Devs - can we do something about the leveling process

Honestly, leveling through following the Hero's Journey, any person I add to my group just adds an entire extra set of quest drops I need to obtain to complete a quest. Stone Hive is a nightmare already on one character with all the dozens of different drops you need to worry about collecting. With my three-box, I spent as much time sorting loot as I did doing anything else in the zone. There is a lot of problem with tedium in the game, and adding more people just makes it worse. Adding more people should make things easier, but it doesn't, so the calculation becomes how much will grouping with another person slow me down instead of how much will we benefit from grouping.

This is the case, as far as I can tell, through most of the leveling process if you want to focus on anything at all outside of raw xp grinding.

So why would I want to group with other people until I absolutely need to in order to progress?

It's a problem, and it's not because the community isn't what it used to be. It's because over the decades the game has become increasingly layered with tedium in order to stretch content out.

I would have leveled so much faster if I didn't do the Hero's Journey path, but I also want to complete the Hero's Journey. That's my choice, but it also has the side effect of making me absolutely not want to bring another person into my group whose needs might be at all different from mine.

That's a problem.

I think lower level shaman, bard, cleric would be acceptable in a 110 group. All 3 epics are full power. All 3 have nice auras that don’t require 110. Debuffs like slow, malo, cripple would be beneficial even at lower level. With a Knight MT either shaman or cleric could spot heal being at a lower level. Bard songs, pulling, rally.

As someone who came back fairly recently and started fresh on phini, I absolutely understand your pain.

I got round it by 3 boxing, and even then it was quite tough getting to max level. At around level 70 levelling became much tougher due to lack of gear, I got past this by pushing to 80 and then doing OMMs to get a standard set of gear (and level up) on my toons, around the time UF launched on phini, now UF was a step up again, and for the most part too tough on my toons, so I mostly did SoD content until HoT arrived, and now I’m mostly wearing wearing a mix of t4 group gear on my 2 boxes and raid gear from UF and HoT on my main toon.

If I had been solo I’m not sure I would have stuck it out, however I do have an idea that if implemented could potentially provide a route for returning players to gear up on. Most expansions have some sort of token system where if you do tasks you get a currency for that expansion. Introduce an npc who exchanges one currency type for another at various exchange rates so new players can farm older easier content and use that currency to buy gear from harder expansions until they reach the current top expansions.

That is because you are boxing them. Real competent players easily provide real help and assistance. The CC spells are the only ones that are actually level capped, everything else does help. Does it help as much as a higher level, no, but it is noticeably better than not having anyone. Enchanters offer other benefits than just CC. Also, all of my previous statements have been specifically countering the idea that they provide no benefit at all.