Among the many awesome things coming to City of Heroes in Issue 16 is yet another new feature: Super Sidekicking. This new system was revealed in an announcement made by Positron on the official City of Heroes forums. 

The upgraded sidekicking system will allow for players to raise or lower everyone on the team to the mission owners level. In addition, Super Sidekicking will also bring changes to the exemplar system, as exemplared characters will now gain experience as well.

Since the new system will automatically bring everyone to the mission owners level, this will also serve to eliminate bridging. Bridging is a practice many players use to powerlevel by getting a lower level mentor to bring a characters sidekick level to just at the edge of the range required to gain experience at all. This means when the rest of the team (which is higher in level) is killing the mobs, which are often times +7 or +8 levels above the bridged character, he'll get the most experience possible, and thus level up significantly faster.

Players who wish to only earn influence while exemplaring, akin to the current system, will also have this option, and will earn extra influence for doing so. Positron also states they understand that the auto exemplaring will cause some issues like the loss of powers, but they are looking to put in a fix for this.

One other tidbit that many players old and new should appreciate is the coming 20% boost to experience gain for players during the level 1-20 range. This will allow players to clear the tedious lower level ranges much quicker, or you know, 20% quicker.

The full announcement can be found here.