In regards to the "Warrior of Darkness"; how far is too far?

[Theodric]

Hingashi was 'kind enough' to open Kugane to trade? You mean they did it to make money via trade while still keeping filthy Ijin out of their heartland. The way you phrase it makes it sound like they're being altruistic in opening up Kugane but that's not really the case.

Of all the things to accuse the Eorzeans of being shady about going after trying to set up trade on a newly formed island to avoid tariffs is kind of baffling to me. If that happens then Hingashi will just have to be more competitive with their tariffs rather than doing what they want and raking in the gil.

They've no obligation to open up their borders to any and all seeking entry, especially when recovering from conflict themselves. Eorzea has a long track record of bringing ruin to other nations to get ahead both in the past and present. Sil'dih was utterly condemned to destruction for the benefit of Ul'dah. A fact which was hidden from history until recently.

[Lauront]

There's no real reason to open up its heartland to outsiders, and Kugane was in and of itself a valuable base of operations.

[Theodric]

There's no real reason to open up its heartland to outsiders, and Kugane was in and of itself a valuable base of operations.

High tariffs are also far less dubious than outright piracy, though mysteriously the Eorzean Alliance isn't bothered by it to any strong degree so long as the 'right' targets are being inconvenienced. One can only wonder how many non-combatants were condemned to a watery grave by Limsa's ships. They specifically go out of their way to target Garlean vessels after all. Yet ships have quite a few crew members who aren't there to fight and presumably civilians would occasionally be on board in the form of merchants and nobles.

That aside, the Confederacy are shown to enforce their 'Ruby Tithe' and are actively aided in doing so by the game's protagonists. So there's no strong moral stance taken against such things - it really is just a case of Eorzea's horrific hypocrisy.

[Driven]

My hopes on calling ourselves the WoD is to fight against a moral yet tyrannical system by a deity.
Like- it is forbidden to eat chicken (if that culture sees it as bad) or go against your parent’s wishes (which can be seen as a moral thing); but the wages for those sins are execution.
We are fighting against the wrongful execution of what can be considered a moral (light based) system.

[Bonbori]

From what we've been told so far, the reason we're becoming WoD is to fix the balance of light and dark. However, what we also know is that light and dark are not equivalent to good and evil. So I doubt we'll end up doing anything unilaterally heinous or even villanous in darkness' name. What seems more likely to me is that while we might attempt retreading Arbert's path at first, we'll quickly realise that we must do it differently, knowing that he ultimately failed to accomplish much of anything.

My interpretation of Arbert's arc is that, in the end, he was no less of a puppet than WoL. From beginning to end, he was a pawn in the game that Hydaelyn, Zodiark, and possibly even players we're still unaware of, are playing. He thought that the proper response to averting the flood of light was to just counter it with a greater flood of darkness, but, to me... that logic seems flawed. It's too simple. Too naive in the greater context of this conflict. We know that there's some high level metaphysical 4D chess being played behind the scenes, and it is highly unlikely that the brute-force approach Arbert chose would have accomplished anything other than ultimately playing into another player's hands.

Even "balance" is just a bandaid. In order to truly fix the world, both light and dark need to be evicted from it.

So I feel that what our WoD needs to do is to see beyond the pawns, beyond the obvious threats, and focus on the puppet-strings tying them to the players instead. And then the players themselves. Our end-goal should be ending this game between entities that couldn't care less about the mortal lives they're toying with. Which is the message Varis was trying to send us in 4.5 but at this point the WoL is still incapable of recognising it, much less acting on it. I expect throughout Shadowbringers Varis will be our new Gaius serving as a parallel for us to compare to and learn from the mistakes of. We will probably be trying to accomplish the same goal, but in the end he will fail, showing us how not to do it, and we will then pick up his mission and carry it on with insights and perspective that he lacked, going into 6.0.

Because chances are we are not going to wrap up the arc in only one expansion. I speculate that everything we've done up to this point has been the lighthearted prologue that sets the stage and introduces the actors, Shadowbringers will be the eye-opening middle part of our classic (anti?)hero's journey, the "turning point" where we fail for the first time ever, realise that we must reinvent ourselves and change the way we perceive and interact with the conflicts ahead, and then 6.0 will follow up on what we have learned and set us on a path to finally resolve the whole Zodiark vs Hydaelyn arc (which may even stretch beyond 6.0).

And after that, a new story can begin where the world deals with the fallout and is probably introduced to another, even greater threat that then has to be retroactively tied up to loose ends introduced earlier, turning the storyline into a Kingdom Hearts-sized ball of spaghetti. And then the writers realise they have no idea what's going on anymore, eventually run out of sanity and/or material, FF14 ends and we look forward to another FF MMO.

Okay, maybe I'm overspeculating now n_n Um... What were we talking about?

[SenorPatty]

I think it's going to be less about good/evil and just more about consequential actions that tip in the chaos scale. If we take Fray's example, I expect the WoL(D) to be more draconian in his/her choices, less diplomatic, more direct and less time-consuming in resolving issues. Where before we'd let some blackheart spend his/her day in jail or be forgiven and make amends, we'll bring swift retribution, not out of malice but again, out of the decision to nip problems at their root. We might see WoL, msq-wise, reject taking detours like ridiculous fetch quests in order to proceed the plot and rather be more forceful and possibly threaten to get his/her way.

In terms of quantifiable dark scale tipping, I speculate that we'll be taking actions that would otherwise be considered downright illegal, if not harmful to the world itself but again, it'd be more of those "small price to pay" type of actions. Perhaps taking actions that would, say for example, really hurt elementals or primal summoning. I genuinely hope that in the first part of the expansion, at the end if we were to restore balance before tackling new issues, the WoD is so troubled by what they've done that we start distancing ourselves from politics and even the scions themselves (for awhile at least) and just venture on our own in a journey to "find ourself" again or self-healing.

[Transient_Shadow]

Darkness isn't inherently Evil :T

[Rangar]

Reading some of the comments here, I'm wondering if half the people here actually read the MSQ cutscenes

[Anger]

Reading some of the comments here, I'm wondering if half the people here actually read the MSQ cutscenes

I'm a bit confused as well.

[MeeDeggiThePunisher]

We are only becoming the Warrior of Darkness because Warrior of Balance didn't sound cool enough.