One of the problems I encounter when I play this game is that I never feel like I have become very powerful, even when I have far out leveled an area. If I ever want to go back and fully explore an area, I have to constantly watch my back and fight most of the monsters that stand in my way. While you do have a bit of an advantage with your trait lines and more skills to chose from, at the end of the day that become a nominal advantage and while the battles maybe easier, now they have become tedious.
At the same time I understand that the player experience at lower levels needs to be preserved, and I am totally for that. I like knowing that everyone is taking on the content at an appropriate power level. That however tends to turn me off to exploration. I don’t want to have to worry about every mob on the way to climbing a vista or getting down to the bottom of the cavern for the point of interest. And since there are no mounts, I have no option to just muscle through crowds of monsters, I have to run at half speed spamming heal skills until I lose agro.
That’s why I think there should be at option to toggle ghost mode in areas that are like 5-10 levels lower than you. You wouldn’t be able to interact with anything or anyone and nothing could interact with you. You could explore in comfort, and why shouldn’t you be able to, you earned it, you have already surpassed the content in term of difficulty, forcing you to continually trudge through endless mobs is detrimental to an explorer’s fun.
I do realize that this could be exploited; part of some of the discoveries is based around overcoming mob obstacles. So you could make it so that in order to actually get the point of interest or vista, you would need to toggle your ghost mode, this would allow you to be vulnerable to attacks until your ghost mode has cooled down. For heart quests, at the edge of the quest area, you could fire off a prompt asking the player if they want to fulfill this quest, if they move too far into the area without toggling their ghost mode, their ability to fulfill the requirements would go away until they go back to the edge of the quest zone.
Hell, to throw in a bit of fun factor, you could make certain mobs invulnerable to ghost mode if there is a particular challenge you want the player to experience, or certain mobs that only show up in ghost mode. As it stand now though, I have very little interest in going back to low level zones to discover the surroundings, and absolutely no interest in going to unvisited zone of lower level. I love the discovery angle in this game, it is highly rewarding and very addictive, but I wont do it if I have to suffer through endless mobs that hold very little reward for my character.