Originally Posted by Douglas
That's how I'd handle it myself, yeah. In fact, let's say you're scaling down to join someone in Deadmines. I'd scale a level 42 in Scarlet Monestary gear, a level 60 without the expansion in AQ40 gear, and a Black Temple raider in full epics all down to exactly the same power level.
One way to do it is just to cap stats. "At level x, you can not gain more than y points of int from gear. Anything beyond that is temporarily truncated, similar to what rez sickness does to your stats." Do that for all stats, including mp5, rating, spell power, everything. I don't imagine that would be that hard to implement as a debuff. The harder part, I think, is what to do about talent trees.
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It would still be difficult to apply the debuff in a fair way, the guy in lvl 42 Scarlet Monestary gear would then still be lower powered that the black temple raider. I personally think the whole project would be to vast to either hire more programmers or take them away from developing other features of the game to be worthwhile. I don't think scaling down is viable to be honest, however it would be easier to scale up a character if they wanted to run an instance at a higher level.
But then what would you do with the loot achieved, is it fair for a player that has scaled up to be able to receive loot from these dungeons or would you implement it in a way that any synced player isn't eligible for loot.
Only way I can think of making the talent points work is a reset of points at the time of sync with a memory to return when you leave the instance. So a short "respec" would be needed at the start of the run. Though this could probably be abused in a way where players of the right level would sync to a closer level in order to get a free "respec" for each dungeon, while being a small advantage I don't think blizzard would like it.
Though if you are going to implement this sort of system then you might as well just go with the idea of making heroic versions of old school dungeons keeping, I imagine, a much larger player base happy (though not yourself in this case).
There is a lot of thought that would need to go into balancing this, let alone the sheer amount of work to implement it.