I think you are looking at the wrong things for this. What you see in the bazaar is what players are buying and if players are not buying the higher level ones other players will not make them and sell them Most run speed buffs, not counting a bard, are going to be slower then mounts and that isn't a critical buff especially with how easy a mount is to get Haste potions don't need to be higher then that as with group gear you can hit 93% haste and raid gear 95% haste. There is no need to be able to cap out at 100% haste at all times. Combine that with the various over haste clicks and you can get enough haste for daily play. The costs you are proposing for the buffs seem overly expensive for the amount of power they give you. If they are going to do something like buff NPC's I see no reason to not match player buffs and be RK2's for buffs that have ranks. Overall I don't think that adding in buff NPC's will reduce the amount of people grouping but they could reduce the number of people staying logged into the game in order to get buffs.
I would want it limited, like "Heroic Buffs" an NPC that casts the best buffs that can take hold, up to level 85/100 (or maybe scaled to X expansions behind current on the server) Help to catch up.
You're speaking in hyperbole. A buff bot ALREADY exists in game, in the tutorial, Mines of Gloomingdeep. You walk up, say "blessed" and get a single target buff cast on you, immediately and without all of the exaggeration you listed above.
A single NPC that casts a single buff in a zone where players generally don't form groups and worry about buffs is not the same as NPC's that would provide buffs for all classes at the max level.
I think they could add a spell called Rytan's Unity which would cast skin, symbol, C, haste, etc all at the same time. Unity spells already exist in game. The stack checking for unity buffs already exists. The NPC casting a spell already exists. I speculate adding a unity spell fixes the concern here. Also strange to say "generally don't form groups and worry about buffs" since the glooming deep is a combat zone which teaches players how to form groups and get buffs. Interesting too that players learn how to get buffs from NPC in the tutorial and then never see that function again in the game.
No one is saying they can't do that but citing the single NPC in the tutorial doesn't count for much. Also while you are correct that it is a combat zone and it teaches players the basics the buff NPC is there more to teach about buffs then to replace buffers.
I wonder if that is true for certain servers and false for others. When I came to my current server, I could not have my original name even though I have 19 or so years under my original name. I could get my original on either Xegony or Rathe, I forgot which one it worked... but the other one I could not get my original. Now I am not saying that there was not someone with my original name. I do wonder how much /played they have though as that name.
