Suggestion: Remove required level on all items

This is more of a suggestion for live. Even with a new 100 or whatever heroic option available. It will still take some effort to catch up to live for most people without direct support. People could have their bazaar mule set up with low costs uber items!

The Bad
1. You could argue that players become WAY too powerful, and won't appreciate the new levels. I don't think this is any different than finding a friendly player to leech off of for those levels.
2. Only the best armor and items would matter in the player economy. However, there still a shortage of the uber rare chase loot on most servers (I believe). I don't think this would be an issue.

The Good
1. I would find leveling super powered alts to be a blast. Can you imagine 200/20 weapons in Plane of Storms at 65? That would be insanely fun! The leveling would be super fast also!
2. It would be easier for people to bridge the gap between 100 and 110. I have never played live in a very long time. This would help players to appropriate level content as it would be easier to get the gear to do it. I found it impossible to catch up in Underfoot because the early group content was hard even if you had previous group gear. With this change, I would be able to wear whatever, and make it easier to adjust for the content, and catch up to live.
3. All droppable armor would be useful to someone! Even with no-trade items, old raid loot becomes useful for low level players (as long as they can zone in).

Attunable gear would skyrocket in price!

I think DBG spend a lot of effort on tuning the zones for appropriate levels. Allowing people to get too good items would ruin the challenge that DBG intended.

For some players the fun starts at level 1, and the difficulty in lower level zones/encounters are tuned to make the game fun and challenging for them.
I think the bad outweighs the good in your suggestion, Twinking taken too far, can actually ruin the experience. At least that is my experience from other games.

If they tweaked the impact of Recommended Level on item stats I think it would be fine. As is the stats you get are (player level)/(Rec level) * (base stat). So if you were 110 with a rec 120 item you get 110/120 ~ 92% of the stats.

Change the formula to [(player level) - (Rec level) ] * 0.04 * base stat
In English, every level below the Rec reduces the stats by 4%. A 110 with a 120 item would get (110-120) * 0.04 = -10 * 0.04 = -40%, so you get 60% of stats instead of 92%

A ToL crafted mask is 9500 hp. If the Req 120 changed to Rec 120, using the formula:
A 115 level would get 7600 hp (ToV 115 mask is 7300)
A 110 level would get 5700 hp (RoS 110 mask is 5000)
A 105 level would get 3800 hp (EoK 105 mask is 4200)
A 100 level would get 1900 hp (CotF 100 mask is 2500)
A 95 level would get no stats

"Current" level gear would generally be better if you were a lot lower level, but as you get closer it is worth using the best gear instead. Especially handy on level cap expansions so if you are 116 and get a 120 drop, you can equip it instead of waiting until you've already beaten everything and hit max level.

Happy to see them remove the required level as long as the recommended stats are appropriate.

If they did that, then the next step could be to allow people to delevel temporarily. That would be an excellent improvement over the shrouding system(assuming you kept all your old spells in your spellbook). In that case I would probably prefer a slightly less harsh scaling penalty, though.
I always wanted to shroud down to a lowlevel version of myself, rather than those mob-classes.

They would also have to figure out how deal with AA and deleveling

This is a joke if this happened would ruin EQ! yea lets get rid of req and rec on items ok.

Players should have to pay for a perk to ensure they don’t delevel and find themselves not able to use their gear!

The guy said in his original post he thinks it would be fun to bring a 200/20 weapon to Plane of Storms on a level 65 and wreck havoc. Basically be invincible and in God mode, taking an already easy game and making it 100 times easier with no risk and no challenge.

To answer the thread title....

No.

Just need to replace it with recommended level and it could be a workable idea and if you improve the formula it uses becomes even better.

I'm all in favor of removing required levels on gear, and just sticking with recommended levels. Then you could have it scale all the way down to level 1. At that level, gear that's rec level 120 (or whatever) wouldn't be any better than typical newb gear...probably even worse than defiant.

But, it would have the added value of scaling and getting better as the character levels, getting rid of the need to constantly replace gear. The gear would improve as the character improves. Procs and other effects would have the required levels, not the item itself.

Chevy spent a lot of effort designing and tuning the Chevelle. They haven't gone out of their way to make sure you can't put a modern motor in an old car.

Which is exactly the same thing as when we farm old TS mats or when we do hunter, except you could get XP on an alt while doing it. I don't understand why anyone at L120 would care how easy it is for a L65 player in Storms. I don't see it hurting anyone but the people selling PLs.

You consider something like that fun but others don’t and they would be turned off if they are working on an alt and someone else in the group has overpowered modern raid gear.

You are only thinking of the case where you play alts, what about people who are playing with their newbie mains in low-level areas they haven't experienced yet? Returnees is also a thing you know.

I imagine a returnee or true newbie would lose respect for the game, if it was possible to twink him way beyond god-mode...

"Just delete your twink-gear", should not be a necessary advice in a well tuned game imho.

I am not only thinking about one thing. I have always been a big proponent of new and returning players. I myself would rather play with a Twink than no one at all. New zones are busting at the seams. The older zones I visit are almost always empty.

I think the recommended level curve on gear would likely be sufficient for managing the problem of being over powered.

There's been plenty of gripes with ToL launch with Req level. Setting a Req level of 120 on those items instead of a Rec level of 120 doesn't seem to serve any purpose.

If a L50 toon had conflagrant gear with a huge stat penalty from Rec level, would it really impact gameplay? They could also scale the penalty pretty easily. 5 levels being a 5% penalty but 50 levels being a 90% penalty.

Im sorry, I misunderstood you before. I thought you wanted level 1 players to wield non-scaled 500ac shields or something like that(essentially god-mode).
I have no issue with your suggestion, if the "recommended scaling" is in effect.

I don't understand why people keep insisting that a properly down-scaled item would be overpowering. At best, a properly scaled down item (from say 120) would probably be Defiant level in terms of power...proabably even worse. It wouldn't have any effects or procs...those could be hard coded to kick in at certain levels. That's how gear used to be...you had to be a certain level to use the clicky/proc.

The notion that level 1 characters would be running around destorying the snakes and bunnies in Crescent Reach with overpowered weapons is idiotic...as long as the weapon is properly tuned for the level via scaling.

Letting characters equip high level weapons at lower levels wouldn't be overpowered...it would be a welcome change. New and returning players...even current players starting another alt from scratch...would be able to just level their toon and learn (or re-learn) the game without having to constantly worry about getting new gear or swapping things out to get maximum effect. Their gear would always be perfect for their level because it would "level" with them.

Yeah, I totally misunderstood what this thread was about.

I interpreted it as using non-scaled-down items at lower levels.
I have no issues with removing the "required level" from items, as long as the items are scaled down to the wearer's level.

A leveling char, where the gear-stats "grows" as he levels up, is perfectly fine.
A level 1 char with 300k hp: No way.

WoW actually has an entire set of gear that can easily be given to a new character that grows with them as they level up and it can make the experience easier as you don’t have to keep upgrading your gear along the way.