could make the folders... I should experiment more often...

And Mirko, thanks for the info on being able to make folders in-game.

Time to go organize my thousands of builds (maybe I'll move all my older builds to "Unused" or something so I don't delete then remake later ).

I /faceplamed for not figuring this out earlier.
You made my day dude <3 thanks a bunch!

Yeah, I remember this a couple years ago, randomly finding it and showing it to a few guildies in CAx and astonishing them. As Azazel mention, you can also create a folder in the builds panel by name the build <folder>\<build>. Much easier than to navigate to the builds folder, for me at least!

I've known all this for a couple years now, but this thread serves as a good kick in the butt to get me to spend the time to get organized. Cheers!

I always just do PvE (or PvP) (or PvE Hero) - Profession - Build Name. But this will make it a lot more organized thanks :-D

My friend, you are a genius. This is incredibly simple, but I never thought of doing it!

Is that the default location? For me they are in:

<drive>\Users\Username\Documents\Guild Wars\Templates\Skills\

Although it doesn't really matter as long as the game knows where they are and can tell you.

I already knew about this, but I must say good work on presenting this information to the public.

I recall finding it out by accidently creating a folder through Guild Wars, and decided to look further into it.

Once again, nice work though.

Thank you very much. While it seems to have been known by many, I wasn't one of them.

This will make swapping builds for my heroes much easier.

I did mine that way but added sub folders with different builds, like running, interrupting and so on.

This would be so helpful, thanks a lot mate!

Very decent. I recently found out about the trick. I've got it setup by profession currently. I could go further and do something akin to this tree:

|=PVE
--|=<primary profession>
----|=<secondary profession>
----|=<secondary profession>
--|=<primary profession>
----|=<secondary profession>
----|=<secondary profession>
|=PVP
--|=<primary profession>
----|=<secondary profession>
----|=<secondary profession>
--|=<primary profession>
----|=<secondary profession>
----|=<secondary profession>

But I may just do something similar, but by character. I like the way I got it setup currently...

Oh wow thanks a lot!!! I totally did not know about this... I was just complaining the other day about how bad I needed to clean up my build too! Now I can actually do a good job of it.

Nice job, i made a folder for certain builds but i never thought of doing it for each type, there does taking 5 minutes to find a build.

very nice, it seems many people knew about this but also many people didnt. I knew about the template codes being saved as i had to copy then paste them when i reinstalled GW. But this is nice, imagine all the possibilities.

Just bringing this back up so that it helps other people as well. What I've done now instead of placing my builds in categories as in the screenshots, I've made:
-PvE
---Professions
-PvP
---Professions
-Heroes
---Professions

Helps me find builds incredibly quick

How could I not knew this <_<