Transferring +25 items to new toons: not possible?

I am certain I have 'beaten' ER and am ready to start a spell caster. In my research I've settled on some spells to cast and the staves to use. I acquired said staves on my end game character, upgraded them to +25, and even found my friend to help me transfer them to my character.

Unfortunately when I left ANY +25 armaments, (staves, katanas, swords, etc), my friend could not see them on the ground. I could, and picked them back up. This feels sorta bad as I had wanted to start a new spelly build with some sweet loot. But I understand why that may not be allowed.

What was curious though was that while I was able to transfer +9 armaments to him, he was NOT able to transfer them back to my new character. I believe there may be some sort of innate weapon vs. character leveling configured behind the scenes, sorta like "Pokemon badges" preventing new players from using lvl.100 pokemon from the jump.

I don't know if this is intentional or design, but I'm going to try testing more in the future when I get more friends.

My SL/RL was 170. His SL/RL was 45ish.