I played ff 14, beat everything up to the end of Shadowbringers but my subscription ended before I could do any of the end of game content. 

I think the greatest flaw with MMOs is just how bare bones a lot of them are before you get further into the game. I don't think I've ever booted up an MMO and thought to myself "hellz yea! these early levels are so fun and challenging!" your most challenging content is always going to be found inside dungeons, or raids, or stuff like that. Massively multiplayer online games are, ya know, massively multiplayer for a reason. multiplayer is the appeal. Not playing an MMO with other people is like, really silly. It feels like the early levels are to learn controls and just find people to party with. From there, you can join a guild and have people help you find whatever you need for the annoying fetch quests. 

The story for FF 14 is good, but like everything else in the game, you need to work your way past the base game to enjoy all the cool content. A realm reborn is [i]painfully[/i] vanilla, then you get to Heavensward and stuff gets better quickly. Post stormblood and pre Shadowbringers was also interesting. 

Me though, I like playing scholar. it's a lot faster to que up.