So I finally got the update downloaded today, and hopped on to see how the changes went. Overall, the battle system has a much better feel to it that pre-1.18. At the same time however, I found that progressing anywhere takes about 3-4 times as long. I leveled ARC up to 20 before the patch so I was close to the lower dungeon level. So I decide to try the normal options for xp. First stop, leves. Grabbed a few leves for Camp Tranquil, for each leve I earned about 3k xp total, including guardian's aspect. This is compared to the 5-6k I normally got before the patch. so half the experience, not horrible, except that it took twice as long. This was while using second wind and raging strike+bloodbath. I had to wait in between every group of mobs in order to regain health and MP. After this I tried soloing at camp horizon, with a variety of dodo's marmots, and aldgoat nannys ranging from level 16-28. Verdict, while before I could take the lev 24 dodos for about 150sp apiece, now I can only do the same continuous play with the marmots, for about 60sp apiece. Also not great at all. The thing about solo though is, CURES ARE USELESS. Bloodbath and Sacrifice are now equivalent to tier 2 cures, and while they have a long recast, they are far more continuous than any sort of magic healing. The difference being..........Bloodbath wait 30, Second Wind, wait 30, repeat versus, Cure, wait 30, Cure, wait 30, Cure, wait 4 minutes. All in all the increased MP cost makes cures pretty much useless for the DoW classes. Maybe if they had simply doubled the MP costs of cure then everything would be good, and at this point I think SE might want to simply half the MP costs of Cure and Sacrifice.

Anyways, I decide that I'm now done healing myself, lets go do some behest. Get into behest, 6 person party, we have a Gladiator for a tank and a Conj doing healing, and we head off into battle. First battle went badly, no more spamming cures means that only designated tanks can tank. So the first group gets killed and I've now died once, but meh, its a new system, kind-of expected that. Next set of mobs we try something different, I'm sent out to go pull the group back so we don't agro another. Launch my arrow, draw the group back, and the tank takes the marked mob.......except that there are still 2 more mobs that are attacking and they're both focused on me. Normally thats not an issue because the healers had AoE cure, so I was still getting healed, now....not so much. after experimenting with a couple of strategies we finally found one that works, every mob needs it's own designated tank so people don't get killed in seconds. Was thinking at this point that the play style for winning is very similar to FFXI party play at that point, except for the flanking mobs that need targets. So now whenever attacking a group of monsters, one person per monster gets to volunteer to get smacked, and the non-main tank better have heals or they will die. At this point I would just eliminate the groupings of mobs, as there is no way to have a designated tank anymore unless only facing one mob. Anyways, we finish behest and I port back to the crystal, look down to see what my labor has brought me.........800gp and 3k sp.......which is about the same as leves, and for 20minutes is about the same as not doing behest at all. Of course then there is also the fact that you can no longer go into the next behest in 10 minutes, the limit is now 55 minutes before signing up for behest again. What does this mean.....behest is now even less useful, may as well just solo on my own, except that that sucks as well. At this point I simply say screw this and log off.

All in all, some nice points, and then the crap.
+ the new battle system is very nice
+ skillful party play is now encouraged
- solo is now useless
- party play is only effective versus single targets, multiple targets almost guarantees a death in the group
+ some skills have been added, others have been balanced
- THM was utterly owned and some skills have now become useless

All in all, there better be some balancing soon, or playing this game will simply be disheartening.

P.S. my thm is 20, it is not my main, my main is lancer. even I can say that THM was utterly boned in this update.