Alternate Persona FAQ And Random Information

It was mentioned a couple of weeks ago we would be getting a FAQ regarding the Alternate Personas, but I cannot find one anywhere.

For those of you who are in beta, can you tell us how this system works so far? What do you like / dislike about it? How often can you change your class? Does this unlock all classes for all races?

I know there is a thread titles Alternate Personas already, but that is 60 pages of being arguing and not actually sharing any information regarding this new feature. I figured it was time to start something new where real information could be shared.

As of right now, it's a joke. That's about all you need to know.

It probably won't be fully released until later in the year than expansion.

I don't have any real info cause I haven't played with it, mostly cause it's too buggy to be worth it atm.

No, this does not circumvent the fixed class/race array size.

As of Friday (Last time I tried it), AP tab in inventory, pick one of the 16 classes, your main's class will be locked out. For example I picked BST, main is a Ikky SK, when I picked BST, pulled up new char select just like normal. So I could pick any race that could normally be a BST. Offered me a choice Tutorial or Reg zone, just like a new char. Went to PoK, got beta buffed to 125, Auto Grant DID NOT work as normal. Hopefully that will change, I can't imagine anyone wanting to do Run speed again...

That's about as far as I got

It's kind of like swapping in an alt for your main character. It's not really like your main character has more abilities. It's really more like your level 120 male Wood Elf Druid main can be a level 10 female Troll Shaman. The persona is like an alt in that it has a separate buff table, merc, and AAs, but the inventory is shared with your main. You can swap from one persona to another in any zone (although some aspects of that may change). What I'm thinking I'll use personas for are for augmenting my main with certain skills of other classes in certain situations. If my main doesn't have track, I'll create a persona which can track for those times I need track. If my main can't port, I'll create a persona who can port for those times I need ports. For myself, I see my persona as being used in these limited aspects rather than playing a persona as if it was a main. I'm sure some people will get their personas up to max level so that they can do stuff like throw out max-level buffs, have max-level AA's, etc.

It has been untestable since Friday since they introduced a CTD bug on the beta client.

Angeliana is still working on it.

Right now the Personas are a work in progress. They really can't answer questions yet as they don't know what is going to work and what isn't.

It's a huge project and I believe they were too ambitious with the timetable. The same with the new UI and DirectX 11. They simply don't have the personnel and time to get everything done in less than a month (estimate based on previous expansion release dates).

My guess is that those three things will be mostly done by February and March.

While we would like them to be wrapped up sooner, I think we would much prefer waiting until it works over pushing it out too soon and creating all sorts of issues.

Do we know if we will be able to absorb an alt into one of the personal slots, or will we have to start that class from level 1?

I think we would much prefer them not to market features that aren't going to launch with an expansion. My hype has turned to full resentment.

The current implementation doesn't answer most of the difficult questions from the questions the players posed. The hard questions are mostly various forms of, "Is this problem going to be handled cleanly?"

My guess is that the developers don't have the answers to the questions because they are scrambling to implement as much as possible of The Vision (tm) as they can.

The answer that there hasn't been time to collect the questions is probably just a distraction, due to how trivial it'd be for someone from the CRC (Or anyone else familiar with the game) to organize the questions.

Based on how long it's taken to answer the questions I'm staying as far away as possible from the feature on release and will switch my main to a persona next year. If they can't answer a few basic questions on it, the chance of characters breaking is way too high for my tastes and I don't want to add to the queue of people asking for character rollbacks. Personally it's not a big deal. I'm planning on rolling an entire new team of Alternate Personas sometime next year when the dust settles.

If Alternate Personas are a critical feature for you, I'd recommend not purchasing the new expansion until the answers to our questions are provided.

That would be awesome, but I think we will need to level them up separately. I'm not planning on maxing out any personas for awhile, just making ones to get access to skills and spells of other classes, that will make playing my main and getting a group or my main somewhere, much easier.
In the future, I would make a persona, instead of an alt, but not going to level up a persona class, that I already have an alt maxed out for.

If you hold down alt and type 0153, you can then have The Vision™.

I don't see how they could merge an alt into another character as a persona. It may not even be something they had considered, let alone could implement. Remember, they are dealing with my most recently favorite phrase, Spaghetti Code™.
@Micker99 you will indeed need to level up any personas you add to a character. I saw it mentioned elsewhere that someone used a level 85 heroic upgrade on a persona, and it deleted the original class. Like I said in another thread, it's horribly buggy right now and not fully implemented on beta server yet. It may be possible to use a heroic upgrade on a persona down the road, otherwise, it will start at level 1.

"The Vision" should have died a horrible, painful, bloody death years ago. It was an abomination to begin with.

If there are devs still clutching to its tattered remains, they're making the game worse...not better.

How big is the dev team sure seems like it super small? they seem to be having problems with everything.

Well, a lot of the problems they make for themselves...like trying to implement too many things at the same time. There was no reason to try and tackle a new UI and DX11upgrade while trying to get a new expansion out with a new feature that was barely beyond the concept stage.

If they're spread too thin it's because they chose to do it when they knew they shouldn't.

Still better to do it in beta then doing it on live I guess?

Playing around with personas, they seem pretty decent. There are bugs to work out, but the meat of it is good right now. I'm sure it will continue to evolve and be fixed over the rest of beta and into the new expansion, but it's not awful by any means. If you see something like a level 85 heroic deleting your character, when applied to a persona, then send in a bug report, that's why there is a beta.

I'm still waiting for guild tradeskill depots.

No, that's not true, I'm kinda over that now. Hope that doesn't happen with this feature.

Fortunately, I was on an EQ break when ship-to-ship combat was released (well, not RELEASED!)

This was never an advertised feature.