I want to play a healer in the game. I'm also going to pick it up on the 3rd.

1) Fan of the Templars and their lore (I guess).

2) Really like the Preacher outfit and a big fan of Blood Magic.

3) The problem is I also like ranged weapons (Assault Rifle), which means I deviate from the Preacher build:

http://www.endgameguides.com/TSW/Abilities/TemplarDecks/159

Does it mean I will be forced to play: http://www.endgameguides.com/TSW/Abilities/IlluminatiDecks/203

Which means I have to go illiminati?

Also I read somewhere that it you don't use your skill points, or something called AP you lose them, I'm not sure what this means?

Looking for a good guild, and willing to learn, need a break from the other mmo systems, but as you can see this is all very new.

The decks are just suggested builds, although they do come with cool clothing.  But the game has a ridiculous amount of skills and can be overwhelming, so this is to help people ease into it.

As for SP and AP, you can only bank so many of them before you waste xp, but that number is rather high.

But if you play long enough you can create every build right?

Yes you can unlock all abilitys.

Originally posted by Kryziz

But if you play long enough you can create every build right?

Every build you can think of. That's the key. Imagination.

Think of it like GW1.  You pick two classes (weapons in this case) and those determine what skills you can use (a huge assortment).  You get to pick 7 active and 7 passive.  Where its different from GW1 is you arent locked in to any one class (weapon), you can change both of them around.

If you complete a 'deck' you get the clothes seen in the according deck image as a bonus. But other than that these decks are mearly suggestions and the clothes in TSW are no armor sets like in other games and purely an asthetic thing - you could wear the preachers clothes and use the abilities suggested in the necromancer deck or any other combination of abilites that suits your playstyle.

You don't ever loose your skill or ability points: these decks require you to get roughly 2/3 of all the abilities of two weapons types. However nothing stops you from learning all the abilities of all weapons .. there are 18 weapons in total, hence even after you've completed 'a deck' that will likely allow you to fill a certain role fairly well the game doesn't stop - you only learned 10% of all the abilities you can potentially learn. Same applies to the skill points that go along with the weapon types as well mor or less, these are passives for the weapon types and ontop of that are a prequisite for the stronger weapons (more or less something similar to level requirement in other games, but you reach the required skill level much sooner than whatever you might consider 'endgame' in tsw).

Once you learned an ability - every time you're out of combat you can swap these with the current active ones.

Not only can you unlock different builds - the game is balanced around it. For instance, there might be a mob that gets stronger if you put a DOT on it ... but some builds dot with virtually all their attacks. On one hand you can say that's unbalanced ... the devs response will be that you should change your build for that fight and dump the dots.

You can literally use abilities from all nine weapons in a build ... though that'd probably be a pretty wack build if you did. You can only use two active weapons, but you have 7 passive slots as well that don't require you to be wielding that weapon.