The answer is to the wrong question and doesn't answer this one. The full question for this was The important bit being in red.
Y'all need to STOP thinking in terms of "at will". All during the beta process, we were asking for a time lockout identical or similar to swapping out a mercenary, which is five minutes. To swap out a mercenary, you must be out of combat and have the OOC regen active. For example, I need a fresh cleric buff, I sawp to my healer merc once the OOC regen becomes active. I get my buff, but because of the swap lockout timer, I have to wait five minutes before I can swap back to my other merc. In regards to personas, there would be an additional lockout timer added, due to the extended time before OOC regen kicks in, during raids. Thus further preventing this "at will" behavior y'all keep harping on. We cannot swap out a merc on the fly, we all agree we shouldn't swap out personas on the fly. An identical or similar lockout timer to swap would negate the potential "exploit", and make the use of personas more desirable.
This would work far better than trying to add an area in zones that is safe for players to swap persona. Take Guk for instance, the run for that would be aweful if you had to change in a starting city on TLPs, as would Sol A & B, Permefrost, etc. Kunark is even worse.
The thing that really bugs me about the achievement/progression system is how unbalanced it seems (for me) for it's intended purpose. There should be enough experience in the partisan and mercenary "quest" achievements for people to level from 1-5 through the expansion they come out in but they should also be easy enough for every class to solo/molo, in previous expansion group gear, until they get to the hero "mission" achievements. That is the place where any kind of grouping should be necessary, even being able to be completed by maybe 3PCs plus mercs. Some of the difficulty jumps in mobs is crazy and unnecessarily prohibitive to returning/FTP players, especially if they haven't picked up their AA count yet. To go a step further I think they should also reward lowest tier "catch-up" armor as reward pieces for completing some of the achievements. Just something to make sure that players have ample opportunity to participate in the newest expansion at least on the lowest level. Keep the merc tasks as the "grinding" option of the quests by upping the kill counts or whatever so it's best of both worlds and let the partisan/hero tasks tell the story of the zone or part of the expansion. You won't have to worry about creating features that you have to maintain if you just create good content and let people in to experience it. People will buy and sub for the story if it's good. We don't necessarily need another keychain.
I would not be opposed to a merc task <Short / medium / long> - 10 / 50 / 150 kill task With scaled rewards for xp repeatable. 10 is so short it becomes annoying to go back to task giver over and over <not to mention you lose killing a mob if it is far from camp, 50 is ok for a lesson burn, 150ish would be fine for a comfy camp.
The problem is if you make it too many players don't move on and others cannot complete their quests. When players are just after hunter, they don't mind if you take a few for a quest if you are all doing the kill quests ithere isn't enough mobs of any type for the numbers you are suggesting. I quite liked the idea with LI, collect all quests and start killing where no one else is and move round the camps. I found you could pull 2 or 3 types of mobs to 1 spot, without having to long a pull.
This is a disappointing response. Monks get massively out of era H2H damage and 25% bonus melee damage just for being level 60, but casters are saddled with worse itemization and minimal opportunities to catch up for 6+ months, thanks to a decision that was made as a unique feature for Mangler server. The inconsistency present with what should and shouldn't be allowed "in era" is very difficult to follow from a player perspective.
Don't get me wrong, I love the concepts of Personas, and Have 5 different ones on my main toon because I was so excited about the prospect, and while I definitely see the potential benefits of some of the things you listed, there are still many concerns. 1. One of the other big ones I forgot to mention was leveling from TOV (111) and beyond. While a regular alt can just do progression missions to level, on a persona, those are no longer available. With the experience from killing mobs not an option (and not to be an option according to Ngreth's response), that basically only leaves Overseer as a reasonable option to level up a persona. While Overseer is a neat little side feature in EQ to me, I don't think it should be the primary option to level up characters / personas, and do believe other leveling options should be looked into. 2. Is it possible to code that Personas basically get autogranted DON and MPG progression when they reach a certain level? So you don't have to repeat it on each persona? Maybe when they hit level 85 so it kind of acts like a heroic character?
As far as I am aware, if you zone into MPG you get the MPG progression granted that you have already done.May need to be over level 65 I'm not sure I'm just under level 60 on my personas. DON is a little different as it is faction based. Maybe they could do it that if you hail the commander in the relevent camp that you get a faction adjustment to be the same as the main/persona that has completed the DoN progession achchievement. I can understand personas not having the same faction on everything the main has, my woodelf faction would make my Iksar persona KOS in their home city for example. But I simple hail to change 1 faction should be a good work around to fix the faction and one I'm sure the players would accept. After all 1 hail or a number of hails has to be better than doing all the faction.
Ahh it must be only when you have 6/6. I know I had 5/6 on my main initially when I tried zoning in, and the persona didn't get any of them when I zoned in on the persona. Will zone back in once I get home to see if it works now that I'm 6/6.
Is there a way to just have persona's share faction hits received by the player, without sharing base faction? That would solve a ton of problems.
Don't really need to go global could just share faction of specific progression ones, there aren't too many required progression based factions in game. Or in the case of DoN figure a way to untangle it and ignore factions, that too.
Yeah but little issues i'm running into would help if that's possible. Did progression and got faction in HoT on my mage persona, so was able to buy my T2-T3 spells. But wizard persona isn't factioned, so bascially i'm going to have to repeat Progression anyways for the faction to buy the spells on my persona.
I've not done the HoT content, so I truly don't know. Are all the spell vendors on the same faction? If so, wouldn't you be able to buy them with your mage persona?
The spells are class specific - ie a mage cannot buy the spells for an enchanter etc. However a mage with faction can buy the spells and give them to another mage who doesn't have the faction as they are tradeable after you turn in the dream fragment. At least I used to buy them up with one class and resell them in baz for players who did not have the faction (not on FV )
This is like saying that Dailies in WoW were really popular because it had high engagement numbers. The metric is only so high because players had to do it because they’re the only/best rewards for time.
Another route honestly is just make it expansion specific. All expansions post PoP <LDoN/LoY included> are cross faction. This is the most clean option Velious itself would be an iffy starting point, but you might not want to be insta KoS in thurg on your new persona. Luclin - Still has seru <Hates evils>/ opposing faction, but it feels so minor so it wouldn't exactly be terrible starting point at the earliest. That way each of the Faction based progression expansion get crossed, while not hurting those older expansions that your might not want crossed. Mainly Kunark/Classic based factions.
This AMA response was unexpectedly thorough and insightful. I have a much better understanding and appreciation now of the efforts by the dev team and the restrictions you face. I have been here since the beginning and I appreciate that there are still people dedicated to the cause of keeping this game alive. Well done!
I don’t understand why they went through this . There a vast majority of “nope” as a answer. It really looks as a waste of time.
