Back in my day, my classes had ranks, not levels, and I had nearly as much HP and MP at rank 1 compared to 50

I could also solo pretty much any mob in a 15 level range and only god knows what the stars meant for leve difficulty; every different leve mob had different level for a given number of stars.

Well, that's a guess, cause back in my day you could not see the mob's level, you just had a color icon beside the mob name