I don't solo at all, just exp with LS mates and friends. It's hard getting 15 people together, especially now that we have to be within 5 ranks. ;/
You don't "have" to be within 5 ranks, I joined a pickup party with people 10 ranks lower than me and we were both getting good skill. I think we were 4 rank 20+ and 7-8 rank 12-16 people.
I wasn't getting more than 300 often but might be because there were way too many mages spamming cures.
Lower rank people claimed several times that they were getting 500 easily instead.
Changing topic, they should lower Return cost to 0. There is no purpose in using it when you can simply deathwarp.
Knowing SE, if you asked them to do that, they would take the opposite stance and increase the duration/worsen the conditions of res sickness. lol
yarly, where are they!?
But seriously, even at lower levels, SE always had such a big emphasis on grouping in XI, and even now with their more casual/solo oriented stuff in XIV it seems that in combat they want to focus on making sure there is still good incentive to group together.
With crafting such a major emphasis, and classes in their own right, there should be a mechanic for crafting in groups just for skilling/leveling. There are a few different ways they could go about it, or include several, and have synths or versions of synths that are for multiple people at lower levels. Making it so that you could have someone else help on a synth instead of needing a subclass.
The "boats and wedding cakes" almost seem like it would only be for special only synths, and that's if it doesn't turn out like each craft gets one piece they make at rank 50 or something and then the carpenter puts the boat together/cook puts the cake together. We still don't know anything more about it, nothing has been said or implied, and the mechanic itself isn't even there right now.
It's annoying that it isn't an option simply for grinding/skilling, it could cut down on the necessary crystals needed when grouping (since the amount needed per synth doesn't need to change, and it could just have whoever "hosts" or "initiates" the synth or w/e use the crystal, or even let us choose when arranging ingredients between us) and potentially offer it's own perks to grouping, just like combat. Having to solo grind an entire class to max is going to be frustrating, and there are 8 crafting and 3 gathering so far, not including what will be coming later. I don't have any ideas on how a gathering class could group, otherwise I'd suggest that too.
I'm not complaining really, this is just something I'd really like to see. I think it would be cool, and make it less tedious and more fun if there were a group dynamic to it.