So there's the general complaint floating around out there saying that in late stages of game progression there's much less freedom to choose whoever you want for your formation because the crusaders in the earlier seats just hit the level cap way too soon which forces your hand to select a DPS from the higher seats instead, and the devs seem really cautious / hesitant about taking the quick and easy solution of just increasing the level cap even further. (Granted, the players with the really ridiculous idol counts would probably just reach the new cap right away and run into the same issue again anyway.) So I was thinking "Well, what else could they try?"

My first thought that I tried to flesh out was going to have something to do with modifying the functionality of XP for the specific crusaders / seats in question. The idea actually occurred to me based on something from a thread about speculations / guesses on what types of new effects we'll see on legendary gear. Like maybe Draco and other early seat DPSers would have a power on one of their items that increases the effectiveness of each XP, so by leveling up that legendary on Draco or whoever else you prefer, letting time pass to earn XP would scale that crusader up more significantly than it does for other crusaders.

But I kind of wanted to come up with something not so directly tied to time (and therefore less impacted by the spamming of time warps) and then I thought of another approach: "Gilding Points", which... would basically be leveling under a new name and without an impact on idol gains, really...

Anyway GP might do something like: When a character reaches the level cap, have the interface replace that character's leveling button with the gilding frame. Gold can now be spent on GP, and... I'm actually thinking maybe the cost starts about equal to the cost of 25 levels over character level 6000 (even if you haven't yet finished leveling the Extra Training talent) and then increases the cost for each additional GP at a relatively slow pace like making it 1% higher each time (the wiki says that each character level is 7% more than the last?), BUT the catch is that only the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 7th, 12th, 20th, etc. (running sum of Fibonacci Sequence) GP earn you another 4x multiplier. (Hmm... Maybe also allow a tiny DPS boost for each individual GP. Like 0.01% or something like that. Not enough to make a huge difference but enough that there is some sort of very small gain along the way in between earning each multiplier.)

GP would be virtually uncapped (realistically there would at least be a limitation based on avoiding overflow in calculations using the number). The GP cap would be chosen to be ridiculously high to leave room to hit as many new multipliers as possible. Possibly also consider perhaps instead of a 4x multiplier the GP bonus defaults to something like a 3x multiplier but a new talent is added which boosts that multiplier 0.05 at a time until it reaches 5x at level 40.

(Rate of cost increase, actual pattern to be used for GP bonuses, actual multiplier for each GP bonus, and any potential rescaling of any of this to be found in talents would all be up to the devs to determine of course. I just threw out whatever came to mind as an example.)

Thoughts / concerns? Ideas for other alternatives that they could consider?