In just two days, the gates will open wide and the adventures of Eorzea will descend upon the First Shard to guard it against the flood of Light. The preliminary patch notes were released today so everyone’s been pouring over them in hopes of learning what information they can before the big opening day celebrations on Friday.

Here are the things I’m looking forward to the most:

1: The New Storyline

Shadowbringers takes us to “The First”, one of several shards of the universe that’s split off from “The Source”. This universe, while somewhat similar to our own, has been overrun by Light. We are sent there to save The First from being overtaken, and (by doing so) to become the Warriors of Darkness.

This is a fascinating storyline, and I’m really excited to see how it’s all going to play out by the end of the initial story run. Subsequent patches will add to the story, as they usually do, but I hope that this patch leaves us in a good place, and wanting more.

2: The Job Changes & New Jobs

I’m still admittedly on the fence about the new changes to the Astrologian job, but regardless I’m looking forward to jumping back into my job and seeing what those changes bring.

I do plan on joining the hype-train and starting the Dancer class at some point, but I have a few other classes I need to raise up to level 80 before that happens. One of the patch notes says that Mentors have to ‘re-qualify’ for their mentor status every expansion, and I have patch 5.0 and 5.1 to level up my healer (Astrologian), DPS (Red Mage), and Tank (Dark Knight) to make sure I continue to qualify.

3: The New Raids / Primals

Stormblood was a quiet time for me in regards to the end-game content. I only really did a few of the EX Primals and Savage Raids. For Shadowbringers, I’m linking up with my Free Company again to do raid content. We’re not progression raiders, but I want to get as far as I can clearing content with them – they’re a great group and I’m looking forward to raid nights more than anything else, I think.

4. The ‘Quality of Life’ Changes

FFXIV’s been releasing a lot of small ‘Quality of Life’ changes that make life better for the players:

• Retainers, when dismissed, now don’t close the summoning window. This means you don’t have to keep re-summoning them to sort your inventory.
• The dialog trees are better looking and lend to more of a “RPG-type” experience.
• More ‘cross-server’ linkshells so we can keep up with friends on different servers
• House decoration restrictions have been lifted for a lot of items.

There’s several others, but these are the big ones that have the Reddit /r/ffxiv community excited.

5. The Community

FFXIV has, for most accounts, one of the best player-bases in any MMO I’ve ever played. Sure, you get your vocal, annoying minorities… but otherwise, people are genuinely excited for the new patch and the things it’s going to bring. I can’t wait to stand beside the other Warriors of Darkness/Light/Whatever to see where this new adventure takes us.