You're kidding right?Certainly 40 to 50 isn't as bad as L1 to L75.
Exemplar point gains are relatively similar to EXP gains back in the day. And stuff like the old colibri camps and stuff were very fast kills.
It takes an order of magnitude more EXP to reach the max exemplar level on a single job, than it does for level 1-99 not just 1-75.
Total EXP level 1-99 : 2,051,350
Total EP Mlevel 0-50 : 29,590,127
(Based on the prior EXP cuve, I'd estimate the EXP total including 1-99 would probably be around 8-10 mil, so EP is still considerably longer if you use old fashioned EXP values, which are not far off from today's EP gains)
That's also not factoring in you have to master before you can proceed with Mlevel. 1200 job points doesn't take all that long anymore (if you're playing the right jobs or can get into a party with them) but it's not insignificant either.
Buffing parties are the best ones I've had. Usually they don't want me to participate in the SCs (because they already have something set up). I'd love nothing more than to be doing those things. Also it seems like a lot of people don't know how BPs fit into SC but that's another issue.Either healing or SC MBing. If you are just going without SCing or standing there then yeah it's a waste.
If only trust didn't suck, because with Matsui, I can do something fun where he opens for me > Gate of Tartarus > Darkness > summon MB > Gate of Tartarus > Darkness x2 > Summon MB and its pretty solid. I certainly wish matsui would stick around because he doesn't give me #&$% for using GoT and I do some really good MBs off of it. But between SC the party of trusts is literally just collectively a tank.
THis really isn't about connections. I can find parties. But really, it shouldn't be expected of the player to find 100% perfect parties that can down the highest level mob camps in less than no time with perfect optimization. The curve should not be based on the few people who have optimized the game the most- not all jobs can even participate in such parties anyway. What about the jobs people don't play as much?I believe Velner has the right idea and sentiment. You just have trouble as a solo player without connections.
Even before 40+, Mlv was already the longest/slowest character progression mechanic (aside from finding rare drops for your perfect gear set I suppose), and now it's even more so.