What does synergy AA / dicho spells have to do with reducing the value added by classes with valuable long-term buffs?
What exactly does either of those have to do with being able to get full buffs from every class on a group?
Zone limits might not make it completely worthless. It does make it worth less. OOC timers are enough of a restriction Oh no someone could do more buffs the horror I camp my buff boxes there that are on separate accounts and log them in once every XX minutes, or leave them logged in for oog help So if the Devs dont want that , they have a big problem it can already be done
My reply is only to Waring's concern classes won't be invited to groups due to Persona swapping for buffs. Synergy AAs created "correct" group make-ups for performance.
More unique AAs, more AAs that autogrant does not provide. Means longer longer longer catchup time for a catchup/newplayer. 5 years from now, they gotta do all that stuff. It's like the heroic AAs, heroic vitality, it gives like what 20k HME, missing out, thats big and expansions expect that you have that. The gap between actually catchup player high end casual player is pretty big. 160k HME buffed vs say 430k HME unbuffed. Those AAs make a dent too. And they are very much a timesink. Something end game players, raiders keep pushing. Timesinks put them in those raids, quit smoothering casual content with timesinks. Raiders are bored, raids need timesinks. Casuals don't wanna be overwhelmed timesinks for keeping end game played for years casuals/ raiders happy.
I think that saying it will reduce the value for some players is a much more accurate statement then ones saying it will make it worthless.
Relative to the amount work it will take to implement personas, having it limited to certain zones will reduce the usage to the point where it's probably not worth the development effort. It would be better to spend that time on other features which will have a broader impact and have more overall usefulness. Pretty much anytime a suggestion is made for improvement in EQ, no matter how minor, there is lots of opposition saying the devs don't have time to spend on it. But here we have a very complicated feature that is going to take up a lot of dev time. If the player base does not get a level of usefulness proportional to the dev effort, then the effort is misplaced. Certainly any feature will be useful by some portion of the players, but with limited dev effort they shouldn't be devoting this much time to something which won't be used that much. In my opinion, having personas limited to certain zones changes it from a "I want to try that out" to a "why bother" feature.
Let's look at what can be done now with alts. I have my alt <class> for whatever purpose on the same account as my main. I take the alt to the the camp area and when I need to buff, rezz, loot or whatever I camp my main out which takes 30 seconds in a combat zone, get the alt and log in. That will take a minute or two at the least. I can have a vet rewards banker out too if I want to Imposing cooldowns and zone restrictions make Alternate Persona absolutely worthless. If it take a lot more time to swap over or I can only do it is a few precious non-combat zones it's totally and completely worthless. I don't even think in combat should be a restriction. If you can camp out during a fight then you should be able to switch during a fight. That being said I think the racial class limits should remain in place as a limit to what you can do with it. They may change it to something else but that at least will make racial choices meaningful for a change
Problem is it isn't just racial limitations but deity ones that need to be considered as well. If you are a worshiper of Tunare it wouldn't make sense to allow an evil class such as a necromancer or shadow knight. If you allow people to change deity as part of the persona process it wouldn't make sense to not allow them to change race as well.
Those are all valid points, but the more restrictions personas have, the less useful will be. If there are class/race/deity/zone limitations, then that means fewer/fewer/fewer/fewer people will use them. I agree with you that those are issues that will affect personas. But if there are so many restricting issues, perhaps they should do a complete rethink on this sort of feature. It reminds me of that scene in the movie "The Jerk" where Steve Martin is a carnival worker standing in front of a wall of prizes. However, when asked which prizes someone can win, he points to a small box in the middle with a pencil in and and says something like "Nothing above this box, nothing to the left of this box, nothing to the right of this box, and nothing below this box. So just this pencil in this box." What might be a better way to accomplish personas is to leverage actual alts. Two characters can be linked as personas. If they are personas, then things like tradeskill levels and keying states will be checked from both characters. If your other character has 300 in tailoring, then that 300 tailoring will apply to you. If your other character has been keyed for the zone, then you are keyed for the zone. Sharing inventory would be a bit problematic, but it might be simpler to solve that than to deal with the race/class issues. If they can rethink how to deliver the benefits of personas in a different way, they may be able to accomplish it in a more useful way.
I love how not being able to use AP in a specific way that certain people want makes it 100% worthless. Lots of hyperbole in this thread...
I disagree Racial choices shouldn’t have restrictions and players should be able to role play a character as they’d like. Ideally, there’d be quest lines that would have something like an Ogre mastering the Arcane or the attainment of some special item. I disagree with in combat switching as I think that would led to a detriment in gameplay and make it unfun. It reminds me of weapon swapping from ESO, where you need to constantly swap to perform well. It just never felt fun to me.
If it doesn't give at least some advantage over just camping out to an alt then why bother at all? Yeah that does make it 100% useless. As for out of race class selection that's one thing I don't think is appropriate at all. If you can't get it at character creation then no cheesing it in AP. The only possible way that all race/ all class should be considered is if some of the overpowered racial perks are removed from the game
Agreed. And it could have quite a few restrictions and still be very useful but many will claim it is now ruined but will still probably use it.
The fact that you share many things across your persona such as inventory and flags give it a nice advantage over alts.
all my characters inventories are perpetually full. I would have been happy with the Oakwynd most items being Heirloom rule going to live.
I'd argue being able to share gear makes it definitely not useless. Collecting all of the little min/max augs/clicks/etc in the game takes a long, long time. Being able to share those things across toons is definitely useful. It's one of the major hindrances to having alts in the first place, if you're someone who values your performance in the game.
If they would just put the Legacy/heirloom rules on Live, sharing gear across alts wouldn't be an issue...and wouldn't require some gimmicky multi-class system.
