In my experience, templating is something that a significant number of players still struggle with. It is tedious and eats up a lot of time, but at the same time, it is something essential for RvR participation and success/fun therein.
I see the following problems:
- No easy ingame options for template creation and complete reliance on tedious spellcrafting tools
- Inability of players to create worthwhile templates causes over-reliance on a few players to create templates for their guild or friends
- ROG drops require custom-made templates for every player and character
- No in-game solution to "order" full templates.
The result is that players who cannot just "do it all themselves" are overly reliant on the crafter being online and have the free time to create a template for them, possibly from scratch based on their items.
My idea to solve this issue (without making crafter obsolete) is the following: Pre-made template lists (Spellcrafter Guild with NPC for each class that shows a list of items required and where to get them) with all items the players require to get a "decent" template that gets them at least all major resists, stats, and skills up (EDIT: Not cap!), but without gimmicks like item charges, weapon/shield/staff-less templates.
These templates would be built using only non-rog drops and crafted armor/weapons 99% quality.
Since now the armor pieces and weapons can be always the same, they could be added as custom crafting recipes for armor and weapon crafter, which would, in turn, require 1 custom SC ingredient and 1 custom Alchemic ingredient to account for the item being created with stats and a proc right away.
In the end the player in need of a template could then simply go to the housing and purchase a full set of the "pre-made template" armor and possibly even purchase all the jewelry if it is being sold by players as well.
To make this work some feather prices for "less good" items would have to be reduced to make it a realistic option. This should not be a problem since especially jewelry is pretty bad compared to rog drops and is barely worth purchasing, especially if it does not come with a useful item charge.
These templates should not be anything fancy or special, but should allow for a budget and lazy option for players to participate in RvR without glaring stat/resist deficiencies that would make them woefully uncompetitive.
[EDIT] Just to be clear, the goal is not to make it "super easy to get the best template", just to provide guidance and a goal for players that makes it less frustrating when they hit Level 50 and have no clue where to go from there.