Last night, I finally pushed Zuri through the Menagerie, which is the final trial battle for the original Stormblood expansion. She’s now finally finished all of the 4.0 content and only has to get through the five patches that came afterward to reach Shadowbringers.

I’ve played every dungeon and trial in Stormblood with PUGs, and I have to say that the knowledge of this content is probably as low as I’ve ever seen it. I’m not just talking about the new people (though there have been those folks, too). But people who have already cleared it and just have no clue how to do boss mechanics for these fights.

I’m also talking tanks who think they can wall-to-wall in leveling gear. I had that happen twice on two different dungeons and both resulted in a full party wipe on trash.

In fact, the only post-level-65 dungeon that didn’t have a wipe was Ala Mhigo, and that came really, really close (both the healer and the Summoner died with no one left to rez on a boss). Menagerie wiped three times (the second time because more than half the party moved after diamond dust only to hurtle themselves to their demise)… and only then was I reminded that even if you get the the second phase of that fight, you have to start all over again from the beginning if you fail. Yuk.

Not that my own memory of some of those leveling dungeons is really very fresh. I almost never run dungeon roulettes, so I haven’t seen these in a while. And this is pretty much the reason why. They’re woeful when you do have to run them.

I have two more characters on Mateus that eventually need to get through this expansion. This is my 4th time through, and it’s just painful at this point. Not only was I never really engaged in the Stormblood story, but the fact that I have to do dungeon after dungeon with PUGs and not Trusts really dims my enthusiasm. I’m still not much of a group-dungeon runner.

I hate to say it, but this experience justifies my purchase of a story skip to Shadowbringers for Tad and Ben earlier this year. I may wait a while for the price of story skips to come down, but if Trusts don’t get implemented in Stormblood eventually, I can already see myself purchasing a few more on down the line.

I have just a few more dungeons and one trial to finish up with Zuri and then I’ll be taking a break from Stormblood for a good long while.