So after the anime I started to read the LN and I really love volume 1 and 2. Sure it was fast paced and we had bigger timeskips but it never felt like we miss a lot of content.
Now I finished volume 3 and I'm a bit disappointed because even though what we experienced was really cool, it felt insanely rushed. It felt a lot more like reading a summary and not really a story. I hoped we would get more content of the dungeons but 95% of the dungeon content was skipped. It would have been a lot better if we had 1 academy year per volume so it's a bit more slowed down.
About the new party members I love Keel, the other three I'm not sure yet haven't seen much of them. But overall it feels like besides Allen the other characters have nearly no relevance :/
Also I hope there will be something later on that makes it possible for everyone to get stronger... already reaching max level and the story is still at it's beginning is so dumb. So there must be a new max level or so lster on.
Well thats just some random thoughts from me. I hope the next volume will be better again.