Alternate Persona

Now wouldn't it be nice if you could 'merge' existing alts into a 'main' on the same server/account.

If they did this, pictured below is the Shadowknight main I rolled and switched to last fall and my warrior main I've had for two decades.

I also would guess you would not retain buffs when switching personas. While having level 125 buffs on a level 1 would really help with leveling speed, I doubt if that would end up being the case. Maybe it will be like how shrouds handle buffs. When you shroud you're unbuffed, but the buffs you had prior to the shroud are saved off. When you switch back, you lose your current buffs and whatever buffs you had before you shrouded are restored.

We’re probably not getting account to account transfers again. They might as well do this instead.

"Merging" alts into your main (destroying the alt in the process) makes no sense from a business standpoint.

They'll just sell you 15* AP slots & you'll have to level, AA & gear each one - Heroic Upgrade option being available one per AP.

*if you don't buy them with Laurion's song.

I wonder if we'll get flying mounts with Dual Spec.

What? Of course it makes sense to do (pending difficulty). If I have 2 characters different classes on 1 account and would rather have 1 character with 2 personas, then offering a paid service to turn 1 into a persona of the other makes perfect sense.

Not really if selling you a persona slot is much easier & cheaper to do than all the additional coding required to achieve the merge token.

And if the "token" to turn an alt into a persona was the same price or more expensive (to reflect the extra cost of doing it) than a persona slot how much sense does that make?

What if they priced it by the level of the alt? The higher the level the alt had the greater the cost, level 115 alt = 100 heroic upgrade price plus additional cost for each level after that added on top?

What is the motivation for turning an alt into a persona slot? Cheaper Persona Slot upgrade? freeing up a character slot on the account? transferring no trade items from the alt's inventory to the main? (this they could fix using Heirloom tag)

I think those questions is what he means by the pending difficulty statement. It is an interesting idea but I think the work involved will make it unlikely to happen. Just thinking of the fun of merging two characters that have their inventory and bank filled with max size bags and all slots filled up.

Not having to flag and do tradeskills on the alt? Ya know...basically the entire purpose of the AP system.
You also seem to be thinking this token would grant you a persona slot which it doesn't necessarily have to do. They could make you have an open slot to use it.

I think it really comes down to how they would want to implement it. Does the alt just get flagged as a persona of the main keeping only thing things from the main or does it try to do things like merging flags and skills. And the inventory would obviously be a big problem.

There was a response from a developer about APs in the Beta forums.

Basically, implementation for the APs is not finished and there has been unexpected challenges during implementation. They have only basic UI and creating a new persona done, which is why it's not available for testing. The dev didn't want to say more about the feature yet as some things might change before release.

It was a refreshing display of candor but also a bit scary undercurrent that the expansion might launch without this feature, which is pretty much the only feature.

You get all of that with the persona system as described which is said to include things like flags and skills but it doesn't sound like you will merge characters.

Its this years guild tradeskill depot. They mention it as an expansion feature but its likely not happening for awhile.

If they do this right I am basically all in. I've been burnt out on my class, but the idea of restarting all the achievement / tradeskills and other item grinding is completely overwhelming.

Right so you'd have the option of either rolling a new alt as a persona and starting from level 1 or buying this new token that doesn't exist to keep your level and gear to make an alt into a persona.

I agree. I also would need to know if the grind from 1-125 is going to be so severe (as in, missing out on the chunk XP boosts from expansion achievements and only being able to mob XP grind/overseer) that the time constraint for most normal players (those who don't have a permanent group available whenever they want) is such that it is not worth it to invest that time.

As personas share the same inventory/bank how would that system handle it if both characters had a full inventory and bank? The fact that they haven't mentioned merging characters but that it shares most things from your character indicates that at least at this time merging isn't in the plans.

Alt slots are where you're races are going to be going. Your Human or Drakkin may have 13 different Persona and your Vah Shir alt will have the BST, BRZ and SHM classes covered.

Of course it's unlikely that anyone will have just 2 characters but it'd be perfectly workable to do it that way

That doesn't seem like it would add any value as the point is to be able to switch to other classes and not just a limited set based on what your race is.

People dont spend alot of time levelling 1-110.....so its not like you are going to spend a weekend in Lower Guk.