How am I meant to level with a friend now?

[Drez]

You have got to be kidding me. Took less than 4 months for me to get to 90 with two different sub jobs and a lot of missions under my belt.

I grinded in XIV for 6 months and got to 33.

I honestly have to question exactly what you were doing in both games. Saying 4 months to 90 and 6 months to 33 really doesn't tell us anything. Total hours played to reach these levels is what matters. It's really easy to skew the numbers by saying it took you 6 months, but neglecting to mention if you only played a few hours a week and took frequent breaks from the game. The same sort of number skewing would apply to the former claim of 4 months as well. You also fail to mention if you were leveling other classes/jobs or focusing on one and only one, possibly further skewing your claim.

Also as many have already pointed out if you have actually been playing with any sort of follow through, you should be far FAR higher than 33. I played fairly regularly from the games launch until early January before I quit (came back recently to see how the update changed things.) In that 3 months I hit rank 30+ (I just hit rank 33 today) and got several other crafting and combat classes between 10-20.

I by no means put in any amount of hours that one could consider to be "hardcore" I played heavily on release and it slowly dwindled down to nothing. Overall I probably averaged 10 hours a week over 3 months. I also never took advantage of any exploits, and I think I joined an exp mob grind party a grand total of once.

EDIT: I also feel the need to point out that comparing anything in XIV to ANY content in XI that was released in 2005 or later is faulty. You are comparing content of a game that has had 8 YEARS to build a foundation and design content around, to a game that for all intents and purposes should still not be released to the public.