Edit: I realized that this suggestion doesn't make much sense. I must have had a brain fart when making this post. Please ignore and move on.

The way training currently works is that at level 50, and every 100 levels afterwards, the price and amount of time needed per stat training session increases. This basically means you're punished for training level more than the bare minimum of what you need, since if you cross a level threshold, raising your pets' other stats will be much slower and more expensive.

My suggestion would be to make training time and cost be based on your pet's highest stat other than level. This would make it so the downsides of training level (longer training time and higher price) don't kick in until the upsides (higher stats) do.

Perhaps even make it so price and training times are calculated per stat, so if your pet has less than 125 (2.5 * 50) speed but more than 375 (2.5 * 150) strength, training speed would only take 60 minutes while strength lessons would take 120.

Sorry, I don't support. Level is a perfectly fine stat to base training time and cost on, especially when it's the least important stat in battling. What you're proposing will punish people who put their exp and boosters into raising those other stats. I haven't trained my main battle pet's strength or health in ages because they're far beyond her level.

You're just shifting the 'punishment' of increased time and cost to someone else. I'm also not sold on the idea that high level even has an upside other than job progression since you can drop training and grow stats only through experience.

Also, there's probably a better way to phrase this, but why are you overleveling even knowing that it's raising time and cost? Off hand the only two reasons I know of would be the job center (which I think needs to be reevaluated because of how it encourages overleveling, leading to the time and cost issues) and aesthetics. If you're battling just raising level enough to train others stats isn't inconvenient.

This is a solution in search of a problem. No support.

How does doing a job increase your level? I've gotten stat increases in STR and INT, does it do level too and I have not noticed this?

"level" doesn't actually do anything for you and the other stats do. Therefore as a punishment stat it works just like it should.

The job agency has a chance to increase level by 1 as well.

I lightly support this mainly because I like to toy around with pet builds without level being a hassle, but realistically I believe it will just stay the same because:

1. The system has been around every since, and
2. If changes are considered, then we have to do something with level instead of scrapping it, because people put lots of exp and boosters into it.

To be completely fair, I never even made the level to increased time and cost connection until reading the battle guide. But I’m the laziest battler and didn’t pay much attention.

Isn't this level's only function right now? It has no effect in battle, it doesn't influence your tier or what weapons you can equip, and it's not even relevant to AP and scrolls. If you made this change, level would become entirely useless. Not that that's a good reason to keep a mechanic if it's outdated or cumbersome, but but I don't really see a reason to make this change either.

If someone does decide to remove level from the game, I'll take my refund in the form of exp, thank you very much. :P

After thinking about this some more, I realized that my suggestion doesn't make much sense.