Grinding sp (even solo) > Leves

Just want to make this post so we can get rid of all back and forth claims I've seen on the forums about how leve sp is and just try to finalize and proclaim which method is better.

Some people say it only appears to be worse sp but by the time you get your reward at end of the leve it evens out.

Others say it's worse and along with behests, you're a lot better just doing a continuous grind with mobs.

My Opinion:
After playing for about 4 hours and trying out leves I found it significantly slower and by the end of it I decided to go grind instead a bit. Even by myself it felt like grinding was generating a lot higher amount of sp/min. It seems very broken at the moment and not at all what yoshida proclaimed soloing would be, or sp gain for that matter.

So what do you guys think? Has patch 1.18 killed most usefulness of leves (aside from faction points)? It feels like although they meant to make leves a secondary feature of gaining sp they presented 0 alternative in this patch and left us with a horrendous gap of no good way to get sp other than grind our brains out on mob after mob.

Soloing in general has become much slower. With the cost of cure quadrupled it has become harder to continuously grind (unless stygain spikes can keep up). It's also hard to imagine that people will grind. Auto attack has made melee jobs too easy.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Astray

Soloing in general has become much slower. With the cost of cure quadrupled it has become harder to continuously grind (unless stygain spikes can keep up). It's also hard to imagine that people will grind. Auto attack has made melee jobs too easy.

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I just don't understand where the incentive is to do leves or grinding simply because they've doubled the length they take to perform because now we all have to tediously wait around for our mp to regen every 2 mobs we fight....

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Astray

Soloing in general has become much slower. With the cost of cure quadrupled it has become harder to continuously grind (unless stygain spikes can keep up). It's also hard to imagine that people will grind. Auto attack has made melee jobs too easy.

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oh and btw about the cure mp cost, supposedly using mp items is easier now that they decreased cost of ethers and such =/

Leves are complete fail now...
as is this patch sadly

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ventus

oh and btw about the cure mp cost, supposedly using mp items is easier now that they decreased cost of ethers and such =/

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I am sure alchemists will be overjoyed to hear that... would be nice if ethers gave more than 50 mp... I mean HQ ones do, but still, pretty weak.

Frankly I was bored with the leve system within the first 3 hours of the game and the fact that there's more meaningful activity outside of them is only a really good thing.

Blow the Aerythe camps to hell for all I care I'd rather do real quests with some plot anyway.

Idk i completed levinshower in 9 mins now... (it use to take 23 solo cause of low drop rates)and i made at least 3k+ exp. that's fine for 9 mins..... I was getting 75 per kill and killed about 14 goats + 2 wind ele's. Those mobs gave me about 1200 exp + the 1875 for beating it...So in the end i got 3075 for 9 mins of my time awesome i say I use to have spend 20 mins doing behest for 2.5k exp. Ill do some test later on a full leve link and see what i get~

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Originally Posted by Firon

Idk i completed levinshower in 9 mins now... (it use to take 23 solo cause of low drop rates)and i made at least 3k+ exp that's fine for 9 mins..... I was getting 75 per kill and killed about 14 goats + 2 wind ele's that gave me about 1200 exp + the 1875 for beating it...So in the end i got 3075 for 9 mins of my time awesome i say I use to have spend 30 mins doing behest for 2.5k exp. Ill do some test later on a full leve link and see what i get~

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Did a few leves myself and found the sp to be about 1-3k less on average. For example, Lights Corrival only gave 2k total. Hopefully it's better than it seems.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Firon

Idk i completed levinshower in 9 mins now... (it use to take 23 solo cause of low drop rates)and i made at least 3k+ exp. that's fine for 9 mins..... I was getting 75 per kill and killed about 14 goats + 2 wind ele's. Those mobs gave me about 1200 exp + the 1875 for beating it...So in the end i got 3075 for 9 mins of my time awesome i say I use to have spend 30 mins doing behest for 2.5k exp. Ill do some test later on a full leve link and see what i get~

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you are on some stuff, considering behest has a time limit of 20 minutes, and if you had 3 people rarely took longer than 12 minutes.

levinshower gave you 3k for 9 minutes? well it used to give a lot more than that. oh well whateva