I had seven character when I quit the game, plus one or two others I deleted after a few hours of play each. The seven I kept racked up a /playtime total of 55 days 16 hours and 53 minutes between them, placing FFXIV behind The Secret World and World of Warcraft in my list of MMORPGs ordered by time invested (although all three are probably behind MUD).
Unusually, I grew quite fond of three of my FFXIV characters and am going to miss them. My main, a white mage, was not among these three, mainly because healing stopped being fun at higher levels. Almost every tank tries to take on every mob possible at once, then then blames the healer if they die. It's particularly irritating when they collect a pile of mobs, stop so everyone can AOE them down, then run off to collect some more as soon as the healer has blown their big cooldowns because the tank didn't blow any of theirs.
I did like my monk, because the positioning requirements kept me on my toes. The skill rotation is pretty boring, but the movement makes up for it.
I liked my ninja, because ninja skills are a mess and therefore fun to play. This same character was also a warrior (tank), a role I quite enjoyed unless there were other tanks in the group. My only grouch is that the initial pull of multiple enemies is hard to manage with a cone AOE that you have to target rather than a circle AOE you can just blast out.
I also liked my red mage/astrologian/white mage. This was primarily because she was really good looking (as was my monk, as it happened). I played the red mage (ranged DPS) when levelling, the arcanist (mixed-ability healer) in instances involving other healers, and the white mage (heal-over-time healer) when I was obliged to run an instance for main story quest reasons and didn't want to have to wait 30 minutes in a queue.
I think I'll keep my notes on the dungeons, in case I return to the game at some point.
In the meantime, I'm considering using some of the virtual world's scenery as my Zoom background for conference calls.
It's better than the door that people usually get to see, for sure.