I have taken the plunge and done one persona on two of my accounts (the only ones I got the expansion for due to budget). I haven't lost any equipment on either but on my character with Hero's Forge I have had augs and ornaments pop off on bracers and once on legs. But it was easy to replace them when I swapped again. (easier than transferring items from one alt to another in my always overfull shared bank space) I have learned to zone after swapping for Overseer and mercs to work properly. If you swap from teens to 85+, you need to zone for Overseer. If you have a merc, suspended or not, until you zone, it will appear to be gone. Other than when the server reset, I haven't had the 'wrong class' as the only one available to log in, but that might also be because I zone after swapping because of mercs and stuff. I have a 24-slot bag each for main and persona gear and put that empty one in the top loot spot for the character swapping from with the one swapping to in the next inventor slot before swapping. Then I can put the full one in the bank, swapping it for a 'looting' bag. I think of it as changing clothes for the other 'job'. This also minimizes looking around for items, too. On my persona, I am getting into a habit of doing a gear save before swapping. Same with my main character if I have changed any gear. I don't know if that's why I haven't lost anything, but it might be like the bandolier where it gets terribly confused if the gear item in the save isn't present. (I use bandolier swaps on my bard a lot.) I also put stuff in the persona's bag from my main to equip/use after swap. I do hope, though, they make the worn gear management better with a virtual space for the worn at time of swap without the need to do a "save" and have an empty bag in the top loot spot. The gear swapping is something that should have been done in a better way.
Yeah I don't think it is no where near as bad as people are trying to make it out to be. I played around with it a lot on beta trying to find ways the break it and testing it in general. It is a good system. It would be a great system if they removed the need to be in a starting city / fast camp zone to swap.
I can understand the hesitation surrounding personas because of some of the scary bugs encountered on Beta (and Test). I do personally feel it is safe to use personas, and am using them myself in my free time. For those of you who are worried still, the two updates after the expansion launch did include persona fixes. Sometimes those changes are listed as internal notes only, depending on what they include (may have been the case there). We are and will continue to fix bugs found with personas. I would encourage you to try them out and let us know if you find any bugs. If you're not ready to try them on your main, maybe try them out on an alt. I think it is pretty fun and creates some really interesting gameplay.
Yeah.... sounds very comfortable and not prone to human error at all Seriously, as long as people have to follow multipage safety instructions for a persona swap, personas will not get very popular (besides all the other issues they have). People like it KISS (keep it simple stupid).
Thank you! Also, I'd make the fixes very public and fixable and work on turning the community perception of the system. So far no issues for me, but I was highly concerned using another Heroic token on an existing heroic character. I bagged up everything I could since I was on FV, and moved it to another character. Anyways, thanks for the new feature. I don't like I'm wasting my time, when doing Hunter's now as I can experience on another Persona while doing it. Leveling is very slow 110 and up without the achievement experience, between ToV, ToL, and LS that's like 8 levels. Hope y'all can come up with some ideas around this.
By not listing personas' fixes in the patch notes and knowing how many people have had issues with these, you are shooting yourself in the foot. You should be extra pro-active about mentioning your personas' bug fixes. I went back and checked ... since the expansion patch, which mentioned personas only as a new feature, there has not been an official message about personas issues ... well, until now if we count your message as official. Alpha products should never been implemented on a 25 year code base. Personally, I'm not touching these until at least 6 months ... probably longer than that. Because if something can go wrong, it will happen to me.
Could you maybe give some examples of interesting gameplay? ATM I'm in the camp of not seeing any use of to personas with all the restrictions put on them and see no reason to use them especially over a box.
My personas are for RP reasons. I am not leveling fast out of choice and game time available. I am not using a Heroic boost though I do have a level 100 one available to me. My personas are not intended to be replacements. Half-elf Bard (120+) > Half-elf Rogue (17 now, I think): This bard is my "main". A friend of mine has a rogue that keeps teasing my bard about how she clanks and around and is far too noisy. Plus, I would like to do poison making (half kinda want to do all tradeskills on the same character so might have a shaman and gnome persona at some point, too, but the race change is an RP issue for me). Vah Beastlord (120+) > Vah Bard (18 now, I think): My beastlord's mother is a bard (my very very first character ever was a Vah bard) so my beastlord is now learning magic singing to please her. The rogue and bard are considerably OP with mount buffs and, for the rogue, veil and gnome pirate buffs. I suspect that might normalise around 75 or 85. I've been around a long time. I've gotten used to doing saves and backups frequently when doing stuff on computers and not relying on autosaves. I had a few term papers get eaten in the late 80s and hard drive fails in the 90s and later to teach me those lessons. But, yes, I do agree that they could be more popular when some of the quirks are ironed out. But, they are far from unusable now. However, without a virtual storage for worn equipment, I can't see how a swap in any location without a bank would be very useful. The summoned banker couldn't be used because summoning it before the swap to get a gear set would be dispelled (as all buffs are) when swapping but, I think, the cool down timer would make it unavailable to resummon after the swap to put that now filled bag into the bank. I would not want to sally forth on an adventure with a bag full of gear that I'm not using at that time and might accidentally sell if wasn't paying attention. While they are usable and kind of fun now, I do know there are improvements that could make them better and more widely attractive without becoming a new way to exploit.
Niente - Do you know of any ways to get the spell books on 2 of my persona's swapped back to the correct classes?
On Beta, whenever they changed persona code, my character would get reset to the exact time they made a persona. It appeared that the moment you make your first persona a 'snapshot' is made for easy rollback from breaking bugs. I don't know if they put that code on live.
Gotta say...you guys making changes to the game and/or gameplay and choosing NOT to tell people about it sounds a little shady and not really instilling confidence. Transparency is always preferred.
From reading the forums, it sounds like these problems may still be out there and would be serious enough that you might not want to use personas with your important characters: * Occasional loss of plat in the character's inventory (workaround: store plat in shared bank) * Personas have mixed up spellbooks (workaround: re-mem spells into spell book) * Item loss(?) I'm not sure if this one is still happening. There were some early reports of people losing everything, but I don't think anyone has reported it again in a while. * Camp as one persona log in as other (workaround: make sure you camp in safe spot for all personas) If you had an alt that you didn't play much, that might be good to try out personas. For instance, one thing I'm doing is creating a Druid persona on my Warrior on account #2 to be the taxi/buff bot for the characters on account #1. A persona is good for this since I already have a Druid on #1 and all my character slots on #2 are full. This way I can add a Druid buff/taxi bot on #2 without having to delete a character to do it. I don't really play the Warrior all that much, so if he gets bugged and takes a while to get fixed, I won't really care. This way I can cast Druid buffs on my characters on account #1 without having to dedicate a character slot on #2 to a Druid that I wouldn't really use for anything else.
My job is software testing for routers. There are somethings that do not go in customer release notes. Items that expose security holes, even by patching them to not exist, are usually not in the customer release notes. Sometimes small changes, like for spelling, etc. are not in the release notes. There are other exceptions, too. It's not to hide things or to be shady, it's part of the development process. Not every single change in the outward facing release notes is 100% normal. Release notes, like all customer facing documentation also needs to be "sanitised" to not be alarming. Saying "adjustments made to personas" would have elicited a bunch of questions, recriminations, and conspiracy theories for what the adjustments were, why those were "wasted" development, and how they affect thus and so in whatever way (real or imagined). And, sometimes release notes are not in the vernacular of everyone who could possibly view them, i.e. "performance improvements" vs "fixing lag" especially when the vernacular is not as technically precise.
