Oaken

It all comes down to your motivations for doing it. I would never PUG a level 40 instance with complete strangers when I'm level 70 because there is no incentive. But I'd run it with a couple of friends, rewards be damned, because it would be fun.

It would not be difficult at all. The simplest way to do it is simply downscale all of your abilities, your talents and your gear with a simple slider (a % shift to scale weapon damage, spell damage, stats, etc.). Deactivate any talents that don't get opened up until later levels (no invisibility on a level 40 mage equivalent). You choose how far down, the system doesn't have to do it for you - I mean ultimately you are the one choosing whether your want to downgrade your abilities or not. If you want to run an "easy" SM, you could pop yourself down to the equivalent of level 45 (sure you would be overpowered but its more sporting than running it at 70). If you wanted to make it hard because you enjoy the challenge, try 35. The only difference would be that WoW would calculate experience based on the way it does today (so if you are the equivalent of level 70 your party gets less experience, if you downrank yourself to 40 they get more). Simple and effective. Would you be exactly the same power level as a normal rank 40? Probably not (especially if you are decked out in T6 gear) but you should be close enough to have fun. If its too easy at your "equivalent level", downrank a bit further. Because ultimately that's what mentoring would be for - playing with friends without being so overpowered you take all of the challenge out of it.

 

Douglas

So, let's talk through some of the options we've seen for talents now.

One person mentioned getting talents in the order in which you spent the points -- if you rank down to 30th level, you'd get the first 21 talent points you spent.

This works perfectly well for someone who has never undergone a respec. It also works well if you spent your points with this in mind when you did your last respec (which means that the people for whom it does not work could fix that problem by doing one more respec). Maybe this is fine! The people who really cared could certainly do a respec to set things up for this.

Another option was to say "screw it" and let people continue to access essentially every talent they had, with the thought that, if your stats and spells and equipment are a lower level, maybe having those extra talent points isn't such a big deal.

I'm not sure about this one, but maybe it could work. I just don't know if Deadmines is really going to be trivialized by, say, an 18th level druid who's casting Rank 2 of Regrowth, with almost no +heal, with a 50% increase to the chance that the spell will crit due to 5/5 "Improved Regrowth". My gut says this is something we'd have to avoid, but maybe my gut is wrong.

A variant of that is, let people access every talent point they've got that any character of the lower level would be able to access.

This is fine for single-spec characters. This makes hybrid specs insanely powerful in comparison. But as with the previous suggestion, I do not know how much of a big deal that would be in practice; is a 20th level druid with an 11/11/11 spec going to trivialize everything? I don't know. Again, my gut says this is something we'd need to avoid.

Another option was to have people select the spec at the time they downlevel.

This would certainly give you a lot of flexibility, but it adds some time and complexity for the player at the moment when you want to start playing. Myself, I dislike it for that reason.

Another option is to use the spec that the player was at the level in question.

One problem with this is, that means you have to store all those talent allocations. Another problem is... when I hit 60th level, Innervate was a talent and Moonkin Form wasn't. Another problem is, I underwent my first respec (from feral to resto) around 45th level or so -- if I downrank to 45th level, which spec do I use? I don't think this solution for talent specs is going to work.

Yeah, I think of those listed, my favorite option is that you get your talent points in the order in which you most recently spent them. If that screws you, you can take care of it the next time you do a respec.

 

Kharzaljim

I suspect that it's a problem every time any one of those players is online at the same time as another in the group. That may be very little real-time, but I'd bet it's 90% of the time in-game that they care about.

The players within the puzzle are not going to significantly alter their habits to outside influences. Please work within the boundaries of this intellectual exercise.


My question is how much power growth are you willing to tolerate? I don't think there's a perfect way to lower everyone to an arbitrary level. In the event that you did find a balance for whatever variety of goals is present, it would be needlessly complex, and likely awkward to program.

Here's what I suggest. For talents, something along the lines of Trillian's suggestion seems simplest. For example, a level 70 paladin decides to drop down to a level 33. That paladin then has any and all talent points spent in the 5th tier and below, regardless of whether or not that's actually possible at that level.

For gear, I would not bother with a gear-replacement strategy or anything, because it requires upkeep with new content implemented. Instead, I would apply a formula to existing gear. Examine the current ratios of points spent on the gear, lower the item level to the exact same level as the temporary character, and re-apply the ratios of item points spent. Disregard all considerations of blue, epic, or greens, and instead let that show through to the final result. This means it's possible to have a level 25 in full epics. NOTE: THESE MUST NOT BE ALLOWED IN BATTLEGROUNDS.

As far as programming, I know little about it, but using the example presented earlier in this thread, I'll try to run with it. Create a temporary template of the character's skills and stats, to be automatically used as a reference. Whenever something tries to reference the original character, simply re-direct it to the lower level template. When done mentoring down, simply remove the template and the redirect command. I have no idea how possible any of this is.

One of the benefits of doing something like this is that it's flexible. If you want to run lower level, but still have epic levels of power, you can do that. If you want to run in greens with your similarly clad friends, it's just a short trip to the AH away. If using some sort of snapshot system, that's less possible.

If using "he or she" seems awkward to you, try using a neutral gender term. Some people use s/he, others find that clumsy, and try using variations on pronunciation, such has zer or zier. Unfortunately, English doesn't really have the concept for neutral genders, so there's no real consensus yet. But that leaves room for one to be built.

 

daemok

Wow.

Lots of complex talk about how to implement a down ranking system that's some how "fair" and takes into account talents, and gear, and summoning stones, and, and, and, ...

Doug's not asking to be level 30 again. He just wants to be able to play with his friends without 1 shotting every mob in the instance.

The mechanic for this already exists in the game, and Doug has already alluded to it: Rez Sickness.

Make a new buff, Mentor, that reduces all of your stats and spell damage/healing ranges by X% where X is a number from 0 to 100 set by the user.

Keep all the same gear. Keep all the same talents. Be 75% as effective. Or 50%. Or 10%. Whatever makes you comfortable for the zone. So what if I have Dragon's Breath in the Deadmines? If it's only doing 50 damage, is it really so game breaking? No, it won't be exactly like being there with a level 18 mage, but does it matter? I'm hanging out with my buddy and we're fighting through the zone (mostly) as it was intended.

 

Zifna

I think it would be a nice thing as well... a self-scaled debuff would work well, and in fact I've tried to do this to myself by using downranked lightning bolts while trying to teach a lowbie warrior friend about aggro. It is, at best, an approximation. Not only this, but he gained less xp with me there than he would have solo because of the monster nerf to xp a high level character brings. If I'm not doing tons more dps, I'm not worth it at all, in the long run.

I raid. As a raider, I need a certain amount of time to raid and to prepare for raid. Where do I find time to level characters to play with my one IRL friend (L53), my other IRL friend (L44), my little brother (L20)? Answer: I don't. But it's a delicate thing to come and 'play with them' because my character is powerful on a scale their characters can hardly comprehend. It takes a fair amount of work -not- to 1-shot everything and leave them to "pick up after me" duty looting corpses. That's not fun for them (after the first heady rush wears off), not as fun for me (but I want to spend time with them), and leads to them saying they "feel bad" about asking me, their friend/sister, to come play with them.

A scaling personal buff/debuff that also reduces the XP reduction from being partied with you would be easy to implement and make playing with lowbie friends a lot more fun.

By the way, the L52 and L44 players have had the game since, oh... February?

 

BFG

Douglas is far from alone in his situation. I too have casual real life friends with low level characters, and I would love to downrank my 70 together with several other friends and help the casual one actually experience the game how it's supposed to be, without tearing the place apart.

The implementation doesn't need to be really complicated, just lower my level, lower iLvl of my gear and maybe reduce power of talented skills. That's it. No extra sets of gear, no respecs. It will be fun as it is, just to play with my friends at proper character and gear level.

 

Icetro

Look: though I still don't think this would be a plausible idea in the context of WoW or even a worthwhile project for the developers, I empathize with the OP. My favorite times playing this game are when I'm playing with my brother or girlfriend or whatever, even if I'm on my 40 rogue alt and we just wiped in Cathedral because the idiot blood elf priest apparently hasn't put any healing spells on her hotbar yet.

As much as this discussion mentions FFXI or CoH, we're not talking about those games. They are different beasts entirely from WoW, and it really doesn't translate well to try to draw comparisons between the game, especially in this respect.

Though the aforementioned games have "mentor" programs or what have you, WoW simply doesn't. In WoW, if you want to play with lowbies, you roll an alt. It may not be the answer you're looking for but I simply can't imagine anything like this being implemented. No one has been able to give a satisfactory answer to the questions I posed earlier in this thread (what to do about gear/talents) and I believe that's because short of totally overhauling the talent specialization system, there isn't really any way to pull something like this off without going to manually respec, etc., by which time SupahPUGx will run out of patience and leave.


Edit - lowering the iLvL of gear doesn't cut it for a response to the gear problem. Though Blizzard's revamp of low-level instances shows *astronomical* improvement in their understanding of what the playerbase considers "desirable" stats, I really don't think they could manage to pull this one off.

 

BFG

Even if it doesn't cut it. It's not important to fine-tune the mentoring system, it's important to give us ability to play together. So, my 65 alt in some greens is 25% stronger than my friend, my main in full epics is 75% stronger, and a WSG twink is 100% stronger, so what? I become just a powerful friend, not invincible superman, and my friend can feel that he's pulling his weight, and is important to our group's success - this is what matters. Repeating Blizz mantra, it is fun.

 

Viia

I know someone mentioned this but I would strongly suggest you looking at Everquest 2 systems if you're going to make suggestions on downleveling. Not only does the system work (and would similarly work in a WoW environment if items were tweaked), but people want to do it because they gain a 'secondary' type of experience for doing it.

I've had people mentor me in EQ2 and I thought it was fun, in general we had a blast and gained pretty decent experience. Here is a URL with a bit of information: EverQuest 2 WarCry : News : Mentoring!.

That being said, WoW is just flat out a better game. With the likelihood of a mentoring system implementation being extremely low, I would suggest finding creative ways to help or team up with your friend.

On a side note: I really miss AA's and wish WoW would implement something similar.

 

Grelif

I could not disagree more with this statement. Implementing an AA system will only widen the gap between the people with lots of time and those with limited playing hours and it would just add another set of requirements for guilds looking to recruit new members.

 

Liryn

Or you could just have each "snapshot" log in as if they had freshly unlearned their talents. If you're a level 30, you have 21 unspent talent points to spend however you like. I love the snapshot idea, but I hate the suggestion of giving them the first 21 points of their current high-level spec. That doesn't even make much sense - a lot of us respec very frequently at 70, and I know the first 21 points of my current raiding spec (much less next week's PVP spec) would not work very well as a leveling spec for a level 30 priest. And it's supposed to matter exactly what order I filled in the trees last time I respecced? I kept jumping around between Holy and Discipline, going back to lower tiers to fill stuff in, etc.

This seems like the simplest solution - just give the snapshot the current talent trees with X points to spend. It gets rid of the "but Blizzard changed the talents since I was this level!" issue and has the nice effect of also allowing you to have a differently-specced lowbie alt if you feel like having a fire mage for today's SM run instead of a frost mage, or whatever. No extra talent data needs to be stored either.

 

Valerian

While some of this SEEMS simple, blizzard STILL doesnt give me all my talented abilities back at the proper levels when I respec. I cant imagine the amount of coding/testing that would need to go into something as complex as this. The most ELEGANT solution is just a res sickness type buff scaled appropriately. Of course, this would somehow need to determine your gear level since a dungeon blues 70 and a BT 70 are significantly different in power.

Overall getting an appropriate leveled alt to play with your friends (only when they do or keeping up with them at worst) is probably the simplest solution. Someone mentioned lacking discipline to do so, but really there a ton of things in the game that if I lack discipline for I wont succeed at. For the few people this will help I highly suspect it wouldn't be worth the coding time, compared to those few people simply being "disciplined" enough to game with their friends.

 

Liryn

What do you mean by that?

Point taken, though - I'm sure there's a lot of coding here that I don't understand, and I agree that I'm not sure whether this would really be worth the time and effort. Just tossing ideas around.

 

Valerian

I meant that when I respec from Feral to Resto then back to Feral, I still have to buy all my ranks of Mangle, Feral Faerie Fire etc back. It certainly wouldn't be unheard of to have some sort of code in there to notice Im level 70 and give me the level 70 versions of said abilities when I get the appropriate talent. But it doesn't do that. And I suspect there'd be something very similar occuring if you removed talents/spells etc in this type of mentoring system without a full overhaul of some serious portions of the code.

 

dukes

Train mangle -> go to trainer -> buy rank 2/3 of mangle bear and cat -> respec -> train mangle -> go to trainer ->... wait, wasn't I here a second ago?

The same goes for all talents with multiple ranks. I'm just glad they changed the cost (it used to be quite a lot for retraining something like MS or Bloodthirst from the level 40 talent up to the proper version.

Edit: damnit, beaten :[

 

Liryn

Oh, yeah. Quite true and quite annoying

 

• Vinsent

I think the snapshot idea is pretty damn good, lets use CoT as a base. Say you could go to CoT and then talk to a NPC, the NPC has the standard vendor menu, in that menu there are masks.

Putting on a mask makes you into essentially a premade character of your class of a lower level.

That new character has unspent talent points appropriate for that level.
That new character has preset gear, and none of the gear save for the mask can be removed.

Not that I have huge faith in blizzard to create these premade characters based on their skill at the PTR but I think something very simple like this could easily work.

 

Fiola

I haven't seen this mentioned in the discussion so far, but what's the problem with allowing a 70 player to keep their talents while getting a "Ressurection Sickness"-like debuff that lowers stats and damage done? (Scaled to the instance level vs. character level - maybe -90% or something for a L70 in VC, -20% for a L70 in Strat/Scholo, etc)


Would high tier talents like MS, Slow, Wrath of Air, Vampiric Touch, etc. make low level instances a pushover?


If we ignore the talents, then just slapping a -%stat/damage debuff on the high level players would do a decent job of making the instance run a challenge. An epic geared character might still be a bit powerful for the instance, but poor play could still wipe the group. (And the high level player could strip off armor if they want a more appropriate handicap)


EDIT: It figures that I didn't look hard enough at the last page of discussion.

 

Lookit

While I'm not a huge proponent of implementing a mentoring system (it simply doesn't appear on my 'DO WANT' list) this is the best idea I have seen in this thread.

People who are "worried about balance" with talents and gear and whatnot are really looking too far into this: Balance is not really much of an issue because people are voluntarily debuffing themselves in this situation. If you're thinking "But people will have overpowered talents that will trivialize SM!" you need to step back and remember "Oh wait... they are already level freaking 70 and could pull the entire instance at once if trivializing the content was what they wanted."

A simply slider available in the interface menu that goes from 10% to 100% and adjusts your stats accordingly is all that is needed. If my uber mage buddy with 10,000 health and 1k +damage wants to run SM with me, he just scales down to 20% and suddenly has 2k health and 200 +damage -- still overpowered for SM, but weak enough that we could perhaps 3 man it with a tank and healer and have a fun and semi-challenging time. If he finds he's just dropping mobs way to quick, he could unequip a bit of gear to bring the +damage down or just adjust the slider some more.

Next to the slider could be a checkbox that says "Calculate player level as equal to target". This means that my hit rate against a level 34 mob is the same as if I was level 34.

This (relatively) simply feature would let Douglas play with his buddy. He would have to fine-tune the slider and his gear a bit after each of the first few pulls perhaps until he found a level that "felt" right for his group, but he would have accomplished what he wanted to do: play with his lower-level friends without completely dominating the play experience.

Idly, I feel there is no merit in discussing/implementing a "sidekick" ability that lets lower-leveled players play higher-level content. What would be the point of leveling at all - you could just create a new character and run level 60-70 instances until you actually *were* level 60-70. "Voluntary" advancement like that has no real place in this game, whereas voluntary regression would be fine.

Edit - I feel this topic has more merit than it normally would as we are on the eve of patch 2.3, which will greatly revamp the lower level instances, making them much more desirable to run than they previously were.

 

Hoverpuma

When considering the use case for such a thing, keep in mind that there is a certain bias imposed by the population of these boards. The OP's friends aren't the goal-driven "hurry up and get to 70" types who want to get themselves into a raid now-now-now; they are in a sense playing a completely different game from those of us who are focused on endgame raiding as a primary activity. Without making any value judgements, I will simply assert that it's probably at least somewhat in Blizzard's interest to improve the ability of the people playing the raiding game to help those who are playing the sub-70 game enjoy playing together. Happier players = more subscriptions (or fewer cancelled subscriptions).

That said, I believe there is a use case for such a thing even when taken from the perspective of a raid-focused guild. Consider this: isn't it generally beneficial to endgame guilds to have incoming talent actually steeped in challenging grouping experiences for 70 (or 80, soon) levels, rather than expecting them only to quest, grind, and be twinked up and then have all the "L2P" burden imposed at once?

I would have loved to have something like this available to my friends when I was leveling. I started WoW around the same time TBC hit and everyone else started the 60-70 grind. It was a horrid time to try to find at-level groups, and to this day, I've never seen the inside of places like Dire Maul. I could have had hot and cold running twinks, but I find being twinked to be a chore like a horrible game of whack-a-mole. There's a good chance that I would have given up if I weren't playing such an easy leveling class.

However, while I can be counted among the people who think this could be a benefit overall, I do doubt that Blizzard will ever implement such a system. I'd love to be proven wrong, but it does look like this thread will be more of a thought experiment in game design than anything else.

Scaling item levels seems via a debuff seems like a horrible mess; you have to account for speeds, procs, "fairness", etc. To use a personal example, my current ammo requires a high level and faction rep to use; do I then have to go buy a separate quiver full? For that matter, does my quiver suddenly shrink when I'm debuffed? It's not as if my down-leveled self should have rep with the Kurenai. Most lowbies don't have access to trinkets, or in extreme cases even hats and shoulders. My armor has a set bonus which procs off an ability I don't even have access to at lower levels. What do we do about that druid's idol? The list goes on, and it's filled with corner cases which would all have to be implemented.

Alternate implementation: "rental" toons. Use a mind control-like buff to take control of a "stock" toon at level for an instance. For everything except perhaps the old-world endgame, a skilled player should have no problem running an instance with a "characteristic" array of greens and a few blues. It's not as if one actually needs the full Blackened Defias set to run Stockades or anything.

Also, agreed that the "snapshot" concept seems workable. The major infrastructure hit it imposes is database storage, which could be worked around by counting snapshots against your total number of toons on a given server. It neatly solves not only the "help your friends" problem, but also gives a supported way to implement (and segregate) PvP twinks, as well as throwing a bone to the people who never completed the old-world raids and are trying to run them at level 60 for the challenge. Since it would be a strictly opt-in system, I can't see how there is any reasonable existential objection other than perhaps "Coding it would distract Blizzard from other work," and that seems like a straw man: Blizzard will decide to do it or not based on their estimate of the cost/benefit tradeoff, not based on discussion here. (Again, I suspect they will not be interested in doing it, but that doesn't make it a horrible thing to contemplate existing a priori.)

 

Zifna

I agree that people who are going into the fine points of "balance" are missing the point. This would require two things:

1. A way to artificially reduce the power of your main to a level approximating(NOTE: APPROXIMATING, not precisely) the level of the character you want to play with.

2. The game to take this power reduction into account when calculating experience for your lowbie buddy.


That's it, all, finito. So what if I can Bloodlust myself, unlike a "real" L20 Shaman? The first time I levelled up on live, there was one mage in our guild who was able to stay about 10-15 levels ahead of us slowpokes, and it was awesome when he'd come back and help us in instances. It made things a lot easier. But it didn't make the rest of us not part of the team! If the tank didn't keep aggro on the mobs, they'd still kill the L30. If we let -only- the L30 do damage, things died too slowly. The rest of us still mattered, he was just awesome! And yeah, we got a little less XP because he was such a high level, but not that much less than if he was 24-25.

That's the level of power I'd like to be at when helping my friends--powerful, great to have around, but still someone you can play WITH instead of trailing after. Since we're choosing our own power level, it doesn't matter if it's "super precise." If it's imprecise and I feel too powerful, fine, I'll lower it. If it's precise and I feel too weak, fine, I'll raise it. What's the difference?

 

Vandermonde

I like the premade idea more than snapshotting, as it's far less work and I'm sure we can all attest to the possibility of clearing sm cath with people considerably less functional than any realistic pre-made. People complain about the ptr premades, but "my rogue's offhand is too slow and he doesn't have enough hit" is a pretty far cry from "why are you wearing spirit gear as a hunter?" I also think it beats rez-sickness (and to a lesser extent snapshots) in terms of it very unlikely to lead to exploits.

 

chadcook1999

Why don't you just powerlevel your friends and get them to 70? Yes the mob experience will be much lower but the quest xp is where it's at and it's the same amount each time. I think Blizz increasing xp and making lvl faster in next patch is already what you're looking for.

 

Lookit

I think the OP was based around the idea that not everyone necessarily wants to plow through the game as fast as possible to get to the level cap. Some people, when they are paying $15 a month for an online game, like to take their time and enjoy the leveling process. Many people like to say that the game begins at level 70, but this is obviously not the way everyone feels about 1-69.

While there's nothing wrong with having a high-level friend run you through a dungeon, in some ways it's a bit like buying a new game and inviting your friend over so he can quickly beat it while you watch, since he's played it before.

 

Allev

I think there's been enough to say that, mechanically, some sort of solution exists in which you could scale gear and talents appropriately to be (reasonably) balanced against content. However, this also seems to ignore the basic tenets of progression in the game. The game IS progression. It always has been and always will be. CoH is a different game that emphasizes the mechanics you want-- small group teamwork and short-term fun, with progression being a secondary consideration. It might not be the genre, but as much as Blizzard wants to accomodate playstyles, this playstyle is contradictory to pretty much every one in the game so far.

Don't try to change Chess when you want to play Checkers.

Now, the mechanic you might want is something to artificially slow progress-- like, an ability to refuse leveling up until you go talk to a trainer, or reduce your XP gains relative to people you play with so you can "stay together" better-- the problem seems inherently that staying together with a similar group is difficult. Or changing the balance in XP gain while grouped, so if someone is under-level they get a vastly larger share of XP (while keeping "your XP plus their XP" the samel). But don't allow it for max-level players, or players that are X levels above you.