Best way to animate 2D characters?

I'm working on the art assets for my game, I'm currently making sprite sheets for my characters, but I wanted part of my game to be where you can customize your character with many different armours and weapons, with lots of different combinations. My Question is do I have to do every idle, every walk, every attack animation with every possible combination of armour and weapons or is there an easier way? apart from limiting the combinations.

Thanks for any advice help and or tips.

 

Wait I figured it out, I can just make the base model a Skeleton. Then Just add a helmet, Armour or weapon as a different layer.

 

Hey I am currently working out how to best rig different charakters. My idea was to make a template and then change how the face, body, etc. looks like. So I would like to know how you added the other layers and how did the endresult look like?