Possible help for the higher end players and the uselessness of xp is a
henchman to dump xp into. The initial costs of hiring this character could
be prohibitively expensive.. but the idea is that this henchman could be
a surrogate player. Basic fighter,blaster healer type

I've heard that in times gone by, it was possible to hire Npcs to flesh out
a party but i might've misunderstood. I'm also fairly certain there any number
of issues with this, least of which being it discourages fleshing out a party
with players when you could just populate it with bots.

a thought.