The Warrior of Light and tournaments...

I won't refer to anything specific to avoid spoilers but on numerous occasions the Warrior of Light takes part in a tournament of some description. Sometimes it is done for the sake of sport whilst at other points it is done with lofty stakes in mind.

Still, there's one thing I've not seen addressed as of yet. The Warrior of Light is literally blessed by Hydaelyn. Empowered, even. Therefore nobody really stands a fair chance against a competitor such as this and yet the Warrior of Light is allowed to compete anyway.

Am I the only one who finds this to be troubling? In a setting where so many people are just trying to get by and the Warrior of Light isn't exactly starved for glory it feels rather dubious for the WoL to participate in such things for sport and absolutely thrash the competition again and again.

How many of those defeated will be humiliated and ridiculed? Or just give up what may be a life's dream? In some cases, those supporting or running the tournaments are well aware of the WoL's divine blessings and feats of strength, so that adds an element of moral greyness to the equation; especially if it's a fight that permits death and/or injury. Anyway, just some idle musings that I figured I'd bring up here to start a debate...

I haven't played Stormblood yet, but in my experience they are either in the class quests, where you are still considered just a normal if talented person, or the MSQ where the tournament in question is between the various heroes of the realm in which case they are similarly strong.

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Originally Posted by Shadotterdan

I haven't played Stormblood yet, but in my experience they are either in the class quests, where you are still considered just a normal if talented person, or the MSQ where the tournament in question is between the various heroes of the realm in which case they are similarly strong.

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^ This, from what I can remember. I don't really remember any specific "tournament-style" fight where you're obviously just going in to obliterate the little man; well, aside from the fact that you are the player character, have all the plot armor in the world, and are obviously going to fare better against the NPC. Usually. ._. In any sense, most of these "tournament-style" fights are also a bigger picture sort of thing. You may defeat the little man, but you're ultimately doing him and everyone else a service in doing so by using your victory to accomplish something bigger.

Since you mentioned spoilers, I'm going to guess the latest example of one such "tournament" you may be referring to is:

The Naadam. In which case you are a) a foreigner and no one has any idea who you are or what you have accomplished, and b) going up against multiple tribes of bloodthirsty/power-hungry Xaela and their quite powerful/scary leaders. Difficult and frightening for anyone, even the WoL. :P It was also with the purpose of winning the respect of said tribes (sort of) and (definitely) forcing them to fight with you in the liberation of Doma, so there's your "bigger picture/purpose" right there.

I was under the impression the Blessing of Light only gave the WoL an advantage against primals, Ascians, and other entities Hydaelyn deems a grave threat to her well-being (Not that lacking it stopped us from defeating Ravana and Nabriales regardless).

At the core, they're still an exceptionally talented individual overall.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

Therefore nobody really stands a fair chance against a competitor such as this and yet the Warrior of Light is allowed to compete anyway.
...
How many of those defeated will be humiliated and ridiculed? Or just give up what may be a life's dream?

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Truly serious competitors would want to compete against such an opponent because s/he is so powerful; how much more glorious would be the victory hard won against such a legend? And those who fight to fulfill a life's dream are not typically so self-deprecating as to think losing to an absurdly strong opponent is a sign of total weakness.

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Originally Posted by Miyha

SPOILER ALERT UNTIL I CAN FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET THE DAMN SPOILER BBCODE TO WORK

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The spoiler tag is HB. It prolly stands for "hide box" or something similar.

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Originally Posted by Shadotterdan

I haven't played Stormblood yet, but in my experience they are either in the class quests, where you are still considered just a normal if talented person, or the MSQ where the tournament in question is between the various heroes of the realm in which case they are similarly strong.

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Also Ultros.

If the opponent is the bad guy in the fight then they deserve the smack down.
If the opponent is a good guy then one of two things happens:
1. the opponent defeats the WoL and earns infinite glory.
2. the opponent loses the fight that they were never expected to win and they still get glory from actually challenging the WoL and lasting more than .5 seconds. Also, those that are capable fighters in such an uneven fight will learn what they can from the fight and use it to become better.

Either way the good guy opponent wins. The WoL isn't in the tournaments to be defeated or to defeat others, they're in there as a status symbol to the others. "I was in the tournament with the WoL! OMG SQUEEE!" Its the story they tell their grandkids 50 years from now.

As mentioned before, our Blessing of Light helps a lot against the Ascian and Primal threat, but we're not all-powerful (we defeated Nidhogg with Hraesvelgr's eye, for example, which we them gave back); we're extraordinarily powerful adventurers, but there's also other very powerful individuals.

In the Nadaam, while we ARE more powerful than most people in there, we're getting a lot of help from the Mohl, Hien, Yda and Gosetsu, who are also very powerful people in their own right. It also helps that many of those tribes were also fighting each other; if they figured we were the biggest threat and focused us down, probably only Gosetsu's insane strenght and stamina would have prevented us dying on the spot.

As for the other one I think you may be talking about

While we are strong and gameplay =/= story, it's implied we didn't wipe the floor with Raubahn and it was a pretty even fight, especially considering he's handicapped; at this point, most of the "strongest men" in the alliance WANT to test themselves out against us, which is pretty much the point of Hullbreaker HM, as well

And we can't forget that

Zenos did wipe the floor against us TWICE, even if we ultimately defeated him at Ala Mhigo and as Shinryu,

it does serve to remember that, game mechanics aside, we're not invincible or immortal, we're just much stronger than the average but almost every group has someone close to our strenght.

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Originally Posted by WhiteArchmage

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I remember that fight with big R. He mentioned something about wishing he could have faced us at his full strength, in his youth. That would have been a sight to see.

This post is gonna echo most of the sentiment of earlier ones, I think, but three things:

(1) As has been mentioned, we're powerful, but not THAT much more powerful than those around us. Solo instances and same-level mobs can typically overwhelm us quite quickly; our gifts mostly just allow us to take on supernatural threats that similarly-skilled warriors wouldn't be able to and provide us with a variety of passive abilities that let the game exposition at us, neither of which can be easily exploited in organized contests of combat prowess. But that's sort of a moot point anyways, because...


(2) ...we don't really participate in that many tournaments in the first place. I can think of...two, maybe three? It's not really a thing that happens that much in narrative, certainly not enough to say that it happens "again and again."

(3) The ones we do participate in aren't the sort that involve your hypotheticals - nobody's honour or glory is ever on the line. Our presence is basically a novelty, meant as a main attraction of the event in question (Grand Melee); or, just one of many exceptionally skilled warriors in a regular event that often sees wanton slaughter above and beyond what we contribute to (the Stormblood one). I can think of one where your point holds some water, and ironically it's the one in the 2.x Hildy quests; even that, though, never has us stealing the much-needed winnings of the person involved through duplicitous use of our gifts, instead taking her out of the competition through investigation before she has the chance to fight us.

So yeah. I can tell that a certain event in the current MSQ isn't sitting well with you (possibly because it edges too closely to "Warrior of Light takes advantage of an established culture in order to overcome narrative hurdles and nobody sees that as a bad thing" for your tastes?), but I don't think this is a reasonable moral charge to place on our heads.

So far I saw only 3 tournaments - HW MSQ Alliance Tourney, which was not for glory, but to strengthen ties and act as a military exercise, the Paladin 60-70 Job Quest, in which WoL participates because he happens to be a famous free paladin and the Steppe thing, which is EXACTLY about beating the nomads down and forcing them to follow you through superior strength.

I really get the feeling that you want to find something just to make the WoL look bad. ^^; There arent that much MSQ tournaments and in SB its only the one that we are kinda forced into to help Doma. At the end you will always have someone that is stronger then the rest (normally the winner) which will make the losers feel bad. Even if you are a normal person and you win, you will still destroy dreams of the others with that. THis simply is the result of only having one winner in any tournament, even if its something like chess. (And the tournament in HW was done to raise the spirit of the knights after revealing the truth of the past. The other city states were completely fine with it and Raubahn was really looking forward to fight against us and enjoyed it. So we did not destroy anyones dream there, we even helped them)

And we are strong (and I believe that SE made us too strong way too soon, because I kinda wonder who will come next to stand a chance against us) but we are not that strong thanks to our blessing or echo. Unlike some plotpoints at the end of SB it was never shown that the Echo makes you strong, otherwise people like Minfilia and Krile would be able to kill primals too. You might be able to see AOEs or predict movement (if that is truly how our echo functions..I still remain skeptic on that) but without the power and skill behind it you will only manage to evade someones attack. The blessing itself only protected us in important fights like the Ultima one and without it we were still growing stronger.

So yes we might have some advantages thanks to the Echo but deep down we are just a very good fighter, that learned it through training and battles. Our old level 15 WoL could have never defeated Raubahn even with the Echo simply because we did not have the skill to do so. So we trained hard over the times by defeating more and more powerful enemies.

You kinda have that in the real world too: You will have people that have a natural talent for things that needs to train less to be really good at it and then you will have those that have to work extra hard to get to that point or even will never get to the point because sometimes in life even if you train hard does not mean that you will ever reach your goal. Should those people that have a natural talent be excluded from any tournament too? Arent they in some way a motivation for others to get better?

So no I do not find it bad that we participate in those tournaments. Both times (in HW and SB) we are asked to join and we did it to help other people. Also nobody had their dreams truly crushed and imo its always shown in the story that our fighting skill and wins are a motivation for a lot of people. We are their role model and them wanting to be like us often means that they will train harder. This can be seen in a lot of quests.

It's a difficult thing to measure, the result of combat and the concept of "powerlevels" do not really measure up in reality, and I gather it is the same in ffxiv(a veteran of combat can still die to a weapon the same way a raw recruit can). The Warrior of Light, while they have the capacity of slaying gods that other fighters lack it does not fully translate into fighting lesser opponents the same way. To everyone else not a deity, they are a skilled fighter, still in the limitations of flesh and blood, unlike other users of the echo, which often take their gifts past this limits in the realm of the truly unfair.

This might push the envelope of gameplay and story segregation, but consider the other potential cutscenes where the WoL hits their limits and is "defeated", namely, the steps of faith and the limitless blue. In steps of faith, they are facing waves of nonprimal opponents, who end up piling on with numbers and strength until the last gate falls against our will.

Same with the limitless blue, Bismarck stays back and sends in waves of Vanu Vanu to hit the WoL while it attacks the island, until both are worn down enough for bismarck to finish off. I think the Vanu Vanu play the major role for the former.

It might actually be easier to defeat the WoL with non-supernatural opponents. We are still the protagonist, game wise, but to everyone in Eorzea that isn't supernatural, we are still a mortal being, with limitations to our senses and endurance, that we either cannot or will not, break in the same manner as with facing the likes of ascians and primals.

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Originally Posted by Alleo

I really get the feeling that you want to find something just to make the WoL look bad. ^^;

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I don't get that feeling from them at all, I think it's a legitimate concern and a good question. In addition to this, I feel like the WoL themselves may actually struggle with a similar question. Here's why (DRK job quest spoilers):

In the DRK 60-70 questline, much of it is about "atonement" and reuniting people with those they lost who were close to them. In accordance with the popular theories going around at the moment, the whole reason Myste comes about in the first place it due to the WoL feeling guilty about all those they've had to kill in the line of duty. They may be all powerful, but they're still a thinking, feeling human being. It's one of the reasons I love the DRK quests so much: it explores the "other" part of the WoL you don't get to see through the MSQ. The "dark side", or, in actuality... the human/normal side.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

The spoiler tag is HB. It prolly stands for "hide box" or something similar.

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Thank you kind sir/miss, you are indeed a life-saver. ;;;;

@Miyha: But in these job quests its more about killing things which is something you dont really do in tournaments so I dont believe that the WoL feels bad about doing them.

@Kallera: Yeah I feel this is really a bit of a "problem" in this game. The powerlevels are sometimes a bit off (at least for me) since we can defeat void creatures, primals, normal people and yet in cutscenes we are often standing around, letting people go or need help even though those should not be a problem to us. I do believe that a very skilled human can still keep up with us (but it should need a good explanation for us to lose in single combat) but our weakness comes from being attacked by lots of people at the same time. So if you have a big enough army I do believe they would be able to kill us.

Am I the only one that found it a little strange that the Echo version of Fordola was more like a power up for her? I mean I was able to beat her at the very beginning of SB and yet as soon as she got this she became invisible? If her echo is able to predict in such a way (like reading the future) why cant we truly do that too in scenes where we are defeated or where others had to give their lifes to save us? Does this mean we are still not good with it? Or is this just a increased feature of the fake echo? I really hope that they will not mass produce this and use this as a reason for later defeats..because we should be able to be on that level too since we have the natural echo.

@Alleo. I always figured powerlevel comparisons meant that "there is no way the lower powerleveled opponent can win against the higher powerleveled opponent." I'm saying it isn't so cut and dry in these cases.

I just remembered, the 50-60 DRK job quests have another occurrence. When you are getting out of the city with Rielle and are chased down by Ishgardian knights on chocoback. the journal mentions that the knights are relentless, and that Rielle's conjury comes to the rescue as you begin to tire against the pursuit. The issue wasn't that any one knight stuck out or was blessed with powers, but that the WoL was on the run and attacked persistently, one knight after another came to fight.

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Originally Posted by Alleo

Am I the only one that found it a little strange that the Echo version of Fordola was more like a power up for her? I mean I was able to beat her at the very beginning of SB and yet as soon as she got this she became invisible? If her echo is able to predict in such a way (like reading the future) why cant we truly do that too in scenes where we are defeated or where others had to give their lifes to save us? Does this mean we are still not good with it? Or is this just a increased feature of the fake echo?

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A friend of mine presented for consideration that our Echo

does allow us to predict enemy movements, at least outside of cutscenes.
http://i.imgur.com/IKgqVbM.png

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Originally Posted by Rongway

A friend of mine presented for consideration that our Echo

does allow us to predict enemy movements, at least outside of cutscenes.
http://i.imgur.com/IKgqVbM.png

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I just find it bad that it stops when you are in a cutscene. It just doesnt make any sense and feels more like "well if we want the situation to go that way we will force it that way even if the WoL should be able to move away". Also we have NPCs that have no echo that can still avoid AOEs so not sure about it.

I'd say that the PLD 60-70 job quest is the kind of thing the OP's argument is particularly targeting, as there are really no higher motives for participating in that tournament except to test your strength against other fighters.

In response to that, I think we can accept what was touched on earlier in this thread: Hydaelyn's blessing does NOT imbue us with any kind of boost to our fighting strength. It serves as a shield against supernatural dark forces. Since the folks in the tournament are NOT wielding supernatural dark forces, we are fighting them on an even footing, our strength against theirs. Now, in addition to having this blessing, we also happen to be ridiculously powerful on our own merits, but there's no rule against that. The tourney is totes legit!

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Originally Posted by Alleo

I just find it bad that it stops when you are in a cutscene. It just doesnt make any sense and feels more like "well if we want the situation to go that way we will force it that way even if the WoL should be able to move away". Also we have NPCs that have no echo that can still avoid AOEs so not sure about it.

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It bears remembering that the Echo manifests differently for each individual (with some common ground), while it's generally understood as "the power to trascend the soul", in 1.0 Minfillia's Echo let her see the future while we can see the past; this was somewhat dropped in 2.0 then brought back with Krile who can communicate with animals, and since we DIDN'T need the aetherial gimmick for

the fight with Zenos, it's likely he didn't have the same type of Echo as Fordola, whose "soul attunement" may have been her own personal manifestation.

@WhiteArchmage: Hm you might be right.

I just found it strange that Urianger and Alphinaud talked about her Echo (seeing movements before it happens) like this is common. I mean it would explain why we see marker ingame (even though I saw this more as a ingame mechanic and not something that truly happens) but would not explain why NPCs that have no echo can react to them too. Also Zenos kinda hinted that we cant control our echo fully but at the same time maybe fake echo is different to real echo.

I do wish but also fear that the echo will play a bigger role in the future. I fear that Garlemald will create lots of fake echo users that will somehow be really stronger with it (even though it was never shown that the echo itself grants power like that) thus creating our rivals with that. But at the same time this could give us the chance to explore our own echo more because other than two scenes we never really saw our echo in SB anyway...(okay a third time if you count the shield which we somehow know hot to do, to shield the others from being tempered)

I always thought the WoL's Echo works kind of like the Swords of the Cross in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files - they strip away the supernatural defenses and advantages of the WoL's Primal/Ascian/WoD/X Weapon adversaries and brings them down to a level where mortal skill can reach them. Since regular folks don't have these supernatural advantages, it becomes a matter of personal power.