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.

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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....

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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

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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.

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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

Leves are just there to break monotony and give a little reward now.

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Originally Posted by Physic

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

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Levin gave you alot of exp for spending 25+ mins on it...+ links and solo it didn't even give at least 3k... but i forgot your the same guy who likes the 11111 attack system so ill stop there lol

Also my bad i typed an 3 instead of an 2..... ill ifx that for you if it makes you happy

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Originally Posted by Gramul

Leves are just there to break monotony and give a little reward now.

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I think they are fine, faster you do them more sp you get. Like i said 3k for 9 mins of time is fine in my book

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Originally Posted by Firon

Levin gave you alot of exp for spending 25+ mins on it...+ links and solo it didn't even give at least 3k... but i forgot your the same guy who likes the 11111 attack system so ill stop there lol

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i didnt use 111, thats what people did who didnt know how to play, at least for melee classes. levin gave more in the same time frame before. using your math as example, as long as levin gives more than 7.6 k for that time, then it was more sp before, not to mention since leves and guardian favor is finite resource, (you get the same amount per a certain time frame) you actually profited more when it lasted longer.

I had hoped the sp rewards would be higher, and offset the costs, or give you a big bonus for difficulty or time of completion, but it seems this is not the case. I would have prefered they made it so there were multiple decent paths for sp gain, 3k a leve doesnt make much of a dent in 80-100k tnls that you start to see at high levels.

Maybe I'm the only one to experience this, but I did 3 leves at Camp Iron Lake last night. At Rank 47 on 3 star difficulty, the SP per kill dropped from approximately 300 per mob to less than 100 per mob, but the lowest bonus I received at the completion of a leve was 4700 SP, the highest being 5300 SP. It's conceivable I could have completed 4 star difficulty but I was still trying to get my feet wet with the new battle system. All in all, I made 19k SP on 3 leves. I'm not going to complain about that. At that pace it would take me about 15 leves to go from Rank 47 to Rank 48. The best thing is that even the leves that used to not even be worth doing at Iron Lake gave very similar SP rewards at completion to the leves that used to yield the highest SP, like Great Hoary Toads. I can't speak for everyone's experience with leve SP, but I am more than pleased with the adjustments.

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Originally Posted by Physic

i didnt use 111, thats what people did who didnt know how to play, at least for melee classes. levin gave more in the same time frame before. using your math as example, as long as levin gives more than 7.6 k for that time, then it was more sp before, not to mention since leves and guardian favor is finite resource, (you get the same amount per a certain time frame) you actually profited more when it lasted longer.

I had hoped the sp rewards would be higher, and offset the costs, or give you a big bonus for difficulty or time of completion, but it seems this is not the case. I would have prefered they made it so there were multiple decent paths for sp gain, 3k a leve doesnt make much of a dent in 80-100k tnls that you start to see at high levels.

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actually , i got around 40ish k (actually i got more but not sure exactly how much were from leves) seems about right w-o comparing it to leve link repeat .

Was geting 5-6ish k per level at lv 46 mrd on 4 stars lv 40 leves.

my bggest complain is that , like i said on a diferent thread that
went from ----

--Do leves that have more mobs .
to
--Do leves that can be done in few minutes w-o effort.

Since reward = stars and fast completion.

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Originally Posted by Zkieve

actually , i got around 40ish k (actually i got more but not sure exactly how much were from leves) seems about right w-o comparing it to leve link repeat .

Was geting 5-6ish k per level at lv 46 mrd on 4 stars lv 40 leves.

my bggest complain is that , like i said on a diferent thread that
went from ----

--Do leves that have more mobs .
to
--Do leves that can be done in few minutes w-o effort.

Since reward = stars and fast completion.

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interesting, ill have to test them more.

Can't say I grinded before, but now the skill gains of levequests just dropped incredibly, so did the difficulty.

I completed a 4 star level 20 levequest as a level 19 lancer and was not gaining more than 400 skill experience per kill. Previously, if I did something that wild (which was hard as hell mind you), I'd get about 2k skill exp.

Crafting levequests? Yay, free materials for normal experience gains..

Did I mention they're still on the same 48 hour reset timer despite the massive reductions in, well, everything to them?

What does Guardian's Aspect do again? I haven't not used it, so if it still buffs skill gains, then, well, I can't imagine how low it'd be without it.

Couple this with the fact that we now have to run around to all 3 cities to get proper levequests if we want guild marks.. and yeah, levequests seem to be only for guild marks now, not for gaining experience.

I don't grind, I stopped doing behests when they nerfed the party size (they didn't even add auto-joining of parties this patch), and now the main form of leveling for me has just been destroyed.

Can we get the old team back? At least they weren't trying to make FFXIV like FFXI. (which I did enjoy for 2 years when I was a young teen mind you, but times change.)

They kind've killed leves when they reduced the rewards IMO. Leves weren't really a great leveling system to begin with, but now there's not really much reason to bother doing them unless you need guildmarks.

I don't know, I did 6 R40 leves in Gridania last night and got about ~5k and the end of each one on 5 star. That's 30k SP, and at rank 48 it was 30% of my level, plus I still have two more I can do at another nation. I don't feel that's too bad for something you do casually every day and a half between other content. Some of you guys are just so used to fail grinding the same leves over and over again and spoiled by the insane SP rewards that you don't know what else to do.

It seems like the majority of you have been soloing leves. Has anyone Leve-Linked post 1.18? Now we are able to link with the whole PT. What is that SP like? Has anyone done BW3 with a full PT of links?

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Originally Posted by Prox

It seems like the majority of you have been soloing leves. Has anyone Leve-Linked post 1.18? Now we are able to link with the whole PT. What is that SP like? Has anyone done BW3 with a full PT of links?

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my 4 man static will be experimenting with this within an hour

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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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If by easy you mean boring.....

My leve run was great. i dare say i got MORE SP then before the update. i know for sure the SP has at least evened out. leves that gave 10k SP in a run are now more balanced (give less). However to balance that out the ones that gave 1k now give mouch more.

The leve system is balanced and thats what SE was aiming for. Also the mobs are easier so its mainly for solo as SE wanted it to be from the 1.18 update.

(Ninja edit)

I can only speak as a DD. After completing 6 Rank 40 Battle Quests in Limsa I earned more SP for the same amount of time spent then I did prior to the patch. Same seems to be true for crafting. Same quests were giving more SP then before. Appears that most of this increase is coming from the bonus for completing the quests. I suspect that this will drop off as I increase levels unless SE adds quests for 45-50.

Let's not forget the essential fact that Yoshida himself stated "Leves are no longer central to the game."

The second you read that you should have thought "Oh! Well, I guess I don't need to worry so much about those anymore, They're not going to be the exclusive best way to level anymore."

Also, let's not forget that they're gonna be rebalancing all of this for the next 3-4 months constantly playing teeter-toter.

My only problem is the gil situation. The gil reform should have happened months ago, as now we've got massively overinflated prices, and less gil entering the system. Of course, I'm sure RMTs will have boundless supplies of the stuff by now, as I've finally figured out what they're doing (They have a gang of mules link up, and then a higher level character runs through and beats the leve for them) Not that enough people will ever play before SE pops a surprise RMT banning for the RMT to really cash in.

Anyway, the economy will be in turmoil until 1.19. But seriously, eventually level 10 weapons have to stop being 100k. Tanaka was crazy to have had gil given out in the handfuls they were till now at the beginning of the game. When I started FFXI, 1,000 gil was pretty big to me, and 10,000 was impressive and took a day to get. It's a little late to get the gil fix in now, but with current populations, if enough people start back, things should recover, but I still feel the lower gil rewards should have happened before we ever knew who Yoshi-P was.

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Originally Posted by Rizon

I can only speak as a DD. After completing 6 Rank 40 Battle Quests in Limsa I earned more SP for the same amount of time spent then I did prior to the patch. Same seems to be true for crafting. Same quests were giving more SP then before. Appears that most of this increase is coming from the bonus for completing the quests. I suspect that this will drop off as I increase levels unless SE adds quests for 45-50.

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I was doing leves 5 star at rank 48 and still getting about 5000 bonus at the end of each one. That's still a HUGE chunk of SP for something casual that isn't supposed to be central to the game anymore. I agree with you, the SP reward for doing your own leves is plenty.

They need to change the terminology for the star system though. Since leves are primarily solo content now, setting the difficulty at 5 star doesn't really equate to bringing a legion with you. ;) New players might be confused by this and pick difficulties that are too low.

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Originally Posted by TheVedis

my 4 man static will be experimenting with this within an hour

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one thing i would try is running the leve twice with one link since the links are supposed to be heavily nerfed.

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Originally Posted by Lusavari

as I've finally figured out what they're doing (They have a gang of mules link up, and then a higher level character runs through and beats the leve for them) Not that enough people will ever play before SE pops a surprise RMT banning for the RMT to really cash in.

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I've seen the same high level, no linkshell character on my server for the last few months doing this. Other people know full well it's an RMT person, but oh no, nothing's ever been done about it all this time.

At least, I think. I saw another character with the same first name but different last, and in a linkshell this time. Still, had a bunch of pointlessly named characters following them.

On low population servers (mine) this is a worse problem. The economy is already monopolized by a few big linkshells, we don't need gil sellers running rampant.

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Originally Posted by DAOWAce

I've seen the same high level, no linkshell character on my server for the last few months doing this. Other people know full well it's an RMT person, but oh no, nothing's ever been done about it all this time.

At least, I think. I saw another character with the same first name but different last, and in a linkshell this time. Still, had a bunch of pointlessly named characters following them.

On low population servers (mine) this is a worse problem. The economy is already monopolized by a few big linkshells, we don't need gil sellers running rampant.

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I've seen them on my server too. Hopefully SE does something about this because the gil sellers have had almost a year to build up a huge reserve of gil just before the currency was made more valuable. It wouldn't take very long for someone to monitor the camps and catch these guys in the act.

I joined FFXI in its 5th year, where the community had figured stuff out and had the leveling up system / monsters / camps figured out. I've never been a part of this experience, i'm lost as what to do for effective SP gain ; ;

I spent last night doing leves in a party and the xp was great. Gained an entire level. Not sure what everyone's problem is with leve xp.

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Originally Posted by Wynn

I spent last night doing leves in a party and the xp was great. Gained an entire level. Not sure what everyone's problem is with leve xp.

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Well many people have an issue with Mages and Archers being nerfed. And if you are someone who does solo/light parties, then this presents a huge problem, especially if you are a mage who prefers being the BLM type instead of a main Healer. Everyone is going to possibly pigeon hole CON. This could be a problem. IDK I havn't played it yet to see. I'm used to having to manage my MP because I've been a vet WHM on XI for years, pre-aby.

And for those who solo/duo/ light parties, it could be agitating. My husband and I only duo, and I help DD and also keep us healed...well that could be a problem for us. SO IDK, I'll just have to see.

The gist of Party play for Guildleve is as follows.

People who are leve sharing (leeching) get only about 500 bonus sp give or take.
People who Activate or Leve Link get usually the full amount of Bonus SP at the end of the leve.

It is worthwhile to be in a LeveLink party because you are able to Do Leves at higher stars at a faster speed. Meaning more SP bonus at the end for everyone levelinking.

If you are leeching, there's really little incentive to do so, unless you're just along for the ride to help someone 5 star something quick on a leftover guildleve or inbetween linked guildleves.

The reason why leve Sharing is chuper nerfed is if completing all shared leves gave you 3k+ then all you need to do is Make all 8 party members get 8 leves, never link, do 64 leves at 3k+ sp for 192,000sp for each guildleve rotation. And that value can easily double.

I don't know what the effect of leve linking a full party does at the moment. And I have yet to calculate gardians aspect or even the new sp multiplier potions.

Someone in our LS had Vintage Jester's Cap as a reward in a 100 point Faction leve. I would call that pretty decent ;)

I don't see why everyone is QQing so hard.
It's rather monotonous and boring.
Just like when we kept repeating the same leves.

Can't you see that Yoshi and his team do not want people
gaining the maximum level in around a week or two.
Which at the previous SP rate; was more than possible.

You have to remember they are trying to balance the classes
through the nerfing of classes, they are also trying to balance
the SP rewards across all types of quests, dungeons and leve
rewards.
There is other alternates to leves; people are just too
blind and QQing too hard over the fact they cannot attain the max
rank with stupid speed.

They aren't making this game for you solely, they are
making it for those that will join upon the release of
the PS3 version. I personally love 1.18, I just wish people
would keep their opinions to themselves when they have
nothing constructive to serve.

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Originally Posted by TheVedis

my 4 man static will be experimenting with this within an hour

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Please share the results!

How are we supposed to get faction points?

Go grind a boring leve that gives us no SP?

Not sure if that was a good decision!

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Originally Posted by giftforce

How are we supposed to get faction points?

Go grind a boring leve that gives us no SP?

Not sure if that was a good decision!

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You now get Like Twice the amount of faction points per finish. They're easily farmable if you're in a party intent on doing so.

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Originally Posted by syntaxlies

one thing i would try is running the leve twice with one link since the links are supposed to be heavily nerfed.

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thatd be a waste of time....unless you can get sp bonus even if you didnt have the leve and get the full completion bonus


from what i noticed, we got 192 a kill with full links(crap) and was getting 2-4k per completion based on how many stars we set it to
if you 5 star it, itl give ALOT more compared to 2-3 starring it basicaly

so what i see is this, 8 man parties will do great there with aspect and 5 starring it(the mob ranks are alot lower now so 5 star isnt stupid hard)