i didnt have anyone to group with so i solod 2 leves at broken water at 2 stars each (three stars got me murdered) on my THM, did both in about 45 mins and got about 1.5k SP
thats marginally worse than before the patch.
should it have been nerfed? sure, itll promote grouping. but in my experience so far soloing leves for levels (which is what i did for about 10 of them post rank 25) is pretty much impossible now.
now in order to gain any actual levels grouping seems to be 100% required.
the search feature is not very user friendly, the community is miles away form what it could be and the populations still dont compare to any other game making it that much harder to find a decent group.

i officially call this era of FFXIV the "Thanalan dust bowl era" where we have more modes of messed up targeting than we do ways to level.