99Leves? Local Leve XP?

[Junpei]

any npc that uses your allowance tells you how many leves you have allowable as soon as you first talk to them.
the mechanic of having 8 open at one time still stands. you can be 8/8 and as soon as you finish one you can get another as long as you have the allowance to do so.

This answers the OP's question. /thread

I thought it was obvious we could still only carry 8 and the allowance was given from the Adventurers Taverns. The NPC made it quite clear...

[TheVedis]

You can take 8 "at a time"

then you can finish those and go get 8 more, and so on and so forth

[Jinko]

Some of you should read the patch notes next time, you would save yourself a lot of anxiety.

That being said the locals leves still need to be updated to the new recipes. (hopefully its planned for 1.19a, I won't be touching them until then)

[Haibel]

I thought it was obvious we could still only carry 8 and the allowance was given from the Adventurers Taverns. The NPC made it quite clear...

Not too obvious if people make thread about this stuff. But I'm right there with you.

[Fanzeron]

... the locals leves still need to be updated to the new recipes. (hopefully its planned for 1.19a, I won't be touching them until then)

That's correct. Still the same old recipes, and even though they provide the basic material, the required number of shards still apply. I guess the reduction will come in the upcoming patch.

[Xenor]

That's correct. Still the same old recipes, and even though they provide the basic material, the required number of shards still apply. I guess the reduction will come in the upcoming patch.

Why does that matter? Crafting leves never use your own shards or materials. So who cares what they give you? SP is SP. I imagine they didn't have time to change the leves, plus they have mentioned reworking them to fix the problem of too many rank 1/5 leves and not enough 45/50s. They'll probably do this together and presumably for 1.20 since that's when old recipes will be removed.