Should high level players keep their unlocked abilities when they down-sync?

[Zered]

I've found it to be annoying every time I queue into a lower level dungeon and half my buttons don't work. It throws off the muscle memory and the combos.

Also one of the worst things about going through ARR is that you barely have any abilities so combat is usually just spamming the same 1 button for 15 minutes straight. Getting queued into a level 20 dungeon and having to go through that again is nasty.

I was wondering if it would be reasonable if the developers marked certain abilities for each class as always available once unlocked.
For example:
Dps classes would always have a 1-2 single target combo and atleast the first aoe.
Healers would have atleast 1 aoe, 1 mitigation, rescue, and resurrection.
Tanks keep their death denial and atleast 1 mitigation, and 1 aoe damage.

This would only apply for dungeons since they are casual content. Trials and raids are more of an experience and balancing is more important, plus there are no super low level raids and trials generally last less than half a dungeon so not too bad.

Yes it will allow people to do a little bit more damage and play a bit more agressively but who cares. Would be nice to get through those tedious early dungeons a bit faster and it is also nice to still be somewhat functional in these dungeons below lv50 instead of having 70% of your kit disabled.

[Asdif_Laoeg]

Your Idea is better then the other with having all the abilities in lower dungeons, but even then i see some problems:

DPS: They worst DPS (for combos to use and as far as i remember) for Sastasha has a 1-2 single target combo (Dragoon) and it goes up to a 1-2-3 1-4-3 combo for monk. And for the first AOE, thats soemthing i wished for a long time.

Healer: For AOE, i agree, but the second effect (Stun from Holy) should be deactivated. But you seem to have not played Healer in a long time. You have Rescue and Resurrection even in Sastasha. The mitigation is in theory good, but outside of full pulls from the tank it is not needed in the ARR leveling dungeons.

Tank: They have at least 1 Mitigation even in Sastasha, probably even more depending from what level they sync down (remember, all role actions are avaible on sync down) and they get the aoe attack bevor they even can enter Sastasha for the first time. About the death denial, that is outside of full pull not needed.

But the idea to have at least something better is a good idea. The problem is they had in the past a better feeling in the ARR Dungeons, but they lost this with the Expansions when they removed abilities to give the jobs new abilities and i don't see them giving it them back.

[Underscore]

Getting through old dungeons even faster wouldn't be good, they're already badly powercrept.

If they used some method of syncing to scale your damage down, then maybe? Might be strange for the sprout who still has party battle effects enabled to see 20 tactical nukes being dropped on some pirates in Sastasha though - would sort of kill the classic ARR adventuring vibe. I wouldn't be opposed to them reshuffling some of the action unlock levels to give you a few more buttons early on, as long as it's nothing too crazy. If only they hadn't removed so many old actions from the jobs, that's probably why we're having this problem now.

[Valence]

Used to be better back in HW. Max lvl was lvl60 and they hadn't yet started pruning abilities to make room for new ones much. By lvl30 you already had most of the core of jobs and by lvl40 you had two full hotbars. All healers literally had more attack options in sastasha than today at max level (2 dots, at least one oGCD).

[Arrius]

Too annoying to balance. And gives new players a bad experience if they cannot contribute but instead the high-level ones bomb everything in 2 casts away.
Just like what happens with WoW - 10% DPS, 90% running after the tank which is killing everything on their own.

[Veritas-Ancora]

Sprouts need to learn the basics.

Yes it sucks that you only have two buttons to press, but you'll thank those players in a month when they're running Savage.

[Espon]

They could introduce some weaker versions of abilities at lower levels so that the number of abilities you gain between... say, 30 to 100 doesn't increase very much. I dunno if people will find that very interesting, though...but I'm of the opinion that we have far too many buttons as it is and gameplay can be made more engaging in other ways instead of just memorizing a string of buttons to press every 1 or 2 minutes.

Thing is about scaling down is that relative damage isn't the only thing that improves as you level up. A level 100 tank has far better survivability than a low level one due to having better and more defensive cooldowns and self-healing. People already complain about healing being pretty boring due to lack of DPS buttons to press and tanks having too much self-healing, now imagine running a low level dungeon with a warrior with Bloodwhetting, Nascent Flash, and Shake it Off. That's not going to be a fun experience for a new player if you never have to press a single heal because your tank can handle everything in a dungeon that wasn't designed that way.

[Underscore]

They could introduce some weaker versions of abilities at lower levels so that the number of abilities you gain between... say, 30 to 100 doesn't increase very much.

I like this idea a lot. Give them less flashy looking animations befitting early-ARR and simplify their functionality somewhat, and then have them upgrade into their current versions at the level they'd normally unlock those.

[Azurarok]

I kinda wish they could implement an option to use a sort of "legacy" kit for older content, so HW kits in ARR-HW content, SB kits in SB content, ShB kits in ShB content and so on, while still having simplified modern kits for those it may overwhelm. Probably without some of the weirder mechanics like elemental debuffs and cross-classing though.

[Kaurhz]

They really need to rework dungeon scaling in addition to this to be honest... These dungeons are already far too quick in ARR.

You can argue 'but they aren't important', which for you for the balancing of it might not be, but to the newer players that are trying to pick up the basics of the game, they are... Otherwise all you end up with is newer players that go into the trials and raids, not even knowing the barebones, because they've grown so accustomed to the game throwing nothing at them. Which is already enough of a problem, let alone when you want to exacerbate it.