Because they are after endless power and possibilities. A good compromise would be to add soulbinders or open outdoor zones as AP hubs for each expansion.
Because, with an alt you don't have to do that. It takes the biggest benefit of personas away and that was ease of travel. What if you have a persona that is a Shaman(enchanter etc) vs just an alt. Your group needs buffs, someone died or the buffs expired. With an alt, you log in the shaman, buff, then log back in with your main. With a persona, you have to go to a fast camp zone, switch to the persona, go back to the group and buff, go back to a fast camp zone, switch back to your main, then back to the group again. Why? How much better would it be, to just click the shaman persona right there and not go through all that? All I'm saying is that they nerfed the best and only rea usefulness of Personas. They aren't completely useless, but nothing that is going to turn my head. Could have been game changing.
Micker99, you underly an illusion. Nothing got taken away or nerfed, because it was only a test environment on the beta server and never meant to be like that on live/TLP servers. The purposes of APs are not what you seek and sadly we never received an official statement about the strategy concept behind them. It is all obscure which had led to confusion, dissatisfaction, and speculations. "An Alternate Person glowers at you dubiously!"
Nothing got taken away, but little or nothing got added. That is my point. They added something that does so little and it could have been a game changer. I don't care, I have enough to do, leveling my toons as it is, so better that personas are something I couldn't care less about now.
It just did not met your expectations. I am also a bit disappointed by them but they do add more than most of us can see yet, like the opportunity for being able to play all classes on one account, on all servers, by all characters, which is a whole new dimension. It is like goiing from 32 bit to 64 bit. Roleplay wise it is weird and it sure is not meant so much for old players, and rather for new players that do not want to mess around with alts. It can be seen as an attempt to further modernize the game and to lay stones for the future. Maybe it is the first part of a bigger concept that is yet to come.
That's a matter of one's point of view. Certainly having to run back to a no combat zone to change really makes it worse than an alt. But being able to share gear is a huge bonus. I think long time players will benefit more since they generally have more mounts, illusions and achievements that would benefit their personas.
That fact is that everything about a persona, with possibly the exception of tradeskills, could have been achieved MUCH more easily if they had applied existing game code for gear and achievements to the actual alts. In fact, it would have been even better because alts don't share most timers and you wouldn't have to mess around with swapping inventories or worrying about items getting eaten when you swap out personas. To be honest, I'm not even sure how important sharing tradeskills is, beyond maybe the Artisan's Prize because even with everything at just 300 (which you can do in a week or less) you still get an aug with pretty damn good stats. If this was about convenience and making life easier for players to level and try other classes, they would have found a way to just let us use actual alts for all of this. But this was about monetization of an expansion, so we got personas.
One possible good use of personas would be for your own persona super buffer. While I have buffing classes already, they are spread across different characters and different accounts. It's a pain to have multiple clients running and camp and log different characters in order to do all the buffing I need. It would be awesome to have a single character who could cast whatever different buff I wanted. I do my buffing in the PoK already, so the swapping issue wouldn't be a problem. But there's no way I'm leveling up multiple personas to max level just for that convenience.
Just because it didn't release with options doesn't mean you can't add value. All skills should be based on highest persona. Make an alt? You have 300 defense? The alt will just have max def until you hit 300+. No real reason not to include them since they work with tradeskills too. All those caster skills? Already maxed for your persona and you can happily go hunting without AFK casting in guild hall. AA's? Let all general AA's cross persona. No reason to make EVERY persona refarm EVERY tradeskill AA when they whole point is making cross tradeskills easier. Last but not least, go to the moon with it. Level req gear for persona's is based on your highest char. Got a level 125? Your level 1 persona can equip level 125 gear. Which helps a ton removing rot loot. Crappy T1/2 drop? Meh might as well loot it and toss it on my level 38 shaman. I mean why not at this point? Persona's should just be the "alt toon you can have fun with w/o requirements". You already put in the work on your main, your persona shouldn't have to as well.
Personas just didn't really add anything new to the game. Someone might find a use for them, but what a waste of a good idea.
Think the only benefit is if you want to start a new main and want all the achievements your main has gotten. Dont see any other uses since you got be at starting city or out of combat zone. Got two tradeable persona token on fv pst with offers. Looking for bunches of emberquart tradeskill items.
They didn't added a new feature on itself. Instead they added more possibilities and flexibility, which the players are just about to find out, like creating a superbuff or superport mule. The real new feature of the expansion are Linked Characters with the Call of the Hero rings, which nobody is writing about in the forums. CotH for everyone and an indirect nerf to the magician class.
i do agree, was looking forward to being able to switch to a solo class in the zone im currently in.. im sure now its going to be me waiting 10 min to find out if someone has room for me in group or not then deciding to change to another toon just to have someone say hey we have room for you in group. now i have to camp back to main if they do not want that class or if its too low level then its automaticly to fastcamp zone then run to group / instance / what ever is going on.
only thing i can see doing with Persona atm is making a buff account and getting all the buff types.. being as i can switch only in a fast camp / starting GGH / PoK is most likely where he will be camped just to buff box toons / guildys who looking for buff's
I'm looking forward to creating a few personas one they are stable. Not risking it now while there is a chance of losing my gear. First 2 personas are likely to be bard and mage. Bard for ease of travel and track and mage for a change and I'm sure I have plenty of wizzy gear to fit the mage. Bard will be for finishing up some hunters. Next TLP I wil create a ranger persona purely for fletching....yes it will be a wood elf. I'll also have persona for all other TS stuff (shaman, rogue, chanter). I am an altaholic so my goal will be to at some stage in the future have all 15 alt personas, be that on live or TLP. I've never really played a monk or a warrior to a significant level, so there is that also. But for any of that to happen they need to do something with the storage and make them stable.
I just saw something about the Linked characters and CoTH rings. Why hasn't anyone mentioned those lol? All this talk about the boring personas and this is actually something interesting.
Ok, I'm curious...why do you need to specifically make a ranger for fletching when every class in the game can do it?
That is not a true statement. I was there in beta. You can go find my video showing alternate personas in beta. At the time I created that video, we still did not have ANY information on what was intended for the Alternate Personas. All we had at that time was a thread where DBG was asking us to provide questions about the Alternate Personas that they could answer AT A LATER DATE. Many people asked repeatedly to have the intended feature set of Alternate Personas be told to us in the beta forums. They did not do that until NEAR the end of the beta. The ability to switch personas anywhere was in there day one when the alternate personas feature was turned on in Beta. The DEV that mentioned that the alternate personas were now testable in Beta mentioned that the ability to switch personas anywhere was still being decided upon. When you say that being able to switch personas anywhere was never an intended thing for the AP feature in Beta, you are 100% wrong because they did NOT have a decision on that UNTIL near the end of the Beta. That rule was still to be decided for the majority of the time we were in Beta. It was only near the end of Beta that they finalized that rule, and I didn't know one single person in Beta that wanted that rule. Not one single person. This was a decision that was completely against what the Beta community was lead to believe would be the functionality of the feature based on the wording from the initial sales promotion page where it said allowing you to switch between alts faster. That little blurb was the ONLY thing anybody had to go on for the vast majority of the Beta up until near the very end of the Beta when they finally said that you would only be able to switch in fast-camp or starting zones. It was a poor decision in my opinion, and I can only assume that it was made because they realized how many places it could be used as an exploit. Rather than fixing the exploitable situations, they chose to render the feature completely useless instead. I respect their decision, but I also respectfully disagree with it. Alternate Personas as implemented is not what was advertised during the pre-purchase phase of the expansion. I'm not one of those, I'll ask for my money back kind of people, so I won't do that. I took the gamble on the expansion and pre-purchased it. That is on me. But, to sit there and tell me that they never indicated that it was going to work that way, that's not right. They did indicate it would work that way up until they said it would not.
