I've kind of been having a blast. I've finished the Heavensward 3.0 MSQ and am up to 3.4 now and it's been amazing! The ARR patches were where I first started enjoying the story and characters and it's just gotten better and better from there. All the concerns I had been told I should have about playing on the OCE datacenter were nothing, like sure you can't get a queue for anything other than levelling roulette past 1am but that's kinda fine by me actually.
I spent most of ARR not much liking or caring about the main characters, then it was pointed out to me that Alphinaud is canonically 16 years old and written as a teenage redditor who thinks he has the solutions to all the world's problems and I realised - oh, he's supposed to be a little weiner, all of these people are weiners okay I get it and I love them all now (except Thancred).
I've now also fallen into what appears to be a universal situation of falling in love with my player character and headcanoning how they see all the other characters! Neath is an edgy little dork who wants to look cool. At the end of ARR she realised "Wow a lot of shit went down I have to step up my game" and in HW she learned the arts of melodrama and enhanced edginess from Ysayle and Estinien respectively. Now she's met Krile and developed the world's biggest crush, giving her a reason to put her newly acquired skills to the test to impress her by being the coolest, edgiest and most dramatic hero that there is.
She's also got nothing between her ears:
It's cool. I'm having fun with an MMO again and it's not the empty kind of fun of going over rote tasks like WoW or Runescape, or the fun that's tempered by "this falls short of being good in so many ways" of SwtOR. I'm not far off from starting Stormblood, which I hear is exceptional and is another one of the points where people will say "Okay everything else before this was a bit boring but THIS is where it gets good!" and I'm really looking forward to how much of this there is ahead of me
