Shadowbringers

I have never cried as much during a game as I did during Shadowbringers. Everything about it is just fucking perfect. The ending as well as the post story quests felt completely satisfying and tied up a lot of loose ends that I didn't even realize needed tying up. Even the lore dumping sections felt interesting and entertaining (but maybe that's just the lore loving freak in me coming out). I remembered nothing about the character they brought back, and yet they immediately became one of my favorites over the course of the expansion and was the character I cried the most over.

The story itself feels self-contained away from ARR to SB, it puts the buildup on pause in order to focus on the story of the first and the ascians which also sets up for Endwalker. It feels more intimate, if that makes sense, it's dealing more with interpersonal and internal conflicts and personal memories rather than year long wars yknow. The Conflict is also more contained too in both a literal and figurative sense, it's smaller than what the WOL has dealt with before and involves small groupings of people rather than whole armies.

I'm genuinely sad that it's probably never going to be included in the free trial, cause the expansion everyone praises and encourages new players to get to (Heavensward) gets knocked out of the park by Shadowbringers. The music is also fucking amazing, so many of the songs I heard are songs that I genuinely listen to outside of playing the game, which is rare for me. The dungeons and trials also felt fun to play through in the way that previous ones were not, and were enjoyably hard. Shadowbringers is the payoff for having to slog through ARR imo.

Favorite Duties

The Seat of Sacrifice

The Dancing Plague

Paglth'an

Dohn Mheg

YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse
My favorite alliance raid series! The Tower at Paradigm's Breach is peak.