You need to level and AA the new personas from scratch. So it’s just like making a box but worse. It seems like it would be a massive time investment to maintain in the AA eras especially when you are burning glyphs on raids and have like 10,000aa to be raid ready.
I'm messing with alternate personas right now on the Mischief server, and this is pretty spot on.
The only benefit you get is:
- No reflagging for alts because all perosnas get the same flags on that character
- Not having to buy mounts for alts because all personas share the mounts on that character
- One time /claim items get to be used across all your personas on that character, so splurge on expensive stupid shit cause you only need it once
- Being able to go do something on your character when no one else is online by swapping to a persona that is more solo-friendly
Beyond that, there is no benefit, and in reality you get sucker punched in the nuts on some things by not just having an actual alt character rather than an alternate persona. One such kick to the nuts is the fact that an alt character can log out somewhere and log back in to that same place later. As an alternate persona, your character is going to login at the last place your last alternate persona logged out. You can't have an alt in like Sirens Grotto and another alt working over in another zone. Instead, you have to login as the last persona that logged out, go to a fast camp zone (aka PoK or starting city), swap to the persona you actually want to play, and then travel back to the spot you where you want to play. It's a bullshit mechanic that makes AP suck.
They could make Alternate Personas pretty damn nice if they did just two simple things:
- Make it so you can swap personas anywhere as long as you are out of combat
- Make it so you can choose WHICH persona to log in as at the character select screen
If they added those two features, Alternate Personas would be a win for the game.
If they wanted to make APs not trivialize raid content, all they would have to do is make it so that you can't swap personas in a raid zone. That's it. It's not that hard to fix some of the exploits that AP would create in the game.
The only other thing they could add to the Alternate Persona system to make it a win win is create an alternate persona dragon horde where your alternate persona's equipped gear gets put when you swap personas. The fact that it tosses you equipped gear randomly in to your bags when you swap alternate personas is a huge annoyance. I can't imagine trying to keep track of gear for all the classes in the game if you had all the alternate persona class slots opened. It would literally be a nightmare.