Predictions from the Patch 6.2 Trailer & Patch Website

My Void Lore is a little rusty, help me out there - if a Voidsent is defeated in the Source, are they gone for sure or do they just return to the Void? If it's the latter, the Shadow of Mhach Raids would make sure that there are multiple Voidsent that aren't too keen on us being there... wonder if that at least gets special lines of dialogue, considering the Shadow of Mhach Raids aren't mandatory.

I don't think we knew 100% that if you defeated something from the void on the source that it just went back to the void until now. Thus the how the void and voidsent work PowerPoint presentation during 6.1.

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Originally Posted by Carin-Eri

Though I may very well have missed something, I'm surprised we haven't least invited Cylva and Unukalhai to join us or even made them aware that we're visiting their 'home' shard.

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Unfortunately they're not only locked behind 5 Role Quest but also behind Warring Triad so unless the remove these or make WT mandatory & remove Role quest needed for Void quest I don't see those two playing any part in this other maybe a small side quest for those who have done Void Quest.

It is depending on how they come, for example, Calo was mere half voidsent as it was a mhachi mage that mutated herself. Diabolos seems to have been summoned several times and seemingly with his actual body by whatever pact was used... as far as i understood, by accident and natural rifts they can only sent their soul and part of their power, depending on the size of the rift, while a summoning opens a gate which can also bring their body...? Im not fully sure, it might be that its actually really just their soul and much like our friends at the first, they create an ghost body.

If some Gargoyle is using a stone statue, i doubt their actual body is affected.

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Originally Posted by Lord_Umbra

Unfortunately they're not only locked behind 5 Role Quest but also behind Warring Triad so unless the remove these or make WT mandatory & remove Role quest needed for Void quest I don't see those two playing any part in this other maybe a small side quest for those who have done Void Quest.

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Honestly i wanna slap whoever had that BS idea... its so much story leading no where as its basically not existent... >_>

Imagine we actually purify the void and dont even bother telling em cause they forgot to update the npcs lol

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Originally Posted by RicaRuin

My Void Lore is a little rusty, help me out there - if a Voidsent is defeated in the Source, are they gone for sure or do they just return to the Void? If it's the latter, the Shadow of Mhach Raids would make sure that there are multiple Voidsent that aren't too keen on us being there... wonder if that at least gets special lines of dialogue, considering the Shadow of Mhach Raids aren't mandatory.

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From the details in 6.1 -

Most voidsent in the Source are either pitifully weak or mere souls possessing effigies. Only lowly voidsent, such as imps, are able to cross the scant dimensional fissures that naturally appear between the Source and Thirteenth, and opening a voidgate to pull through a full-powered voidsent takes too much aether to be practical. So most voidsent are summoned as only souls a la the Scions to the First, possess effigies to have a body, and presumably return to the Thirteenth when they "die."

The Allagans and Mhachi, at least, seemed to have better technology than we do capable of opening voidgates, so some of the more powerful voidsent we've fought might have been the real deal (namely Diabolos and Scathach), but it's entirely up in the air. If nothing else it looks like Ferdiad is back for a third bout; make of that what you will.

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Originally Posted by Cilia

The Allagans and Mhachi, at least, seemed to have better technology than we do capable of opening voidgates, so some of the more powerful voidsent we've fought might have been the real deal (namely Diabolos and Scathach), but it's entirely up in the air. If nothing else it looks like Ferdiad is back for a third bout; make of that what you will.

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Ferdiad confirmed to be Hermes's shard from the 13th. Joking aside, he's a "clown" trying to "entertain" us and kill us at the same time...like Amon.

In the epilogue to the Shadowbringers role quests 'The Hero's Journey', Traynor refers to Voidgates as 'Hollows' when teaching Unukalhai how to open them. That's also the phrase used to describe the upgraded forms that we fight during the Shadow of Mhach raid series (Ferdiad Hollow/Diabolos Hollow). I think the strength of a particular voidsent on the Source depends on the manner of their summoning.

The Diabolos Armament codex entry states that in order to summon a more powerful voidsent, you need a suitably powerful host, which is why the Allagans built warmachina with genetically engineered components for that purpose. But I wonder if simply summoning the same Gargoyle except into a more 'powerful' statue gets you a more powerful manifestation on the Source.

There's also the question of how the contracts themselves work, and whether it's more beneficial for them to come across through a contract or simply walk through a large enough portal.

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Originally Posted by RicaRuin

My Void Lore is a little rusty

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From Caith Sith during the prelude to Weeping City of Mhach:

"The more powerful the Voidsent, the more difficult it is to manifest its presence in this world. Their own immense strength weighs them down like an anchor, you see, preventing them from breaking the surface of our dimension.

And that is why they "cooperate" with mortal sorcerers. A mage can provide a suitable vessel for the summoning, or rip a large enough hole in the fabric of reality to allow the entity itself to step through.



Stacia asks a question, Caith Sith answers, reminding us that Voidsent are incredibly devious about finding loopholes in their pacts.

The Nullstone was seen as a last resort! Should a Voidsent break its pact and turn on its summoner, the mage could use the relic to disperse the essence of even the most potent entity, obliterating it completely.

So it would seem that in order to kill a Voidsent completely, you basically have to do what the Nullstone does to them, which is more or less a super powerful ray of light. They say complete obliteration, but its power depends on the mage using. Complete obliteration is also nebulous, since it only smokes them on our end.

I'm of the mind that if it's a voidsent possessing a vessel, their soul on this end is destroyed, so it's like cutting off a limb, and they lose a lot of power but don't die on the Void side.

If the Voidsent itself came through though... I suppose that would be a true death if literally all of their essence came, but it would seem that they have a respawn anchor in the thirteenth, the exact workings of which have never been explained.

Curiously though, the Mhachi coffins literally did trap them here, and there was no way for them to relinquish the foothold they had and re-manifest elsewhere.

Diabolos is a curious case, because he had manifested into the Diabolos Armament prior to being summoned by Mhach. So it would seem that Source side summons can circumvent the Voidsent's essence being in another vessel already.

But yeah, short answer, no, a Source side death is not a true death for them. FFXIV in the house making the satire line from Hot Shots Part Deux, "I'll kill you until you die from it." no longer satirical, lol.

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Originally Posted by Kuroka

Honestly i wanna slap whoever had that BS idea... its so much story leading no where as its basically not existent... >_>

Imagine we actually purify the void and dont even bother telling em cause they forgot to update the npcs lol

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You're thinking in the wrong direction: it's not 'we might fix the void and they'll be left without a story', it's 'these guys are the only ones that could possibly fix the void, because it is their story to do it'.

The prospect of fixing the void isn't gonna be something anyone can just do, anyway, for simple logistical reasons if nothing else: the Thirteenth no longer being the World of Darkness means that voidsent can no longer be used, at all. This chokes out any stories you could want to tell around them with, say, Mhachi or Gelmorran ruins just as an example. But it also, as I mentioned before, completely breaks Reaper; if there are no more voidsent, Reaper no longer functions, because either the Avatar is dead or a largely mundane regular dude.

What is plausible, though, is finding a way to start that work while acknowledging that it's going to take time before we see results. Like Eden, basically. And I think exactly that is going to be what we see happen with Unukalhai and Cylva; they'll strike gold (probably with our help after we discover something in the 6.x quests), but it won't be an immediate fix, just an assured one; the Thirteenth is still the Void for all intents and purposes for the greater story, but there's hope for the future and potential further hooks for the story of furthering its recovery.

If the direction they are going in 7.0 will become apparent (only) in 6.5, then I don't think this void stuff is massively related to the route they are taking. Unless Yoshi-p thinks we are absolute idiots, which he probably does. I'm more confident in more dragons instead, thus Meracydia.

Either way, 6.5 needs to end at a place where they can somewhat comfortably leave the game in until the release of 7.0 which might or most likely will see (several) delays. Most last post-patches leave us in a pretty safe place, not in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event like a rejoining. Unless the rejoining of thirteenth is more gradual or has completely unforeseen effects this time around since it is just a void, not a shard, I don't believe in a rejoining -> calamity thing for 7.0

I think this Void stuff will either lead to us having to go stop an invasion in a far away land (likely Meracydia), or will result in us basically halting the Void stuff for the main part, thus "cutting" our last ties to the old stuff. Which would allow us to enter Meracydia, The New World, etc without any old plot hooks or old "we're falling back on this predictable enemy faction" decisions coming into play.

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Originally Posted by Tehmon

If the direction they are going in 7.0 will become apparent (only) in 6.5, then I don't think this void stuff is massively related to the route they are taking. Unless Yoshi-p thinks we are absolute idiots, which he probably does. I'm more confident in more dragons instead, thus Meracydia.

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It's hard to tell at this stage how the Void stuff is connecting to what could come ahead, and I think some of the disagreements on where it could go come from us not knowing why exactly it's coming now. I'm seeing two potential reasons, and I feel like a lot of people have grabbed immediately onto one without thinking about the other:

A: That the Void is somehow related to the upcoming story, and so will naturally follow in while acting to ease us from one story to another through familiar faces and features.
Or B: That the Void actually isn't meaningfully related to any story coming up, but if we don't do it now, we never will.

Personally I think I'm leaning towards B, but that's largely because I haven't thought of or heard a particularly compelling way that it could lead into the next expansion yet.

A thought on the raid characters: with the shot of Old Lahabrea crushing the glyph in front of his face (which we know is the symbol of his office on the Convocation), on top of the different-colored constellation crystal, I think that's a point in favor of the concept that he's not going to be the Lahabrea we knew. I know there are a few holes in the 'Erichthonos becomes our Lahabrea' theory, but if Old Lahabrea rejects his office and gets himself killed in this or the next raid tier, it could be that Ericthonos disguises himself as his dad and takes up his office to avoid tarnishing the family legacy, or something along those lines. If he (and possibly Themis) come up with a way to conceal his identity from even the Convocation's truth-detecting abilities, that could fill in all the plot holes nicely. They'd need to come up with a plausible reason for it, so I'm not going to call this at all guaranteed yet, but it's a bit more possible than it was before.

It's a nice theory, but no matter how good their disguise is, there is a Convocation Member that can literally see and distinguish souls and who takes his offices very seriously.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

It's hard to tell at this stage how the Void stuff is connecting to what could come ahead, and I think some of the disagreements on where it could go come from us not knowing why exactly it's coming now. I'm seeing two potential reasons, and I feel like a lot of people have grabbed immediately onto one without thinking about the other:

A: That the Void is somehow related to the upcoming story, and so will naturally follow in while acting to ease us from one story to another through familiar faces and features.
Or B: That the Void actually isn't meaningfully related to any story coming up, but if we don't do it now, we never will.

Personally I think I'm leaning towards B, but that's largely because I haven't thought of or heard a particularly compelling way that it could lead into the next expansion yet.

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I think B as well, but it all depends on whether Golbez and the three fiends will be a trial series or part of the MSQ.

But I suspect this
- Scythe Lady is Zenos' voidsent and is the main character of the void/Golbez trial series.
- In the trailer we are seen riding a dragon that is not Vrtra. It might be Azdaja, and if it is, I suspect we successfully rescue her. Azdaja's return will probably be a hook to Meracydia eventually. But if it's just some random dragon, this won't obviously happen.
- The successful trip to the thirteenth will be enough for Y'shtola to close the focus on her for a while, because she has her lead on traveling to different shards which is all she needed.
- 6.3-6.5 will most likely include the Thancred and Krile focus that I think Yoshi was alluding to at the start of the year. I doubt their stuff is related to void in any way whatsoever, so I'm confident that our void trip will be just a trip, and the focus on it will fizzle out after 6.2 in terms of MSQ content.

Still have no idea whether Hydaelyn's crystal will play any importance going further.

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Originally Posted by RicaRuin

It's a nice theory, but no matter how good their disguise is, there is a Convocation Member that can literally see and distinguish souls and who takes his offices very seriously.

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Which doesn't mean that a switcheroo is completely impossible, it just means it requires two things.

First, we need either extremely concerted effort to look exactly like Old Lahabrea, or a confluence of luck that happens to result in exactly that as a side effect.

Second, we need to accept the possibility of Emet being wrong about this. On its surface that's not that bad, but the more things Emet is confirmably factually wrong about makes everything else he's said even less believable. Since I think a lot of Emet's both appeal and concept as a character is essentially based on him being factually correct in morally objectionable and concerning ways, making him factually wrong about things is a huge issue. A character can't be 'right, but a dick about it' if they're frequently wrong.


So, basically... it's not that Old Lahabrea has to be Our Lahabrea, it's that making him not Our Lahabrea would both require extra complexity and damage the integrity of another character when doing so.

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Originally Posted by Gogoglovitch

A thought on the raid characters: with the shot of Old Lahabrea crushing the glyph in front of his face (which we know is the symbol of his office on the Convocation), on top of the different-colored constellation crystal, I think that's a point in favor of the concept that he's not going to be the Lahabrea we knew. I know there are a few holes in the 'Erichthonos becomes our Lahabrea' theory, but if Old Lahabrea rejects his office and gets himself killed in this or the next raid tier, it could be that Ericthonos disguises himself as his dad and takes up his office to avoid tarnishing the family legacy, or something along those lines. If he (and possibly Themis) come up with a way to conceal his identity from even the Convocation's truth-detecting abilities, that could fill in all the plot holes nicely. They'd need to come up with a plausible reason for it, so I'm not going to call this at all guaranteed yet, but it's a bit more possible than it was before.

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I am not so sure about that. Some say that the German voice sounds exactly like the voice of our future Lahabrea (sadly I am not sure about that myself. I can hear him in some tones but not 100%). Also we still have that NPC in Sharlayan that gave us the quest that also has a darker skintone which could possibly be a hint that this is Erics reincarnation.

I am also not sure that Themis would lie to the others in that way and if Eric would even fit, since he is really bad at creation magic.

Perhaps Eric is more than just the "physical son" of Lahabrea and Athena, and there may be going on more with him in terms of aether. The only way I can figure a twist happening here is if Eric IS Lahabrea, but not in the way we think. What if Lahabrea and Athena attempted an experiment to see if they could figure out how souls attached to bodies, and they split off a small bit of their own souls to create Eric, with Etheirys filling in the gaps, thus creating a manufactured soul.

Even though everyone is speculating Eric might be the Lahabrea we all know. I find it difficult to imagine him going: "Mwahahahahahaha I'm evil!!"
Emet retained most of his old personality (If not all of it) while Elidibus showed signs of mental maturity but Lahabrea is way off in terms of personality from anyone we have seen so far.

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Originally Posted by Kranel_San

Even though everyone is speculating Eric might be the Lahabrea we all know. I find it difficult to imagine him going: "Mwahahahahahaha I'm evil!!"
Emet retained most of his old personality (If not all of it) while Elidibus showed signs of mental maturity but Lahabrea is way off in terms of personality from anyone we have seen so far.

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i think emet explains its because lahabrea was body hopping way too often which mentally warped him.

While there are memory stones for both the unsundered and sundered Ascians, the unsundered ones' served a different purpose; the sundered ones' were made to raise their sundered reflections to their former office, while the unsundered ones' helped them retain their sense of self over the aeons. Problem is both Lahabrea and Elidibus neglected to use theirs after a certain point; Lahabrea lost himself to mania, while Elidibus succumbed to his programming as a primal. Only Emet-Selch used his regularly enough to hold on to who he was before the Sundering.

Lahabrea was, however, much weaker than either due to his frequent body hopping.

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Originally Posted by Cilia

Lahabrea was, however, much weaker than either due to his frequent body hopping.

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I would put money down that this will be changed by Pandaemonium. I can see a giant flashing “ADDITIVE RETCON FITS HERE” sign xD.

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Originally Posted by EaraGrace

I would put money down that this will be changed by Pandaemonium. I can see a giant flashing “ADDITIVE RETCON FITS HERE” sign xD.

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At this point it's the only way to make us feel anything for him, considering he was a stereotypical crazy mustache twirling villain before now.

Not sure this fits better here or in why does Solus look like Emet thread. But what I guess I don't quite understand is how Elidibus when he starts to regain memories is how he ends up remembering the WoL being the one to show up on Elpis to help deal with Pandeamonium. I know it might be a case of thinking too deeply about this stuff. And yet don't we get told the memory crystals of the convocation are memories about said person and their seat function? So, how would Lahabreha and/or Elidibus's own stones have that information if they're supposed to be memories from others about themselves? Or are there also personal memories in those stones? Can't wait to learn what's going to ensue in a few days.

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Originally Posted by SannaR

Not sure this fits better here or in why does Solus look like Emet thread. But what I guess I don't quite understand is how Elidibus when he starts to regain memories is how he ends up remembering the WoL being the one to show up on Elpis to help deal with Pandeamonium. I know it might be a case of thinking too deeply about this stuff. And yet don't we get told the memory crystals of the convocation are memories about said person and their seat function? So, how would Lahabreha and/or Elidibus's own stones have that information if they're supposed to be memories from others about themselves? Or are there also personal memories in those stones? Can't wait to learn what's going to ensue in a few days.

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It doesn't matter what memories are on Elidibus's stone, he was already transformed into a primal when he became Zodiark's heart. So he will only ever react to his primal functioning and it will never matter what's on the stone.

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Originally Posted by EaraGrace

I would put money down that this will be changed by Pandaemonium. I can see a giant flashing “ADDITIVE RETCON FITS HERE” sign xD.

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Yeah, the fact that there seem to be a crazy alter ego of Lahabrea in Pandaemonium makes me think that they are going to retcon Lahabrea going crazy to actually be him unearthing his crazy self that was already there.

So we will have a good lahabrea helping us during the raid, and his crazy version that will end up fusing with him, becoming dormant, and slowly awaken as lahabrea hop between bodies.

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Originally Posted by RukoBoshi

Yeah, the fact that there seem to be a crazy alter ego of Lahabrea in Pandaemonium makes me think that they are going to retcon Lahabrea going crazy to actually be him unearthing his crazy self that was already there.

So we will have a good lahabrea helping us during the raid, and his crazy version that will end up fusing with him, becoming dormant, and slowly awaken as lahabrea hop between bodies.

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i wouldn't be against it if they go that route. if they pull it off (and i think they can) itd be really cool.

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Originally Posted by Kesey

It doesn't matter what memories are on Elidibus's stone, he was already transformed into a primal when he became Zodiark's heart. So he will only ever react to his primal functioning and it will never matter what's on the stone.

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Yes he became a primal. Yet he still had his own memories that slowly faded away until only the function of his office and the need/want of Salvation were left. Except the side story hints that he would have kept some knowledge of himself if he had looked at the stones. That and he starts to remember things soon after his defeat. What doesn't make sense is how does he remember that it was the WoL and not Azem he saw and was helped by with Pandeamonium. Emet wouldn't know or at least would somehow think it would have been Azem. Same for Lahabreha. Unless Lahabreha ends up finding out that Themis isn't being helped out by Azem but by a "familiar" that might as well be Azem. Which must have been on a memory stone. As the kick off for the memory regain is from us giving him the 13 convocation memory stones.

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Originally Posted by sidurgu-12

i wouldn't be against it if they go that route. if they pull it off (and i think they can) itd be really cool.

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It might also be more satisfying. If we hear 'Lahabrea went crazy over time' then that creates three potential Lahabrea States we could see (well, realistically it'd be more of a spectrum since he went mad over time, but that'd be complicated): the 'completely nuts' state we've already seen, the 'sane' version we probably will see, and the 'losing it' state we will never see. If it turns out that there's an actual event in Pandaemonium that made him snap, though, then we get both pre- and post-crazy Lahabrea as well as a front-row seat to the event that caused it.

Realistically, I don't think we'll see any sort of 'retcon' so much as a 'coloring-in', if you get what I mean. Emet's description of Lahabrea going mad came in Tales from the Shadows, and what we know of dev cycles says that by the time that story was penned, Pandaemonium would've at least been getting planned; they'd have known they'd be telling this story soon enough. So I expect that what we're gonna learn about Lahabrea isn't going to outright contradict that story, but rather is instead going to provide more context; perhaps show exactly what degrades over constant body-hopping, that maybe Lahabrea was more susceptible to it because of reasons, or perhaps a reason why he would've gone so much harder on body-hopping anyway (maybe finding a believable excuse to constantly live with sundered versions of Athena or something).