Starfire

You know, FFXI sort of did this. But it was done from the start conceptually, I believe.

I do, however, think the FFXI model could work with WoW. The only thing I am uncertain of is how to deal with talents.

But first, let me explain.

FFXI had missions/dungeons/quests or some thingamabob that had level caps to them. And anyone completing said questmabobs needed to be at or below the level. If they were above the level, they would receive a debuff that would lower their level for a certain amount of time ~ this doubles as a timer to complete the mission too, as losing the debuff would cause you to forfeit.

The caveat? You lost any skills or spells above the debuff level (easy to do, I imagine) and the harsh part. You could not wear gear for above the level. ~ What people did was maintain sets of gear in their bank to be used when they level down. Albeit, this was also somewhat easier as Bind-on-Pickup items weren't too common.

Of course, as mentioned above, still two issues: Talents and Storage Space for gear. That said, I also like one of the things FFXI did do for gear. There were "suits of armor" that was used to store entire sets and easy to switch too. Would be nice if in WoW we could just "store a Shadow resist" set or something. Could then, ideally, say store L19 armor, L39 armor and L59 armor or something. /shrug

But you know what? Maybe it's not such a bad thing to allow higher levels to keep their full talents - if we keep the restriction that "debuffed" characters still can't use higher level spells, will it really matter if someone is 41 point shadow? Probably not. 15% crit won't hurt -that- much. Perhaps there could be a slight (small maybe 10-25%) exp penalty involved or something to compensate for this.