I was thrilled to see how the patch would affect the game. New content, quests, everything was really nice! I'm enjoying it alot. However, I got "distracted" by all this fun to ignore levelling my gladiator from 49 to 50 because I had so much other stuff to do. So..

Today I went to do the leves I had had for a while in my journal book. Oh, I got just in time to do a behest, I thought, heh, what the heck, a quick 4,4k SP right there. So I got to be alone in the behest, no one else was with me. That's when the fun started. Monsters were around my level, it takes +1-2 minutes to defeat a single monster of my own level. All in all, when I did finish the behest, I had 3 minutes and 30 seconds left on the timer.

That's nearly the duration of the whole behest, being 20 ish minutes or so. What did I get? 3,3k SP as a reward. Over 1k less than before the patch and further more, defeating behest taking nearly 15 minutes longer than it did before. Sure you get more SP from the monsters, but it still does not make up for the timesink it creates. I had fun before defeating enemies in a swift manner, now it takes a lot more time.

Sure ok.. I thought maybe the behest mobs were just harder than the leve mobs now, so I went in and took a levequest. Stuff that I was able to rank 5 stars before. R40 leve as a R49 right, shouldn't be a hard thing. Ranking 5 stars pulled the mobs to 2-3 levels above me. I got 3 mobs on me at once, I couldn't even kill them without nearly dying. By the time I finished the leve as 5 stars, I had around 8 minutes left on the timer. Just for reference, to get the bonus from a levequest, you have to defeat it before the 23 minute mark. So.. then I just simply had to drop my levequest difficulty to 1 star, and even doing so, having the mobs nearly 10 levels BELOW me, I could manage to defeat the mobs to around 24 minutes, leaving me a minute spare time.

I can understand that they wanted to enforce partying exp, but the change just killed soloing completely. Personally, I'd like to see a melee class, doesn't matter which one, defeat those leves without any healing abilities whatsoever. It'd be impossible. Even with R50 conjurer and R50 thaumaturge spells, I had hard time not getting killed on a R40 leve as a R49 gladiator.

To make a summary of this.. stuff that used to be done in 5 minutes, now takes 20 minutes instead, with the same rewards. Doing leves is pointless now, when comparing to exp parties. In one of my LS'ses today I read that people had got from R45 to 50, in less than 5 hours. Getting over 400k SP during that time. I can't see this happening with leves anymore or people who like to solo.

This is quite a serious issue in my opinion, what do you think?