4 months after release, what's your highest persona?

When the personas were released I had planned to level a batch of them this summer. The free heroics are making me consider popping a few krono to activate my accounts and collect, but I am worried I'll get tired of overseer and grinding in the 115+ levels! I had hoped that DPG would do something to alleviate this experience and make personas more impactful, but I haven't heard of anything planned.

I'm curious how the community is handling personas to see how I'd fare!

1. What's your highest persona?
2. Roughly how many hours did it take to get to that level?
3. Did you use a heroic character for them?
4. What % of your leveling came from overseer?
5. If leveling personas at the 115+ levels was easier, would you be more likely to use personas?
6. If you could switch personas in any zone, would you be more likely to use personas?

if they changed a few things on personas alot more folks would use them.. as it stands.. they are completely useless and the grind from 110-125 is unbearable to most with no achieve exp etc..

they should add a bonus to exp on personas, based on what achievements you have completed.

also if they would give alt personas seperate DZ timers i guarantee you would see everyone using alt personas.. that being said.. very few people are using them and the ones that are, are just basic grping and grinding their life away

0. this feature should be removed and any personas spunoff into alts. no clue who came up with this brain-fart feature at this point, it's a waste of code and support programmers.

Level 10. That was mostly just playing around with them a little on Mischief. I've considered making a SK persona on my level 125 Paladin, but I'm not sure what I would use it for. I do think it would be fun to blow through the early levels with all her hero's AAs, though.

Personas are the only reason I would still play this game outside of the month or 2 when a new expansion is released. There is no real reason to play this game after that. I guess maybe if you feel raiding is fun but it is so easy right now that everyone has beat it on most servers even the guilds who are terrible.

So why do you play the game?

1) To just talk with other people?
2) Endlessly replay boring easy raids for some rare drop you want?
3) Grind group stuff?
4) Completionist trying to get all achievements on a single toon (this can be done now with personas but could never be completed before they were added)

Personas is the only reason I played for over 2 months when the new expansion came out because I had something to do after finishing all achievements in LS within a month. Given there were a few things that were a pain to finish in LS just getting the necklace took me over a month to do and then another month of grinding after maxing exp trying to get it.

They need to fix evolving gear so you don't grind to max exp then have to grind again for no reason other than exping the gear. This is one of the reasons why I stopped grinding personas because after getting tinkering / poison maxed I was tired of all the time I had grinded for leveling the cloak to want to finish leveling the rog to 120 and knowing i still have to max a sham for potion maxing too at some point.

You stupid if you make an alt today, there is no reason with persona unless for some reason you want 2 alts of the same class. (it is possible to want to do this for certain reasons but could be related to exploits so I won't go into details on why someone would do this).

I do love the fact that I can go solo tons of old raids and loot gear to use on personas. It makes my love of twinking so much easier since I don't have to log over to another toon and run him in to loot gear after I beat it on main.

You stupid if you make an alt today, there is no reason with persona unless for some reason you want 2 alts of the same class. (it is possible to want to do this for certain reasons but could be related to exploits so I won't go into details on why someone would do this).

definitely not, there is no way im going to grind from 110 to 125 without achieve exp.. that is insanity.. ill make an alt over using persona even with all the gear buffs etc ANY DAY

1: Zero
2-3: N/A
4: Yes
5: Yes
Extra: Persona equipment management system would also make me want to play a persona.

1. What's your highest persona? Zero personas created.
5. If leveling personas at the 115+ levels was easier, would you be more likely to use personas? Yes.
6. If you could switch personas in any zone, would you be more likely to use personas? Yes.

I would consider making personas if inventory management was easy and convenient and if leveling was reasonable.

As it is now, I'm not going to suffer with 37465 bags with items and augments (managing inventory is already a pain just with a main character with all his gear, TS, collects, etc). Also, I'm not going to start insane grinds to get personas from 115 to 125.

Would like to hear from people how they level them and how long it took them to reach 125.

Created 3, all on different accounts.

Highest level is 63.
They was hoping for easter rare bonus which didn't happen. Personas are purely to get missing achievements on my main. These 3 are set up to get my last LDON hunter.

If you were to ask me the one thing I would like to see to encourage me to play them more, it would be better storage. I'm also not a fan of personas sharing max number of quests and rewards, quest rewards wouldn't be so much of a pain if there was better storage for them.

No rush for levels it happens when it happens, changing class is usually done before I leave the guild hall not during game play so having to be in a city or a fast camp zone isn't an issue for me, especially as I can loot on any persona and all can use.

What's your highest persona? - zero

Roughly how many hours did it take to get to that level? - zero

Did you use a heroic character for them? - no

What % of your leveling came from overseer? - none

If leveling personas at the 115+ levels was easier, would you be more likely to use personas? - no

If you could switch personas in any zone, would you be more likely to use personas? - maybe if I wanted to "main" change.

I've been using personas on both FV and Rizlona and enjoying them.

1. 125
war | brd | rog | shm | bst | pal <-- main squad, 125 through achs
pal | mag | wiz | dru | wiz | enc <-- personas, also 125
shd | bst | ber | clr | mnk | brd <-- personas, currently 117

2. Probably 80-100 hours for squad 2? Squad 3 is probably 30 hrs deep.

Most of this leveling was on FV during the 50% anniversary bonus with RAF accounts, something like 400% exp modifiers. I don't think I would have leveled without these bonuses. Also, my groups have pretty high kill rates, and I did a large chunk of leveling during daily lessons. I think my average time per level 110-125 was around 1.5-2hrs.

3. Squad 2 - no. Squad 3 - yes, the free 100 boosts

4. Probably 10-15%

5. Yes

6. No, I'll use them with or without the restriction.

Leveling personas 110-125 is an absolutely ridiculous mind-numbing slog. There's no way I would've done it if I didn't have a ton of exp bonuses. I can easily see why people would turn to automation. If I were on a normal server with regular accounts I probably wouldn't bother until extra life bonuses tbh.

Best take on personas, I will never use this strange feature.

1. What's your highest persona? 61
2. Roughly how many hours did it take to get to that level? No idea, but I played ultra casually
3. Did you use a heroic character for them? No
4. What % of your leveling came from overseer? None
5. If leveling personas at the 115+ levels was easier, would you be more likely to use personas? Yes
6. If you could switch personas in any zone, would you be more likely to use personas? Yes

Still waiting for them to complete them and make them useful. Maybe by next expansion release?

I was curious to see if there was anything in the AMA about Persona, here's some quotes from https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/the-ama-responses-are-here.296796/

tldr: Looks like there are no plans to make Personas easier to level or more desirable

Q: Are there any plans to further fine tune Personas, and possibly make them more useful, without so many down-sides?
Niente: If you have specific feedback or ideas for personas, we’d love to hear them.

Q: is there any plan for offering in game quests to help with leveling persona's?
Absor: I don’t know. /shrug. It’s not something I’ve thought about. I’ll think about it and see if that’s even a thing we can do.
Pip: The idea for personas was to experience leveling up these other classes on the same character. There is a lot of Norrath out there ripe for a budding adventurer!

Q: What are your future plans for Personas, either in rule changes or otherwise?
Niente: These are not official plans, but things we may do in the future. I’d like to see UX improvements like inventory management, swapping personas with a hotkey or slash command, viewing EXP and AA in the persona tab, equipment sets displaying properly in the persona tab, being able to delete a persona. In the long term future, making swapping more performant (the primary bottleneck is reloading the UI). We have plans to add the ability to have a portion of a zone enable changing personas (for example, the inn in Laurion’s Inn) and to add a zone specific flag to enable changing personas. I do not have an ETA on these improvements.

Q: Gear and Personas - Can we have a way of changing archtypes and classes on gear?
Aristo: Probably not. Race/Class/Deity requirements are inherent properties of the item, so we'd either have to fundamentally change how items are stored and addressed by the game, or make new copies of items for every permutation. Neither of those options are likely.

Q: The stat differences between archtype-specific evolving items in TBL, TOV, NOS, and LS are very minor. Can these items be merged into one to make personas more feasible? 
Ngreth: While possible, this would make for more bland items, and if you see questions above, people are already upset with how “bland” things are.

Q: Could there be an xp buff, similar to the legacy buff, that grants a small boost to XP for each Alt Persona you have at the current max level?
Ngreth: We will speak about this internally, but there are not promises of either doing this or a schedule for it if we do decide to do it.

Q: I know you hear this a lot, any plan to make grinding personas any better?
Ngreth: Other than the above mentioned conversation, there are no plans at this time.

Q: With personas not being able to get achievements the base char has already done, can we get EXP added to the merc quests in ToV - NoS please?
Ngreth: This is not in the current plans. I will not shut the door on it, but, for now, the answer is no.

i have heard too many horror story's of Personas effecting mains so i don't even want to try them.

But really whats the point just make an alt. only awesome feature would be fast switching toons anyplace but they killed that.

From a business point a view its a really dumb idea and could take away from revenue.
Why buy another account for an alt when i can just roll a persona,
granted you could just roll another toon but here is another way you can avoid paying us money.

just LOL

Hey devs try playing eq for awhile and really see what people want.
OR just read the 1000's of suggestions here we tell you what we want to give you money for.

In AMA thread, there was also a comment regarding features released in previous EQ expansions. They said they generally have no plans returning and working on past content.

It would be nice if they improved personas but I doubt that will happen. Next expansion is going to have another weird system/thing that nobody asked for and most people will dislike .

I am interested in Personas for a few reasons. 1 is all the valuable stuff I don't have to get to enjoy other classes. Port clickies for example. The other reason is that this is a more fun way for my main to get things slayer ACH than killing grey cons, or a better ability to solo. I am interested in personas.

However...

The furthest I got with personas was the character creation screen. I did not create a persona at all. This is because I convinced a friend to try EQ, I was going to level the persona with them, but the persona did not have the option to start in the tutorial. As a result, I had to create an alt to get into the tutorial with them.

My greatest concern with personas is not the leveling. Inventory management is the reason I have not created and leveled a persona. A secondary issue is that a number of things, like cloak XP and AAs for glyphs in raids, can't be earned on the persona. So as much as I want to make a persona that is better for soloing than an ENC, or a nice change of pace for playing group content outside of the same class I have played forever (which I love, but lets face it, Crowd control is all but obsolete around raid tanks), I haven't been able to move forward with a persona as a good investment.

Correction, they don't do what you want. They are not "useless", they just don't let you have all the class powers anywhere and at any time you want.
They are a different way to make an alt, not a powerup for your existing characters.

I do agree that leveling is horribly designed post 110 and has problems being one time achievement based. However even if grinding wasn't hard, that doesn't change what PAs are. An alt, not a powerup.

1. What's your highest persona?
   1. 101 Rogue
2. Roughly how many hours did it take to get to that level?
   1. 1 hour of effort
3. Did you use a heroic character for them?
   1. Yes, to 100.
4. What % of your leveling came from overseer?
   1. 80%
5. If leveling personas at the 115+ levels was easier, would you be more likely to use personas?
   1. No. My primary use of personas is to augment my main character (125 Berserker). I made the gnome rogue to have easy access to tinkering and poisonmaking while being able to spend raid currency and reuse raid gear on it (for fun). I doubt I'll want to play as a rogue much.
6. If you could switch personas in any zone, would you be more likely to use personas?
   1. Maybe, but I appreciate the limitation. I would foresee myself turning into a wizard and bard to travel, a monk to get to difficult location, and then a magician to CotH people to a desired location if the option was made available to me. But I also don't want that power. I want the limitations of challenge and risk. Overcoming those limitations and achieving a goal despite the limitations are the rewarding part for me.