Need help with legacy Player Characters and new PC's
Greetings, hive dwellers and feudal clerks. I'm drawing close to the grand finale of my 5th homebrew campaign and I believe I've ran into a problem. This current campaign has ran weekly for the past 5 months and my players have got up to a lot and have become rather powerful and well equipped, they're not all running around with stacks of exotic equipment or anything but they can take on most enemies with little issue, which isn't necessarily an problem in itself but I'm now questioning my original plan for the next campaign.
My players want to continue to play after this campaign "season" ends and some want to try new characters, where as others want to continue with their current characters. I also want to try and bring the scale down a bit but without just resorting to throwing more lower tier enemies at them or making investigations harder for the sake of difficulty. Besides just giving the new characters heaps of XP to compensate, what are your ideas on how to navigate my dilemma?
Many thanks, and Emperor be with you!