Feldon 
If you haven’t read last night’s EverQuest “What’s Next” Show transcript, then you missed out on a number of announcements for EQ2’s as-yet-unannounced Game Update 67.
Two items of note:
Character Advancement Templates — For players who don’t want to spend 320 AA points one-at-a-time, there will be certain templates which are recommended AA setups for each class. You can click a button and have it spend the points for you, and if you don’t have enough points to get everything suggested by the template, it will remember and keep those AA bubbles highlighted.
Alternate Advancement Profiles — You will now be able to store up to 3 Alternate Advancement setups or “profiles” on your character and access them anywhere. No more kludgy AA mirrors. You will also be able to load/save your AA setup to an XML file.
EQ2U intends to support AA Profiles on day one, as well as offer the ability to export a character’s AA setup from EQ2U as an XML file which you can then import into your own character!
I’m almost afraid to consider what some of the default AA templates for the various classes might look like. =P
They’ll either crib them from successful players, in which case they may be quirky, but will at least be viable, or they’ll make them up in-house to fit some sort of “theme”, in which case they’ll be train wrecks.
Smart money is on one of these options…
But, really, who cares? Loading AA via XML (and the death of AA mirrors) is a phenomenal step in the right direction for QOL.
This sounds like great news to me. With all the AA choices I really need 3 profiles. One each for raiding, soloing and Battlegrounds.
This website ,eq2 wire, has made playing EQ2 much more enjoyable. I check here everyday for the latest EQ2 news. This news of upcoming support for AA profiles is just incredible. Thank you for all your hard work. If I make it out to SOE Live I need to buy you guys a drink.
My guess is any SOE default profiles will be middles of the road: good for your average joe but missing the hand-tailoring and tweaking that advanced players normally do. Realistically in so many of the trees there’s very little left to not pick that a few different options per class should cover the basics.
Now having the ability to swap between 3 AA sets on the fly (maybe even more if you use XML?) has long been needed. I imagine it’ll still have the clearing of all buffs (and the tedious recasting) after you change but the amount of time it’ll save for swapping specs between different play modes (solo, heroic, or raid) or even different mobs (particularly useful in raid) will be great and long overdue.
I really love this idea. The only thing that might be annoying is the constant hotbar updates dinging for different specs.
@Kruzzen
They got rid of the hotbar update dinging a good while back.
@Mermut hmm, strange as I just tested it and it updated just like it has for years. Maybe I am missing something. Is this an option that has to be turned on or off? Have they tied an AA setup to a hotbar setup? I would love to know if it is just a setting.
Thanks for any info you can provide on this.
I wonder if they’ll retain the resources costs to prevent powwow going change happy with unlimited xml specs?
First resources each month free, next 10g, then 1p, then 10p, etc. Rising each time a spec is loaded?
If changes are free, anytime and anywhere, surely a few exploits are easy for even the most naive folks?
I don’t see how it would matter if people change there aa specs on the fly. It would be nice to be able to have an aoe spec on trash and a st spec for named. I think that the whole idea of looking at that as an exploit is a bit old school. I think at this stage giving people some options and the ability to change might actually make people happy for once. đŸ™‚
I for one can not wait for this to go live. I have 4 houses with AA mirrors and if i could hold 3 with me i could do 99 of the tanking i need to do with the 3. I just hope it will leave your Mount up, since recasting it in most raid zones are hard.
“Alternate Advancement Profiles — You will now be able to store up to 3 Alternate Advancement setups or “profiles” on your character and access them anywhere.”
They did not say this during the show. Is this true?
At time index 12:06, Georgeson said:
I’ve been anxiously awaiting when they’d let the cat out of the bag on this feature so I could talk about it.
P.S. It will probably be spelled out further in the new Producer’s Letter today.
thank you soe. We have been asking for this for a few years now, but at least its coming. I just bought an apartment solely for my aa mirror too, at least it only cost 11g to buy.
I think it is a wonderful addition as long as it can be used by those that want to hand tailor there aa tree. If you cant then it will cause people to have to change their independent play styles. Biggest draw to game for me was the customization ability. Have found it not as broad as I thought but still way up there.