You've got it exactly backwards. I do not want or need to gain something for myself. I just do not want to completely dominate the experience that my friends have. I do not want to prevent them from contributing. I do not want to force them on to welfare. I want to play with them, to cooperate.

It's completely fine with me if i get nothing at all out of it. It's not completely fine if I trivialize their own experience, or teach them to be bad players, or teach them that everything they could possibly want will simply be handed to them.

Furthermore, you are not only looking at a simple buff.

I do not know how exactly WoW is programmed, but if I image a character as an object in object oriented programming and its stats being the attributes of the object, then everything that runs "checks" against those stats, will just ask for their value.

For example porting someone with an instance's meeting stone would require the target to be in a specific level range. So if the software asks for playerobject.Level to see if he is in the range, it has to return the modified level, not the real one.

But probably some values should not be changed since it is the real representation of the value which gets flushed to database later on. I doubt Blizzard would risk to alter the real level of a character based on a buff.

So such a change would require FAR FAR more than "a simple buff", since it would require every getter and setter method (or functions or properties or database wrappers, depending on the implementation) to be rewritten for any specific use case. From a programming point of view even small changes can require alot effort and I highly doubt that WoW will introduce that concept.

It might be nice for some people, but if you did not have such a mechanic in mind when you design the game, it might be hard or even impossible to implement it later on.

I said 99.999%, not everyone.

But don't say the motivation is due to killing XP, because it's faster XP for me as a level 70 to round up all of SM and AE it down than for me to nerf myself and run it in a real 5 man for you.

Personally I do not like running people through things or being run through them, but my solution is to do it on alts.

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.

Keep in mind, City of Heroes sidekick/examplar systems were far from perfect and ripe for exploiting.

It was commonplace to use the system for powerleveling. Dragging lowbies around with high level characters or into farmable instanced missions led to plenty of ignoring the "content" and speed leveling. We'd even examplar high level characters down to blow the content at high speeds, becuase the level reduction power scaling definitly did not work properly.

Even if Blizzard was able to implement the scaling in a decent way, there's still gonna be a drastic difference in the effectiveness of a lowered level cap charcter then an actual level character in standard gear.

Such a system is ripe for exploitation, and with WoW's illegal farming/gold selling/account selling markets, I can't imagine how horrible it would be. CoH had nothing compared to the population or the markets that WoW has, and I still remember the siege of people who needed "bridges" for Powerleveling, or other sidekick/examplar exploits. The number of game changes based on such system was huge.

While the ability to team and play with friends throughout the game before the level cap is challenging at best and impossible at worst, I think trying to emulate what City of Heroes has done would be detrimental to this game as a whole.

I think the only way this could work is if there was a way to get temporary gear. Say I took a L40 toon. He has the option to buy or rent T3.5 gear. If I went to SM I have the option to buy L30ish gear.

But then this gets really complex.

I think Kallisti is right. CoH works because the game was developed with the system in mind. For WoW it would very complicated to implement something similar.

In theory, it shouldn't be. You set the gear level where you want it to be and then scale the gear down with the same proportional use of the itemization budget. E.g., if you're wearing Kara gear and you want to do Scarlet Monastery with some lowbie buddies, the server says "Okay, T4 epics have three times the item budget of ilevel 40 blues, so we'll scale everything down by a factor of three."

Talents would be the tough part, certainly. You could go with a last-in-first-out kind of thing, where the game would just subtract your latest talent points, I suppose.

I really do wish WoW had something like this. I expect if you asked the devs about it, they'd say something like "yeah, that would be pretty cool, and we'd love to do something like that, but really we have our hands full with X and Y, so we'll probably never get around to it."

Yeup, hence the reason for this conversation in this public forum. For one thing, people can talk about why such a system would be a good thing. For another thing, maybe we can talk through some of the balance issues and implementation ideas, and reduce the amount of effort it would take.

Patch 2.3 convinces me that they're worrying about this kind of issue. They are pumping a lot of improvements into the pre-60 experience. They are dramatically reducing the organizational overhead of running a casual guild (guild banks will rock for poorly-organized teams of good friends).

I did bring this up on Blizzard's own forums from time to time, and there's generally been more support than dismissal of the idea when I've done so. But I've come to believe that these forums are better able to support substantive discussions, as opposed to, say, "Rick Roll" links.

Surely you could just start the instance naked and just use anything you get that drops. Simple solution and one that would work fine, no? I don't see why you need green gear of a similar level, considering that your base stats are likely to be far in advance of whatever they would've been at that level. If you want to take it to another level, respec and just put in the number of points you should have at that level, and use skills of that level. Does it really need a custom made system when you can just do it yourself?

Obviously this wouldn't work as well for leveling with, say, a level 60 char, but at that point the instances are hardly "easy" with one character who is level 70 and a bunch of 60's.

I guess it depends on what your 'goal' here is.

If, on the one hand, your 'goal' is to get your friends to level 70 so you can enjoy end-game content, PvP, Arenas, etc. together, then whatever helps them level ought to constitute 'help'. Unless your friends are all brand-new to the game, you're not 'depriving' them of the experience of Sunken Temple and Blackrock Depths; and, even if they are new to the game, is your goal for them to be forced to push through the game without any external influences whatsoever? They can't buy BoE epics on the AH or borrow gold from you, either?

If, on the other hand, your goal is just to get everybody together and play the game, as mentioned earlier in the thread, what's stopping you from rolling an alt to play with them? You're clearly very capable of leveling a new character, and it takes very little time. You've mentioned that you're near the character ceiling for your account, which I understand, but go back to the question - is your 'goal' to play with them? If so, is deleting an alt you can't play with your friends worth being able to enjoy the game with them?

In my opinion, you are asking Blizzard to fix a problem that does not require fixing in this game, and would drastically alter the limited submersiveness that exists.

EQ2 had this very system and it worked half decent.

The trouble was that you would have to completely revamp all your cast/action bars every time you went into "mentor" mode.

In the end, VERY few people wanted to do this for the same reasons everyone here has stated. For the handful of people who would use it, I think Blizzard could better use the programming time and resources.

This is why I stopped playing the game around MC times, I was lvl ~40 and all my friends were level 60. I would get ganked all the time and was still new to the game and no one ever helped me out. Everytime I asked for help I got stupid responses like "OMFG check Thottbot noob." This was very frustrating, and caused me to unsub. Eventually I came back (I still don't know why) caught up to people. (After playing competetive FPS games and knowing you have people that can help you, finding a good guild was partly the answer).

To this day we have 3 people that raid in my guild and wanted to join my guild because I helped them when they were a lowbie. I answer stupid questions in trade chat as well as heal lower level instances. Sure people probably take advantage of me (I do give away a fair amount of gold here and there as well as assorted slot bags.) But knowing that some "noob" has been asking how to get to Decolace for the past 30 mins with no help makes me think of when I was in their shoes. Helping people most of the time only takes a few minutes. But sadly just like someone said on the 1st page WoW is a very selfish game and there's really no way to counter it. (This is also why World/Organized PvP is dead.) People want rewards and/or gold. Heck that's why the only group quests you can find members for are for the dailies so people get them done faster.
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Then you get into the arguement that this game doesn't really teach you how to "play" your character/class right, again you have to find the right people to teach you and some people won't give you the time of day. I don't know how many priest I talk to everyday and explain to them how they heal wrong. (Ex. Why am I OOM healing Bloodfurnace at Lvl 70) This is why I'm scared to level my Hunter because I know the priest that's healing my Pug will probably spamming flash heal rank 7 on all boss fights or something crazy.

I encourage all people to take the time to help a lowbie, consider it a good deed, but i do not forsee any sort of mentoring change added anytime soon.

I think it would be far too difficult to allow a level 70 to zone into Deadmines, and then somehow try and scale all their gear and abilities to an appropriate level.

Rather, it strikes me that the simpler solution is to let you zone back in as a level 20.

That is, you should be able to save "snapshots" of your character. Preferably at will, but with a default setting that takes a snapshot every 5 levels, as soon as you ding. On the loading screen, you can either log in to your character as normal or right click and select "Log on to snapshot". If you log on as one of your snapshots, you have exactly the skills, talents and gear that you had the moment the snapshot was taken - i.e. the moment you dinged 20 (or 25, or 30, or 35...). You zone in wherever your hearth was set at the time.

Snapshots cannot level up or gain items - every time you log onto them they are exactly the same, and any changes to your XP, gold, items etc. disappear when you log out. Of course, you would have to be forbidden to trade items or use the AH when in "snapshot mode", to prevent people repeatedly logging on as a snapshot, trading all their gear away and then repeating the process. It looks as though standard cross-server rules should work (i.e. you can trade conjured items but nothing else).

It means you can effectively drop down in level and quest with friends without having to level up another alt. And, crucially, without having that alt either outlevel them or get left behind. If you have a level 70, then you also have access to a level 65, a level 60, a level 55, and so on.

This could also provide a way to separate out twinks in battlegrounds. Twink yourself up the perfect character, and then save a snapshot. No more "accidental" levelling up. Snapshots are separated from normal players in battlegrounds, and matched against other snapshots where possible. At that point they could even introduce minor experience gain from PvP, to make sure that all twinks *are* snapshots, and that people don't try to cheat the system and force a twink-vs-normal matchup.

I stopped playing EQ2 in September, and this wasn't a problem any more. Yes, mentored down characters are a bit 'arder than normal characters of that particular level, but its not really a big difference.

Overall, the EQ2 mentoring system is excellent, and adds significantly to an area that WoW is lacking in - replay value.

This sounds like it is the root source of the problem, then.

Either you need to work something out with people (e.g. "John, you're 3 levels ahead, you need to cut back until Anthony catches up"), or you all need to agree to just reroll and start over as a team. Asking the WoW development team to re-engineer the scaling process so that it can be applied in reverse because your friends refuse to cooperate doesn't seem entirely like it would be time well spent on Blizzard's part.

Everquest 2 had the opposite to CoH, you could mentor someone but you would drop to their level, and it would limit your stats and spell levels down to their level.

All that would be needed was a cap for the level for certain stats whilst mentoring, using the equivalent rank of spell or skill already exists for player level (casting PW:F on a low lvl player results in you casting a lower rank to his/her level). I don't think it would be too hard personally.

I used it quite a fair amount in EQ2 especially when people were slightly behind the curve when an expansion come out and they were late by a month or so in getting it, a group of us would just mentor him and churn through the quests and content for him. Infact I spent 50% of my time (that was not raiding) mentoring people, I found it quite fun to help friends/family/guildies without the hassle of rolling another alt to help out.

I'm pretty much flabbergasted at the number of people who are saying that this system wouldn't work because there's "nothing in it for the high level person". Except, you know, playing a game with their friends. This especially goes out to the guy who says "I don't like being run through things or running people through them". THAT'S THE POINT! Some people don't want to take the entire challenge out of the game, but still want to play with their friends. Some of those friends don't want to be run through an instance, they want to run an instance with their friends WITHOUT the challenge removed.

"Run the instance naked" doesn't quite cut it either. A naked 70 mage can still AOE farm SM, and at the same time the friend that they are running through the instance doesn't get to do anything except eat up phat lewtz(tm) and not get experience.

I'm not sure why this concept is failing on some. Really, it's not too difficult if you think in terms of fun, and not in terms of phat lewts and phast clears. Some people want to play with their friends without being completely out geared/leveled for an instance. Some people want it to be a challenge. Some people want to get experience without the level reduction. Can we discuss the mechanics/implementation of a mentoring system and just accept that these people exist? Because they do.

Who is asking them to play less casually? If anything, we're asking you, who already has the end-game experience, to play more casually. Where all of them continue to play at the level and speed they are comfortable with, you need an outlet to play with them (without feeling like you're compromising their entertainment value by trivializing the content). This doesn't require anything on the part of the casual player - if anything, it requires you to play at a pace that accomodates your friends.

Begging the question - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blizzard has repeatedly stated that their primary focus is on improving the game in a forward-thinking manner - that is, devoting their time and resources to new content as the game continues to evolve. The only work they've done on the pre-60 game since January is to go back and, in the upcoming 2.3 patch, reduce the amount of time it takes to level, and add an additional quest hub - further exemplifying their point. They're facilitating getting to level 60 (or 70, or 80, ad nauseum), because that is where their content development is geared towards.

This request, to me, looks likely to get filed away under the same header as Heroic Molten Core - interesting, of potential value or intrigue to a handful of people, but ultimately not a good RoI for Blizzard.



I don't think anyone is arguing that they don't exist - rather, we're looking (in fairness, subjectively) at whether or not there is any likelihood in this change being accepted. Despite it not being a central part of this game, I know people who play WoW just to grind up professions. I also know people who only play WoW to manipulate the AH market (I know a mid-40's man who is an accountant in real life, and he rolls level 1 alts on new servers and tries to see how much money he can make - usually, he gets to 5-figure gold amounts before he tries a new server).

I play WoW with RL friends (and family), too - but because me and my sister want to do 2-man MC, doesn't necessarily mean Blizzard is going to facilitate that.

I don't understand how you're not getting this.

Okay, let's say the people who are on tonight are me (on Earthen Ring I have: 3 70s, a 68, a 64, a 48, a 37, a 23, and a 12), and our 60th level discipline priest, and our 54th level holy paladin, and a 45th level mage, and an 18th level hunter.

What do we do?

I could keep an alt in sync with any one of them sure. But what do we as a group actually do?

I'd rather Blizzard spent it's time developing and tuning new content as well as ensuring that classes are reasonably well balanced without turning everyone into carbon copies. That new content would come in the form of progression for 5-man, 10-man, and 25-man dungeons as well as the PvP scene. I figure that's a tall enough order.

While I agree that a system like the one you're asking for would be useful for a small (in my opinion) portion of the WoW population and that it'd be incredibly neat, I don't believe it's worth the resources. In my opinion, Blizzard often needs to cater to the masses, but not in such a way that they try to please everyone, everywhere.

To answer your above question, you'd pick and choose one or two players to group with. As an analogy, why must there be an activity that works perfectly for my two year old daughter, my 15-year old nephew, my 61-year old father, my 87-year old grand-mother and me? Sure you can find something to do, but would everyone enjoy themselves? Maybe, maybe not. Why is it's Blizzard's responsibility to provide opportunities for everyone for everything?

Find something else to do until they're all level capped, then play together. It's nobodies responsibility but yours and theirs to make sure that you stay at the same level, and it's not so difficult a task that you have to ask Blizzard to program some method into the game to do so.

I like the idea behind the OP's suggestion. Now, I used to play a level 60 gnome mage, and went through all the 5-mans as well as the beginning of the raiding pre-TBC (ZG and the first boss of MC) so I've played all those instances, without being ubered through. Now, as I'm leveling up my priest and hunter horde side, I've run some instances but not nearly as much as my first character, mostly because of time restraints and the difficulty of finding a group of adequate level on my server.

The problem I see coming soon is that, while I've made some friends who their character is their first and they just aren't running many instances because they find pugs scary (who doesn't?) so they either don't run the instance or get ubered through by a level 70 guildie. Thus, I feel that they really are missing (and they have indicated to me as such) a lot of what makes instances fun as they level up.

I really feel that if level 70's (who really do want to help low level guildies) had simple way to play a character of equal level for an instance, they would jump at the chance. I know I'd have fun doing it. To add an incentive, maybe make it a daily quest to downrank and finish an instance which would reward gold or rested xp if you're not max level.

An alternative way to implement this:
Have set stats (str, def, int, crit%) for each class for each instance. Then when you enter the instance you gain a debuff that sets your stats to those predetermined levels (after equipment is taken into account). Also, probably should disable procs from your equipment. (not sure how necessary this would be).

I think this would be a fun thing to do. The debuffs seems to be easy enough to do (finding decent stats may take a bit of time, but not really that hard).

And I also would like to side with the OP about the "find new friends" comment. I've made lots of friends in my time playing wow, and I would like to keep playing with them more, but our schedules just might not match up. This would be a great way to keep playing with them and still keep the challenge of the instances.