The MSQ was fun. I have fond memory of spending a lot of time in the Ruby Sea doing sidequests and then some time going through the villages in Yanxia and Azim Steppe doing all the sidequests. It made it really fun getting to know all the struggles of the people there. I was doing this with hundreds of people around me in the first few weeks so the areas felt really busy like they should.

The next fun thing was the Omega raids. They are all really good. There isn't a lot to say because you can go and do them yourself to see. They were great on savage as well and I had fun with the ones I did.

The dungeons continued to get better and better, with examples like The Burn and Ghimlyt Dark topping the amazing dungeons they had already made.

I didn't really like the Japanese aesthetic, but I knew it was just for 2 years and I'm here for the experience, so I tried my best to enjoy it and I was able to enjoy trials such as the Four Lords. They did some really creative things we hadn't seen before and you will know what I mean if you've done them.

The biggest one, for me, is Eureka. It's probably some of the most fun I've ever had in the game. I especially enjoyed the terrain of Anemos, navigating past dragons to NMs in Pagos, using stealth to get to NMs I shouldn't have been able to at low levels in Pyros and the conclusion we got in Hydatos. The time it took between NMs and the variety of grinds people were doing led to a lot of social interaction in shout chat and at NMs you would see bosses covered in battle effects unless you disabled them. If there is a definition of what Massive Multiplayer Online is then it's Eureka. 144 people talking and playing together, working together to rez eachother when they died to the extremely powerful enemies that were everywhere. You could in fact say that you died in shout and someone would always come and rez you (usually multiple people).

Stormblood saw the introduction of Role Actions and the removal of most of the useless and clunky abilities or effects that remained. Most, not all, because that got taken care of later. Previously, you had to level other jobs and cross-class from them. So you had to level a Paladin to have Provoke on a tank. This put some people off the game because it forced them to play classes they didn't want to and it got grindy. Not anymore. You could play any tank now and you would have Provoke.

Stormblood also saw the removal of the Parry stat and almost anything that used it, which was attacked for being RNG mitigation. It was replaced with Tenacity, which is guaranteed mitigation. It also saw the removal of Accuracy, which reduced the chance of missing an attack. Instead you were guaranteed to land an attack and it was replaced with Direct Hit Rate, which are like smaller but more frequent crits. Elemental resistance was also removed because it was useless and they didn't want anyone melding it or buying damage potions for it (especially since this was going to play a part in Eureka).

We still had stance dancing for the last time in this expansion, which is where tanks could switch between tank stance and a damage stance. Typically, in a dungeon I had to do 3 enmity combos in tank stance and then switch to my damage stance, whereas I only had to do 1 in Heavensward. This depended on the damage output of the party or if they were reducing their enmity for me too. Explaining stance dancing to a new player made tanking sound complicated and it created a big skill gap between those who only used their tank stance and those who only used their damage stance. But it was fun because it allowed you to express some skill while tanking and made tanking dungeons a little less boring. I currently feel that skill and experience still shows through even without this, but many of us miss it as well. It was one of those things that needed to go to remove the skill gap, but it was hard to accept it going as well.

A lot of improvements and most clunky stuff was removed, so it was a good expansion. The next expansion is what got rid of the little remaining clunky or problematic stuff, but depending on your perspective, at a cost. But we'll elaborate on that if you make a 5.0 post.