Template

You won’t have to play for long before you start seeing the word “template” everywhere and now you want to know more. It seems important after all!

Well, in the simplest terms, in Dark Age of Camelot a “template” is the equivalent of your “Best-in-Slot gear list” from other MMORPGs. However, unlike most MMORPGs, scraping together your entire template is not as simple as running dungeons repeatedly until the item you’re after drops. In Dark Age of Camelot, in order to maximize as many stats as possible, you will need to make clever use of player crafted and enhanced gear. There simply isn’t enough variety of raid drops for you to fill out all, or nearly all, relevant stats and resistances.

Lucky for all of us, it has never been easier than it is today to make your own template. In fact, both Eden and Blackthorn have their own built-in systems to help you create it. No third-party tools required!

For players on Eden, simply click the “Template Forge” button on the bottom right of the launcher.

For players on Blackthorn, simply use the “/craft” command in-game and then select the “Template” tab.

Going forward, this guide will use the Eden “Template Forge” tool to explain how to create a template, though the concept remains the same across all three versions of the game.

If you do not wish to create your own template, then there are many available which have been made by the community. The class profiles on this website have some linked, the class channels on the official Eden discord will have some, daoctools.net has some and Zenkcraft on Steam will have some too.

Go ahead and open the Template Forge in Eden’s launcher. This will open a new that can be closed in the top left, if you wish to exit.

In the top left, you will be able to select your realm, race and class. This will have an effect on how much of some stats you might want to include in your template, for instance if you are a Troll Bonedancer vs. a Kobold Bonedancer. As spell-casters, they require dexterity in order to cast faster. Trolls start with 35 dexterity, Kobolds start with 70. Kobolds can afford to sacrifice a bit of dexterity in order to compensate with other stats, if needed. Trolls not so much.

Below your character, you will be able to see all the base game stats, resistances and skills relevant to your class. More will be shown later.

Next, take a look at the paper doll displayed in the center of the screen. This is the representation of your character’s gear. It is empty now but will be filled out soon.

Having selected Bonedancer as our class, make sure to select the “2H” options below the four weapon slots on the bottom. Below that are numbers one to five, allowing you to save up to five different outfits per character.

Below that is what we’re after next. There are four buttons in total but it is the second from the left we are most interest in.

Briefly, the four buttons are:

1. Spell-craft editor: should you desire to manually change spell-craft bonuses
2. Auto Template
3. Template Cost: this will show you how much platinum or raid currencies it will cost to buy all items for your template
4. View Effects: show a combined list of all magical effects afforded to you by the gear you have equipped

Go ahead and click the purple Auto Template button, second from the left.

It will open a window not entirely unlike the one you were just looking at. The key difference being that you can now see many more stats on the left, including the missing “Bonuses.”

Click through the tabs to see what there is if you want, then loot near the top left. There will be a drop-down menu called “Preset” showing “Custom Goals” by default. You can open this drop-down and select a preset relevant to your class, for instance “Caster” for a Bonedancer. This will automatically enable the most relevant stats, though you may wish to enable to disable some depending on what you wish to accomplish.

For instance, in the cast of the “Caster” template, it does not automatically tag the “Arcane Siphon” bonus. While you may not want all 25% of Arcane Siphon, you may wish to have some at least. Likewise, you may not wish to make having 50 extra Armor Factor a priority.

Here you can see that I have adjusted the bonuses to give me 20% Arcane Siphon, up from 0, and only 30 extra Armor Factor, down from 50.

It is also possible to left-click and individual stat in order to adjust their weights or even setting certain stat goals as either required or not exceeded in order to be considered for ranking best.

For now, I will choose to leave them as is. I can always adjust them later or even have the Template Forge program attempt to change their weights to achieve better results.

Next, press the blue-green “Auto-populate” button in the top middle. This will allow you to fill the Template Forge’s database with items taken from Eden’s item database, as well as ROGs from the market place and which player crafted pieces of armour you’d like to include. You can also set the minimum utility of items you wish to import.

I have chosen to set my minimum utility 60, as well as ticking the boxes of all crafted bonuses that I find relevant. Quickness has no value to a spell-caster, buff effectiveness can easily be achieved by simply switching around items or weapon sets for buffing and then switching back after, healing effectiveness is not something I particularly require, strength is also worthless for a spell-caster, so none of those will be included.

You might’ve noticed that some slots didn’t automatically get populated: The mythical slot and the weapon slots. Go to the Mythical slot and left-click it to open the window to add or remove individual pieces. If there is a particular mythirian you wish to use, go ahead and add that one, otherwise simply hit “Add all results” in the top right and then done at the bottom left.

Next up is the weapons. As a spell-caster, we will primarily be using a staff, so click the third of the empty boxes on the bottom to open the two-handed slot. It should automatically only show you staves, if not then you can use the filters on the left to select the “Staff” weapon type. Additionally, you can once again set your minimum desired utility level.

I have once again set it to 60. Next, look in the top right for the purple “Add Legendary / SC Weapon” button. Clicking it will allow you to select what elemental type of damage you wish for your weapon:

• Benthic: Cold
• Entropic: Energy
• Lithic: Matter
• Pyroclasmic: Heat
• Somatic: Body
• Tempestuous: Spirit

Spell-casters do not really get much out of these weapons, so you can just leave it blank for now or add the various Magus staves if you so desire.

Click done on the bottom right when you are done, and then once again when you are back to the weapon select screen.

All slots should now be populated and you are ready to press the “Run” button in the bottom right.

A new window will open and you will see the program automatically adding and removing pieces of gear as it attempts to fill out in the pieces that will allow you to achieve the goals you set earlier. After a while, you can press the red “Stop” button in the bottom right.

As you can see, with attempt number one, it did not manage to completely fill out all the goals I set. It is missing five constitution cap bonus, three slash resist and two resist pierce. Not terrible but it can do better. The missing three slash resist will mean I will get hit for 3% damage from slashing weapons, which is not ideal. The missing two resist pierce means that I will hit for 2% less damage with my spells, also not ideal.

In the top left, you can see that it has generated a total of three sets, listed as “Best,” “Alt 1” and “Alt 2.” Switching to “Alt 1,” I can see that there are still some red bars, but overall I am more happy with its performance stat-wise.

It is missing two dexterity cap, nine constitution cap and one crush resistance. Two dexterity won’t make or break the build, nine constitution less is not ideal either but it’s something I’m willing to give up and missing one crush resistance is not a huge deal. Most enemies use slash or thrust weapons anyway. I have managed to get the missing two resist pierce, as well as one point of Armor Factor, granted that is negligible.

However, before you go ahead an add a set to your character, make sure to look in the top right if there is a white prompt asking to “Optimize weights & re-run.” If there is, you can go ahead and try that. It will open another tab in the top left called “Run 2,” allowing you to switch between this new one and your first attempt. Let it run for a while and then you can press stop again when it looks to have run out of options (or you just wish to move on).

Taking a look at the new results, it seems very promising. Dexterity is now capped and I am only missing two points of constitution. Instead I am down nine hit points compared to before (compensated for by the increased constitution) and the same one point of crush resistance is missing. Overall an improvement!

Happy with the results, I will hit “Apply to builder” in the bottom right.

From here, I can go ahead and check the spell-craft editor (green button) to see what gems are needed for my two pieces of crafted gear (gloves and boots):

As well as try the view effects button (blue) to see which abilities I gain from this template:

And finally, I will check the template cost (yellow button) to see how much it will cost me to collect the various pieces I need:

Judging this to be reasonable, I take one last look at the stats on the left, now also showing bonuses:

Deeming it to be acceptable, I press the yellow “Save” button in the top right and set about collecting my new template in-game. For the spell-crafted pieces of gear, pressing the “Quickbar” button in the top right will automatically add the required gems I need to my quickbar in-game, allowing me to easily craft them.