(SPOILERS) Devs please do something about the Ascian Board meeting?

If they can add Alphinaud failing to heal Haurchefant's wounds in the post Vault cutscene I'm sure they can fix the one time we see all of the Ascians.

Some people might be wondering which cutscene(s) I'm talking about. Back during ARR and before they knew what they wanted to do with our mostly black robed villians they gave us a scene in the rift that showed us all of them. Unfortunately there's a few problems with this. We get a scene in the rift with 14 seats in a circle with a step in the middle. All 14 chairs and the step in the middle are filled including Elidibus. There are no rank and file black masked.

So right off the bat we have extra Ascians. We can easily remove one due to whomever is supposed to be representing the seat of Azem can be taken out as that seat was never filled after Azem split from the Convocation. The next easy one to take out is whomever is supposed to be Emet-Selch as he at the time this takes place just recently kicked the bucket as Solus and went to take a nap. We know from the side story Er Our Curtain Falls that he wasn't disturbed from said nap until Elidibus let's him know about Lahabrea's death.

That takes us down to 13 and yet we should be at least down to 12 if not 11. We have another Ascian that probably shouldn't be there as Emmerololth is dead by the time we are shown them. They were messing around the Isle of Vale looking for a primal that resides inside a sword just like Odin when Gaulf and others went and plunged the Isle straight into the Aetherial Sea.

The Aetherial Sea has pockets of turbulent aether that are able to rip apart just about anything. They're so bad that even Emet-Selch while he's taking his naps makes sure to stay away from them. We also know that they don't come back when we run into the Isle and the Primal later during Stormblood and we're exploring it asking if Pazuzu is up.

Now this wouldn't be such a problem if Emmerololth was just there. And yet they have lines of dialog so those also would need to be given to someone else. The last one that depending on your take on if they've been switching out bodies for 5,000 years or if they got dusted somehow between then and when they appear in their first Meanwhile in Garlemald scene. Yes, I'm talking about Fandaniel. As to me the first time we see him in his white robes felt like he had just been freshly re-raised to his seat.

Either way we still have an extra Ascian as even if you took into account the above oppsies we still started that with 15 people when it should have only been 13 if you wanted to handwave exactly when an Isle tossing and nap ends up happening.

Something something "time works differently between shards" and all that, but one could argue Mitron and Loghrif shouldn't be there either.

Also, loosely related, but there's still no info to whatever happened to the remaining ascians. Altima was confirmed dead, along with either Pashtarot, Halmarut, or Deudalaphon, but that still leaves 2 of them AWOL

I leave Mitron and Loghrif as alive as we don't run into Ardbert and friends until post 3.0. Which would be around the time we know Loghrif would have been dead and Mitron having been transformed into Eden. Altima and Deudalaphon are the ones on Gaius’s belt. Which leaves Halmarut and Pashtarot MIA. One of them got lucky to have a line of dialog. The board meeting is just such a hot mess after the devs finally decided on what they wanted to do with them and how many there should be that leaving it as it is after all this time when we know they should be able to clean it up somewhat feels like they forgot about it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Allegor

Something something "time works differently between shards" and all that, but one could argue Mitron and Loghrif shouldn't be there either.

Also, loosely related, but there's still no info to whatever happened to the remaining ascians. Altima was confirmed dead, along with either Pashtarot, Halmarut, or Deudalaphon, but that still leaves 2 of them AWOL

---

Didn't Gaius kill a bunch of them?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

Didn't Gaius kill a bunch of them?

---

He mentions being on the hunt, and we see two red masks hung on his clothes, so we know he killed around two of them. We don't know which though. They had to have been killed somewhere between HW and between the SB patches(after the Burn).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

Didn't Gaius kill a bunch of them?

---

As far as we know he had no way of killing them permanently so they should still be around. (and even if they were killed permanently somehow, the Unsundered had the mean to awaken another of their shards to the seat.)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by NekoMataMata

We don't know which though.

---

We do know, it was confirmed to be Altima and Deudalaphon in Live Letter LXVIII (even though the Lion mask was clearly supposed to be Fandaniel's but whatever)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kazhar

As far as we know he had no way of killing them permanently so they should still be around.



We do know, it was confirmed to be Altima and Deudalaphon in Live Letter LXVIII (even though the Lion mask was clearly supposed to Fandaniel's but whatever)

---

Oh... another display of great story writing then I suppose.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kazhar

it was confirmed to be Altima and Deudalaphon in Live Letter LXVIII (even though the Lion mask was clearly supposed to be Fandaniel's but whatever)

---

Oh, I didn't know Deudalaphon was confirmed to be the other red mask Gaius had, that only leaves Halmarut and Pashtarot then.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kazhar

As far as we know he had no way of killing them permanently so they should still be around. (and even if they were killed permanently somehow, the Unsundered had the mean to awaken another of their shards to the seat.)

---

The method the unsundered used to raise a member were the memory crystals that we gave to Elidibus when he was dying. Last we saw he took them with him before his soul got vacuumed into the Crystal Tower and now that he's dead dead those are also probably gone as well. The only other time someone tried to do so was when Mitron forced their memories of Logrith onto Gia.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SannaR

The method the unsundered used to raise a member were the memory crystals that we gave to Elidibus when he was dying. Last we saw he took them with him before his soul got vacuumed into the Crystal Tower and now that he's dead dead those are also probably gone as well. The only other time someone tried to do so was when Mitron forced their memories of Logrith onto Gia.

---

I know, I meant they could have been raised again between the time when Gaius "killed" them (maybe) and Shadowbringers.

It would be nice if they fixed up that cutscene for a proper headcount. Plus now we have the bonus of some of the masks being modeled so they can show them in the badguy lighting silhouettes c:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kazhar

We do know, it was confirmed to be Altima and Deudalaphon in Live Letter LXVIII (even though the Lion mask was clearly supposed to Fandaniel's but whatever)

---

This is still so funny to me. They could have made any generic red spooky mask hanging off Gaius' belt but they went out of their way to model a leo inspired one for Fandaniel ...and then had to retcon another convocation member into wearing a kitty mask for the hell of it lol

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kazhar

I know, I meant they could have been raised again between the time when Gaius "killed" them (maybe) and Shadowbringers.

---

Depends on how that works. If they have to find another reincarnation of that soul first (which seems to be the case, given Emet had to find Amon to raise as Fandaniel, rather than just filling the seat with whoever's handy), they might not have been reborn in time to be raised again. It's plausible that they could've looked for said soul on another Shard, too, but we wouldn't know about that until/unless we actually go there to look, or that Ascian comes over to the Source to find us.

Emet did tell us that they could raise someone to a convocation seat that wasn't a shard of a member. They preferred to do so with shards as it probably was easier and a whole lot cleaner that way. Either way we have at least Halmarut and Pashtarot in the wind.

I know it's not a popular opinion, but I'm glad I don't think more about the plot than the devs obviously have. That would be annoying. I can see why you lore nerds (not derogatory btw) get annoyed, it's obvious they were making it up as they went along.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SannaR

Emet did tell us that they could raise someone to a convocation seat that wasn't a shard of a member. They preferred to do so with shards as it probably was easier and a whole lot cleaner that way. Either way we have at least Halmarut and Pashtarot in the wind.

---

Ascians will be the villains of 7.0, please look forward to it! :^)

(gosh I hope not...)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

Ascians will be the villains of 7.0, please look forward to it! :^)

(gosh I hope not...)

---

Gods I hope not as well. And yet until they tell us even in a Tales from side story there's going to be people who will throw them into any upcoming story until the devs take them off the table. They said they want to move on from this arc and yet we have unaccounted Ascians. If we do run into them I hope they're not villians or end up similar to the Lamb of Dalamud where we arrive somewhere and a random person just runs for the hills screaming.

But yeah it would be nice if we had a cleaner head count and this board meeting is one of the reasons why we don't.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Boblawblah

I know it's not a popular opinion, but I'm glad I don't think more about the plot than the devs obviously have. That would be annoying. I can see why you lore nerds (not derogatory btw) get annoyed, it's obvious they were making it up as they went along.

---

Well they were till some point int Stormblood's life cycle. As even what they did with the WoDs wasn't supposed to be more than it was back in Heavensward. So the things in earlier parts look like they were set ups for things that happen later. Yet that wasn't always the case. They just wrote a lot of the later stuff to make it look that way all along. Sadly the Ascians earlier stuff seemed to have been missed, forgotten or retconned. As I want to say they didn't have a solid idea about them until again some time in Stormblood. Course when they start out as a mysterious organization that seems to be pulling the strings from behind the curtain while also being used as the boogie man in 1.0 and all of 2.0 there's not much to go on.

Heck part of the reason why we see what later became Ascian Prime is they needed them to have a spookier look a few times. What's spookier than your average looking Lich? I want to say the idea of making them more than a mysterious group of badies started to solidify around when they gave us the WoDs. Course no one really showed interest in them til Emet entered the story due to Elidibus even in Zenos's body was exciting as watching paint dry.