How am I meant to level with a friend now?

[Dubont]

you can't solo everything in abyssea. Well you can solo anything with a brew, but you run out of cruor pretty fast doing that, and get no procs so it would be pretty pointless.

And, there is ton of content outside of abyssea that is not soloable either. You aren't even allowed to enter nyzul solo for example.

So your point is?

Cause my point is, XI gives me lots to do lowman and solo... things that are rewarding - unlike getting 80 of the 45,000 SP I need to level. That is not rewarding. It is ridiculous.

Before the level cap raise, there wasn't a whole lot that you could solo and even then, you could only do it with a select few jobs with specific gear, specific stats and specific macros. Again, FFXIV is much much much easier to level in and much faster, if you do it correctly, compared to correctly leveling in FFXI. Remember those leve exploits you mentioned about 14? Yeah, there was an "exploit," as you claim, in XI called summoner burns which is probably what you did to get your levels.