Building Personas and Alternate Ability Challenges

One drawback to taking advantage of the persona function is the challenge to not only level to the cap (based upon the type of server) but grinding out the AAs. On Mangler my main raiding character is a druid - level cap 115, all AA's capped 230 banked, 46,762 assigned, 46,884 total spent. Except for the 122 AAs that were auto-granted after a patch every single AA was obtained grinding. I think in light of the hundreds of hours within a few months (with expansions lasting 2-3 months on TLP servers as opposed to 6-12 months on Live) indicates the player base puts the time in-game.

I created a necro persona, used the level 100 heroic boost DB granted, and then did the experience grind to 115. 111-115 was challenging since the ToV experience grind required completing achievements more than anything else. Compound the daunting task of AA grinding and I'm unsure I'll continue or take advantage of the persona game feature going forward.

Mangler will have the CoV expansion released next week on May 2nd. While the level cap remains at 115, there will be 9k or so new AAs to grind out on the main character. The auto grant feature for the necro awarded 17,465 and so far I've grinded 494 - but there are simply not enough hours in the week to keep the personas viable without some type of change. The Focus AAs are a particular challenge since they're essential to the character viability.

For me, once you get past 110, overseer is the most efficient way of levelling persona's for real xp. Assuming you're past the autogrant cap for AA's by that point, just switch all xp to AA's

It depends never try to get aa from overseer. It is broken and doesn't give good aa exp. Always do 100% normal exp and it will give you some merc aa as well. If you adjust it to go to aa exp for overseer you get almost no aa exp and no merc aas.

you dont need all your aas maxed to have a good functioning character. Hell, at least 50% is more or less fluff.
Apart from that, with a couple of friends in a decent group, you can make 100-200 aas per lesson nps ( we did, our group was usually bst,dru,sk,rogue,necro in that the tov/cov era ). and that's apart from any other aas you get while camping augments and other stuff. Just gotta work together a bit.

The best way to get AA from Overseer is via collections. You get more AA per collection the higher your level when you finish the collection.

I fail to see the problem here. You don't have enough time to grind out all the AAs for AP's for a TLP schedule before another expac comes out.

Pretty sure those are achievements thus unless they're still available to be completed as the persona, wouldn't be relevant.

That doesn't change the fact they're the best way to get AA from Overseer which is all that I was remarking on.

Isn't that the same as saying you get most of your level up XP from the expansion progression achievements? Sure you can use small amount of AA on a single persona but you are going to run out quickly. Not to mention if you are using overseer for collections you will need 32 missions (not counting critical results) to complete each set which takes a while and makes grinding faster.

Tradeskill AAs should be shared.

As long as the known recipe list is shared (just checked, it is) AAs and skill ups are trivial by comparison.

TS and language skill-ups are already shared. Combat and spell skill ups are not.

It is my current understanding that they are not sharing any AAs which are already excluded from the auto-grant. If I am mistaken on this point, I am interested to hear any counter-examples.

Overseer doesn't give AA only real xp
So just spend your game time doing AA's - which you can see tangible progress on, and let the overseer take care of the real xp.

Obviously if you're on Live, only switch to AA xp when you hit 115, as you're still getting autogrant up to then.

Merc xp is largely irrelevant. If you were maxed on merc AA's pre persona's on your main character, then the persona's share this progress.

Not 100% true. I had to level up 2 personas to 105 and get a ton of aa because the tradeskill ones don't auto grant. So you must manually get poison, potion, tinkering, and then your main can get all the other tradeskills which requires leveling aa.

That only applies to a small number of AA and only if you care about getting those at all or before you finish leveling up the persona. I think the bigger issue is what overseer quests directly reward you with AA? My understanding is all the rewards only grant level/merc xp and the only way to get AA xp is with the one time achievement for each collection set which are not an overseer only feature.

Well that is a problem with overseer. When it first was created you could pick aa as a reward and got decent aa. However as we leveled up the overseer never was adjusted so if you get aa overseer reward it gives you like 5% aa or something stupid low because you are getting like level 80 mob kill aa exp instead of level 125.

Not for post 300. Its like 500AA per skill, so like 4k AAs.

I don't remember if that was the case but since you can't get AA xp from it anymore it doesn't really matter.

Do the Final Fugue mission, pop Lesson before opening the chest, loot the content, teleport to Shadow Heaven, burn through Door mission, loot the chest, teleport to Maiden Eye, do Ka Vethan mission, loot the chest. All than on 1 Lesson. Aboout 130 AA each for all characters in the group. Plust several Rk3 spells, which will sell for a decent pp later at bazaar.
Rinse, repeat for the next crew. Over 900 AA per week not including actual grind. Easy-peasy.

Does campfire sharing work for AA's?