Feldon 
Character Advancement Templates, as introduced in Tuesday’s Game Update 67, put a lot of powerful functionality into the hands of players, but at a cost. The overall user interface has led to a lot of confusion in the way that it was implemented. But perhaps most importantly, the ability to spend points as they are earned was lost. The system encourages plotting out your entire AA spec, while discouraging making small changes.
That said, the new functionality is quite amazing. We have gained the ability to have up to 3 Alternate Advancement trees which we can swap between anywhere, no mirror required. We can now Save/Load AA specs to our hard drives. Finally, spending points is nondestructive until you hit Commit, thus providing a rudimentary AA Calculator in-game.
Personally, I would have implemented an “AA Build Manager/Calculator” which lets you build, create, and destroy AA setups. Then I would have added Load/Save/Choose features to the existing Alternate Advancements window. The two separate windows would actually be clearer in purpose and let players have all the functionality they had before. But perhaps the team can come tweak the new system to be concise, yet retaining all the functionality.
Post SOE Live, we should expect some improvements. From Lyndro on the EQ2 Forums:
Thanks for the feedback folks. We’re going to work on getting “spend as you go back in”. We’ll have some more information in the next couple weeks, but we hear the concern and we’re going to try to get that flow back in as part of the new system.
Well my suggestion on the forum was to display some kind of highlight (particles/glow) on the “recommended” nodes. So instead of having this right column which is essentially a different layer pointing at the same nodes, a highlight of the next available nodes in the template lets the player see where to spend their next points directly in context of what they’re looking at.
Then what I’d have done is:
* if no template is selected, it would work as before
* if a template is selected in drop down, you see highlighted nodes for the next 10 or so available points to spend in (vary based based on prerequisites), you can’t spend points elsewhere but still have some freedom to explore and spend in between highlighted nodes, so eventually you end up wih the exact same 320 AA selection.
* to build a template, you enter build mode and add/remove points like on beetny, then save, then select that in drop down as your current “guide”
* if you switch “guides” then it’d say “if you switch xx AA points will be removed in order to fit the new AA template” (or just reset it all, and let user respend following the “highlighted” nodes).
But TLDR, highlighting “recommened” nodes based on a a template, that shows people where to spend AA in context.
Main issue now imho is that this column is an additional layer to the same thing (the AA nodes), which adds more confusion than anything. The way of removing pointd to make small changes is also very unintuitive.
Oh the day when they would come over to EQ2Interface and as us authors what we thought. All this could of been avoided if only they would communicate just a little…
A very poor system in my view, terribly implemented. There wasn’t a great clamouring for it, and how it got onto Live with the bug that removes all buffs (including originally Gold Rush) when even a single AA point is added I really can’t imagine.
Not everyone wants to allocate a full spec ahead of time, or even realises how best to do so, and it really does need to made optional so that those (I suspect the vast majority) who prefer to spend as they go along can do so as before.
Disappointment….For the past couple of nights I’ve been unable to spend AA points. Each time I try to spend my AA points the screen goes through the useless motions of committing, turns off all my buffs, and then my AA points reset to the current tally without using the AA points that I wanted to spend to upgrade the particular buff I wanted to commit them to.