My guild has declared this an "Alt Weekend" as a way for some of to avoid outleveling the rest of our guild. The idea came from coincidental AFK vacations for several of our key guild members (happy fishing trip Nelg!), so the rest of us are either going to catch up to them, or play alts.

Mainly it's an effort to balance our guild's levels, although there's also some encouragement to just try other classes. Our melee players seem to be concentrating on the complete opposite: the supposedly 'pure casting' Demonologist, to the point that we've also referred to this as Demonologist Week.

Here's Ignatos, my Demo alt, throwing fire into the face of an enemy:

There are some inherent difficulties with AoC's Apprentice (Sidekick-like) feature. So far, Apprentice has been a bit buggy and Funcom has specifically limited the usefulness, they can't seem to decide if they want players of disparate levels to team up, or whether they want to force lower levels out of higher level content. For instance, an Apprenticed player still aggros as if they were their standard level, so taking them into Cistern / Main System is very messy.

It's still much better than most games for playing with your buddies, but it's not as easy to do as say-- City of Heroes.

As an aside, I'm finding it exceptionally easy and fast to level 1-20 now that I'm familiar with Tortage.