As the end of Stormblood drew near, I kept going back to the Dancer glamour I put together a little while ago, flummoxed by how quickly it went from perfect to way too heavy in my mind. For much of the last few weeks, I’ve been laser-focused on completing various end of the expansion goals, so I never really sat down to experiment with other options, though. Once I had all of my pre-Shadowbringers gearing, done, though, I felt like I could get back to what really matters and do some glamour work.

I knew I still wanted something that felt “battle-ready” since Dancer has some close-range elements, but after the Makai Markswoman’s Battledress, I also wanted something much lighter, more fitting to the flow of Dancer’s in combat movements. Whatever I used would have to be cloth-heavy as well, and for quite some time I couldn’t find anything that checked all of those off of the list. I ended up turning to PvP gear once again, after exhausting most other options I could think of.

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Glamour Components (Required Level: BRD/DNC/MCH 1)
Head: Reading Glasses (Ul Brown)
Body: Republican Sagittarius’s Chiton
Hands: Scion Liberator’s Fingerless Gloves
Legs: Light Steel Subligar (Loam Brown)
Feet: Expeditioner’s Thighboots (Loam Brown)

I’ve never tried working with any of the Republican gear from Stormblood‘s second wave of PvP rewards, but the Sagittarius’s Chiton actually hit most things of my goals for the glamour I had in mind. After a lot of experimentation, I decided that I wasn’t a huge fan of the way the piece dyes, though. It’s one of those two-tone pieces that ends up losing a lot of its unique identity, and so I decided to work around its base color scheme, which has more to work with in terms of color.

Many of the other pieces I used alongside of the Chiton are old staples by this point: Alahra’s familiar Reading Glasses, the Light Steel Subligar, and the Expeditioner’s Thighboots are a pretty old core that I’ve used with with more body pieces that I can count at this point. I did experiment with some other boots, like the Griffin Leather or Eikon Leather Thighboots, but the simplicity of the Expeditioner’s pair seemed to work best. I also debated some sort of circlet instead of glasses, but I couldn’t find one that I liked well enough to skip out on Alahra’s spectacles. Once all of those were settled in, I added the Scion Liberator’s gloves, which match the leather of the Chiton well, in addition to having those gold knuckles that work so well with the bits of gold.

And that marks my final glamour (and post) of Stormblood! It’s been just over two years since we first stepped foot in the Fringes of Gyr Abania, and in a matter of days, many of us will take our first steps off of Hydaelyn onto Norvrandt during Early Access, with more to follow just a few more days after that. Stormblood may have had its ups and downs (which I’ve already talked about at length in my retrospectives on the expansion), but those initial steps out of Castrum Oriens, when the music swelled and welcomed me into the expansion proper, will stick with me forever as one of my fondest memories of FFXIV.

But now we’re about to leave all of that behind. More than anything, what I’ll remember about Stormblood was its places, which have become some of my favorites in all of FFXIV. From the arid climes of Gyr Abania (which remind me so much of FFXI‘s Kolshushu region) to the beautiful expanses of the Ruby Sea and the Azim Steppe, Stormblood‘s zones will stick with me as though they were places, in a way that zones from A Realm Reborn and Heavensward have not (outside of some notable exceptions, like Ishgard, anyway). A lot of this was aided by Soken’s masterful zone music from the expansion, which some of which captures the feeling of being in the zones more strongly than he’s managed in FFXIV to date.

Stormblood has been “home” for a couple of years now, and it’s time to move on. From time to time, though, I imagine I’ll be coming back, just to bask for a little while in that feeling of immersion that Stormblood captured so very well—and of course, all of the memories that come along with it.