USA Testlive PVE server
Report on the avatars. I farmed up the zeal tokens to summon the avatar of Mitra. The game prompted me for confirmation before beginning to craft the true name token. It took many minutes before the token was finished crafting. Upon completion, the altar and priest disappeared, the token appeared in my inventory, and all other items that remained inside the alter dropped into a loot bag. The true name token had a 6 hour decay timer. I did not test to see if I could drop the token nor transfer to another inventory. Upon summoning, there was approx 1 minute wait before the avatar appeared. Either upon using the token or upon the transition to overhead camera for the avatar control (can’t remember which), I received a report that my follower was no longer following me. I summoned near the King Scorpion just outside of Sepermaru. The avatar had a 1 minute usage timer that did not begin until the summoning process was completed and full control given to the character. After the avatar usage was completed, full control and normality was returned to my character, along with the report that the spirit of Mitra had left me. I was able to walk around, do anything much the same as at any point in gameplay prior to summoning. My character name in the chat window was preceeded by Mitra. The only oddity to note was that after the summoning, whenever I typed something into the chat window, it displayed twice, as if I had sent the same message twice in a row instantaneously.
My personal thoughts, these things are really friggin cool! Very OP, but with an extremely high price tag to balance it. I wish I had more than a minute to play around with it, but I understand why that timer exists. I also understand now why it’s such a big deal that avatars were temporarily removed from the game.