The Limits of Regulators (Late DT Spoilers)

So, if I'm understanding the way Regulators work, they can only bring a person back to life if the wearer is killed by non-natural means. If a person dies of old age or an illness, they aren't revived. That much is clear.

That being said, is there anywhere in the MSQ or sidequests, that elaborates on what the other limitations are, if any?

We saw Zoraal Ja get cut down by his father, that one NPC get killed by a monster, and several NPCs dying during the attack on Solution 9, before being revived. The thing about these deaths though? They were all 'clean', for lack of a better word.

What I mean by that is these characters weren't decapitated, dismembered, burned to ashes, disintegrated or anything more extreme. For obvious reasons, the game doesn't usually depict any of this (T rating and all), but let's go back to the end of 2.x

What would happen if Teledji Adeledji was wearing a Regulator when Raubahn cut him in half? Would he be revived and brought back in one piece? Or would he just immediately die again?

How about if Raubahn was wearing one too and Ilberd cut his arm off? If he was killed shortly aftewards, would he have his arm reattached when he revived or not? It sure would suck to lose an arm, get killed a day later, and then come back to life without said arm.

The Arcadion has combatants fighting to the death because the Regulators allow for them to be revived, so I can't help but wonder how this works when I see Black Cat's extremely sharp claws, Brute Bomber's explosives, and Wicked Thunder's cannon. These are all very.. potentially messy deaths.

I realize this is probably not something we're supposed to think about, but given some of the more.. naive writing this expansion has had going for it compared to what we've had before, stupid hypotheticals like this are just nagging at me. Anyone else?

Nah, other issues were distracting me so much more that I didn't even think about this. Soul lore is a mess right now.

In Vanguard, the last boss is described as being 'enveloped in a gentle light' while being resurrected, which I suppose is an attempt to make it analogous to normal resurrection magic.

In a few FATEs and an aether current quest, hunters speak of getting mauled by animals multiple times until we eventually show up. This is shown off-screen, but if you've ever been mauled by an animal multiple times, you know it isn't clean.

Speaking of, 'hunter' as a profession exists, which I think nobody would willingly undertake if their regulator didn't work if they took a nasty strike to the neck or a limb.

So, safe to say that they are kind enough to stitch you back together if you die in a gruesome way.

But also:

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Originally Posted by Lady_Silvermoon

Soul lore is a mess right now.

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Souls lore is fine, you're just asking questions that the game didn't bother asking or answering.

I think it's helpful to remember that a death by old age like Namikka's is said that it 'wouldn't make a difference'. That more suggests to me that there's just things they can't fix, and old age happens to be one of them. That actually helps us more than we think; regulators can't fix old age, but can fix 'beaten to death by four adventurers'. That sounds to me like it can probably speed up recovery to the point where mortal wounds can get mended (because if you think about it, a fatal stab wound is only fatal because you die before it heals), but doesn't do anything for something that the body could never deal with. So following that, I think the limits are probably things like this:

• Probably wouldn't have helped Teledji and/or Adeledji. Your body's not gonna grow back from the hips down no matter how much of a chance you give it. Raubahn's arm is probably much the same.
• Regulators clearly do a pretty good job of patching up the Arcadion fighters even with their feral soul transformations, given they're even suggesting one for us, so anything the Arcadion fighters are themselves causing would probably be fixable; which makes sense, because none of them are flinging something that a body can't heal from in theory.
• However, the Arcadion also shows that the fighters' use of the regulators are causing a medical issue, that the regulators obviously aren't fixing. So they probably can't help with, say, cancer.
• Following from that, that one kid with lightning aether-induced Locked-In Syndrome probably isn't getting helped either. Which would track, because it's not raised as a solution.

For this sort of thing I think it's really helpful to gather as many evidence points as we've got before begging further questions; in this case, that means both all the things regulators confirmably do fix, as well as the things that they confirmably don't--which also includes the things that people with regulator access just don't treat as fixable with regulators.

...also, you can't go 'they wouldn't depict these sorts of injuries because T rating' and then cite two different examples of these injuries form this exact game. They can very clearly depict those events if they want to, they just didn't in this case! Probably because, for the most part, it's just not that worth covering, or might make things more complicated; 'you could also permakill Zoraal Ja by cutting him in half' probably isn't a helpful story beat.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

...also, you can't go 'they wouldn't depict these sorts of injuries because T rating' and then cite two different examples of these injuries form this exact game.

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That's why I said "the game doesn't usually depict any of this".