Ever try to coordinate a guild full of such people? They don't just get out of sync with me, they get out of sync with each other. And being an altoholic, I don't have all that many character slots left too play around with.

I have exactly one guildmate who successfully managed the transition to the raiding game. She's healing in Karazhan and Gruul right now.

Another one ended up getting disgusted with how hard it was to make teamwork happen, and ended up deciding to pretty much only ever solo -- and shortly after hitting 70, he ended up just quitting. He comes back from time to time, with enthusiasm at first, but then the problem comes back and he gets bitter and quits again.

We have a 54th level paladin who is still that level because he had to take months away from the game due to cancer treatments. Everyone wants to play with him when he gets back, but people also do not want to completely abandon the game due to constantly dwelling on the fact of his cancer in the meantime!

This is where I usually hear the "get better friends" comment, which frankly is absurd to me. Why should a multiplayer game prevent people who want to from playing together? Why should it break communities rather than strengthening them?

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.

Since the difficulty in leveling in WoW is so underwhelming, why would you not just assist your friends in leveling using your level 70 character?

In a couple of hours, I helped a friend level a Shaman from the low 30's to the high 30's by running her through SM on repeat. I have another friend to whom I donated my old level 60 Priest from the BWL era, and will be helping him to level it up by tanking dungeons for him (since he'll need the experience and the reps).

Your suggestion strikes me as the least elegant solution to a rare, albeit well-stated, problem.

The problem is 99.999% of people would rather just walk into SM as their level 70 in full BT gear and demolish the instance than flip a switch to purposely nerf themselves just to make it "appropriate difficulty".

Pretty much none of the people I know would regard that as help! And in their shoes, I would not either.

That's not helping them do content, that's not teaming up with them, that's doing content for them. They are denied the experience of, for example, doing Scarlet Monestary properly. And they're likely to get bored doing the same thing over and over like that.

I have in the past observed people who receive that kind of "help" over and over. Have you seen them at the endgame? If you've been at this for long, I'm sure you must have.

On the one hand, they end up not knowing how to play their characters as members of a team -- they never had to. On the other hand, they have this sense of entitlement, that someone should just hand them whatever they want. "Why can't you just take me through Gruul's Lair until I get the drop I want? You did it in Deadmines!" It's two great tastes that don't exactly taste great together.

Pretty sure this has nothing to do with the fact that people want to play with their friends at appropriate gear/skill levels without A) ruining the exp gains which furthers the problem of playing with friends to help them level/quest and B) removing the challenge from the encounters. I'm not sure how you could say that everyone would rather "demolish" the instance when multiple people in this thread have claimed otherwise.

In my brief stint in EQ2 I was able to experience a similar system where you can temporarily drop your level to quest. It was very helpful for my max level cousins to be able to run quests with me and still maintain exp gains, allowing me to advance, while not ruining the fun completely by having their character 1 shot every mob.

Yes, it would require a lot of coding, however, there are many "hardcore" players with real life "casual" friends (myself included) that would enjoy, and use, a mentoring system. Obviously blizzard is keen to such ideas considering the announcement of the leveling changes in 2.3, I wouldn't be quick to say "blizzard would never do this because of the work involved".

edit: Douglas is a bit quicker and more eloquent than I.

I played CoH a bit when it first came out, and occasionally used the sidekick system to play with friends who I'd blown out in levels at first or when I rerolled to a busted burn tanker. As someone else has mentioned, sidekicking works in CoH because the game is very "flat" - the only real differences as you go up in levels are numerical. WoW is very different - if a L70 were to downlevel to play with someone of say level 20, there are skills, talents, and gear to normalize to that level. How would you handle redistributing talents? Do you lose access to your higher level skills? What happens to your gear - especially gear with proc effects, that aren't so easily reduced by any ilvl formula (Shard of Azzinoth proc'ing in deadmines wouldn't quite work, I imagine). Not to mention what happens if you get attacked in PVP while mentoring - are you level 20 or 70 when you fight back? Does that PoM Pyro one shot you or take off a third of your health? Reducing character stats also breaks the persistence and immersiveness of the game world - I could easily solo van Cleef, but instead he kills me and my party because I'm "holding back"?

Honestly, I found the sidekicking system in CoH to be incredibly boring, though that's more a function of the way progression worked in that game (same model, same mission, higher numbers!) than the system itself. Once I realized that sidekicking was just massively nerfing my experience gains, I ended up doing the same thing - going to high level zones with my roommate's fire blaster killing everything - and just didn't sidekick so I gained massive experience instead. Perhaps that speaks to my approach more than anything, but I just don't see it being terribly effective in WoW either.

I guess I just don't see a big problem with the way things are. You said you wished you could impose a level limit on guild ranks - well, you *can* do that, but the game just doesn't enforce it. You could agree to just play with your friends, or if you are playing when they aren't stop before you outlevel them. The game itself is not preventing you from playing with your friends - your playing habits are.

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.

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.